Title:      Doomsday (1932)
Author:     Warwick Deeping
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0600601.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          May 2006
Date most recently updated: May 2006

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca


Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au


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


1


That she should happen to see the wagon pass down the Melhurst road
next morning was a mere matter of coincidence.  Furze was standing
up in the wagon like a charioteer, and she saw the blue wagon and
the grey horses and his brown figure melt into the young green of
May.  A mere coincidence, yes, but it would seem that the
subconscious part of her had been at work during the night, and
that an idea was materializing.  The bluebells in Gore Wood!  And
to begin with, the idea and its inspiration were as delicate and as
virginal as the very scent of the wild hyacinths.

Arnold had given her the right of free trespass upon his farm, and
her choosing to exercise this right while he was away at Melhurst
concealed a mood rather than a motive.  She hurried through the
morning's work, brought out her old bicycle as though she were
bound for Carslake, but when the sentinel firs had passed her into
the Doomsday lane she dismounted and loitered.  She was neither
very sure of herself nor of her purpose.  The passion to escape, to
have a good time, to attain self-expression were like the surge of
the sap.  And so she loitered, asking herself questions, treading
with unsure feet on the edge of her lover's world.  What, as a
woman, did she mean by self-expression?  Escape, whither and how,
and to what end?  Not to be rooted in routine and interminable
repetition?  She saw the Doomsday woods rising about her, green
with a golden and changeful greenness, and cleft with blue
distances.  The larches made her pause, throwing their reflections
in the still water of the pond where the water-crowfoot was showing
white.  A wood-pigeon crooned.  There was a great silence
everywhere, save for the sounds made by living things, the
underchant of a spring day.  Beautiful?  Yes, she had to allow it
its beauty, and her blood stirred a little, and her brown eyes
became elvish.  She turned down towards the farm buildings where a
sunny sloth seemed to prevail, and no live thing moved save the
hens and sparrows and two or three young porkers scampering over
the straw of a byre.  Will and his boy were up the fields.  She was
bound ostensibly for Gore Wood, but the way to it was unknown to
her.

Leaning her bicycle against the gate she looked at the house--his
house.  She had entered it but once, on that night when she had
come for milk, and a place looks so different in the daylight.  The
house, as a thing of beauty, laid its appeal upon her.  Its grey
walls and mellowed brick, its lattices and great spreading roof and
massive chimneys touched the romance in her, and displayed the old
velvet of its texture to her sleek, comfort-loving soul.  And the
smother of green about it, and the secrecy, and its little silent
lattices with the glimmer of their glass lozenges, and the falling
meadows, and the old cedar, and the great thorn hedges turning
white!  She felt that she would like to touch it, know it more
intimately.  And why not?  He had given her leave to go everywhere,
and the garden and the orchard were part of the everywhere.  Not
into the house itself--of course.

The Eve in her was tempted, and no Eve is without the knowledge of
some secret apple, even though it be hidden in the foliage of a
charming and wilful vagueness.  She fell to the beckoning path
beside the yew hedge.  There were steps that went up and steps that
went down.  She eschewed the ascent, and descending, found herself
in Mrs. Damaris' garden.  She did not know that she was observed.

So this was his garden!  She wandered across the scythed grass, and
along the stone path, looking about her a little furtively.  She
was conscious of the windows of the house, and yet when she turned
about to meet their scrutiny she realized that they were sightless
eyes.  No curtains, no blinds!  Also, it seemed to her that the
garden had a newness in its oldness.  The work was recent, the very
plants fetched in hurriedly to a love feast.  She stood against the
stone wall, and looked across the Doom Paddock to the great thorn
hedge.  Two large black pigs were feeding in the paddock, their
black bellies brushed by the buttercups.

Observed--yes, and by Mrs. Sarah Blossom who had come in to scrub
out the bedrooms, and who, by standing well back in one of the
upper rooms, could see my lady without being seen.  So, it was Miss
Mary Viner--Will had been told that morning that Captain, Mrs. and
Miss Viner had wander-rights over the farm, and Will had told Mrs.
Will.  Captain and Mrs. Viner--indeed!  What did Captain and Mrs.
Viner signify?  It was the girl he wanted down among the bluebells,
yes, or on a summer evening in a quiet corner when the bracken was
growing high.  Miss Mary Viner!

And here she was.  Mrs. Sarah took a good look at her from the back
of that upper window, and considered the situation and its
possibilities as they concerned herself.  The future Mrs. Furze
deserved the soft side of her tongue.  Mrs. Sarah wiped her hands
on her apron, and descended the stairs.

Mary heard the sound of a lattice being opened, and she faced about
to see a woman shaking a duster from the window of Mrs. Damaris'
parlour.  The woman smiled at her.

"Good morning, Miss."

Mary felt caught, though she had every right to be in Arnold
Furze's garden.  She was quick in remembering her excuse.

"O,--good morning."

She approached the window, putting a pleasant face upon the
occasion.

"Can you tell me the way to Gore Wood?"

"Of course I can, Miss Viner.  The flowers--they be lovely--in the
spring of the year."

She conveyed to Mary the impression of a friendly but very
respectful creature ripe for a gossip, but very respectful
gossiping, of course.  Miss Viner was Miss Viner.  O, yes, Mrs.
Sarah knew how the honey was spread or should be spread.

"Fine old house, Miss, be'nt it?  Yes--I come up Tuesdays and
Fridays.  Mr. Furze--he be mighty fond of it--All beams it be.  And
there be a bedroom all walled with wood.  I can't call to mind the
right word for it, exactly."

"Panelling," said Mary.

"Yes, that be the word, Miss Viner.  All oak--it be--and black as
black."

She flicked the duster, folded it up, and looked obsequiously sly.

"I've got to be going down to the cottage to get my man's dinner
ready, Miss.  Mr. Furze, he be away at Melhurst.  I be leaving the
key in the door.  Maybe--you'd like to look over the house."

Furze's broad gesture had not opened the house to her, nor should
one accept the authority of a Sarah Blossom, so Mary thanked her
and denied herself the time to make use of an unlocked door.  She
said again that she was going down to Gore Wood, and had been
looking for someone to show her the way.  Mrs. Sarah came out of
the house, wearing an old cap of her husband's, and looking if
anything more sly.

"I'll show you, Miss."

They returned to the lane where Mary had left her bicycle against
the gate.  Mrs. Blossom assured her that the bicycle would be quite
safe there.  The way to Gore Wood lay through the field gate
opposite the pond, and down across the Gore Field where the short-
horns were pastured.  Mrs. Sarah left Mary at the gate and went on
up the lane.  She was sure that Miss Viner would make use of the
key when she was left alone with the temptation.


2


It would appear that Mrs. Sarah knew her Mary better than Mary knew
herself.  The temptress had raised the edge of the curtain, and
there was more behind Mary's fall than a natural and irresponsible
curiosity.  She was a twentieth century Eve.  When romance offered
itself, she fingered the magic garment, turned up the lining, and
tried to estimate its wearing qualities.  Such caution may be held
to be either wise or foolish, balancing on a knife edge, or trying
to teach nature to turn a wheel in a cage.  People who wade
cautiously into life like a timid girl paddling on a rather bleak
foreshore are apt to be too conscious of the existence of crabs and
pebbles.  Nature prefers the plunger.  Or you may more quickly
learn to swim by being pushed into the deeps.

She left her bicycle against the gate and returned down the path.
The eyes of the house looked at her, and she translated into their
stare the varied thoughts and feelings of the moment.  They
reproached her; they were hostile; they hid things that she had a
right to know; they challenged; they were both shy and sad.  Surely
a woman is justified in exploring that corner of life into which a
man is devotedly seeking to inveigle her?  Woman's eyes see what a
man's might miss, or they see them differently.  The house is the
woman's workshop.  Why should she not inspect it before agreeing to
work there?

The key was in the door.  She went in and closed the door behind
her, finding herself in the living-room, alone with Tibby the black
cat somnolent and couchant on a windowsill.  The cat did not turn a
whisker.  Mary was all eyes.  Yes, the room looked different, more
lived in or less lived in, she did not quite know which, but she
thought it had a bare and draughty feeling.  Three doors opening
into it!  She tried the one that Furze had closed when she had come
for the milk, and she remembered her own flash of uncomfortable
suspicion.  Some other girl or woman!  She stood in the middle of
the little white room with its old Georgian grate and its deep
window-seat.  The sun poured in.  She sat down in the window-seat
and looked about her at the furniture Furze had collected, a prim
sofa, two rather uncomfortable-looking chairs, a green and blue
carpet that was already beginning to fade.  And that painted wooden
table!  Poor man!  She was conscious of a feeling of dismay.

Was the whole house like this?  Driven from Mrs. Damaris' parlour
by a curiosity that was self-conscious and a little ashamed, she
found the stairs and went up to explore the rambling bedrooms.
Their emptiness astonished her.  Not a chair, not a bedstead,
nothing but one or two old packing cases!  Opening yet another door
she discovered herself on the threshold of Furze's room, and though
she shrank back almost instantly, she had lingered long enough to
realize its makeshifts.  A camp bed, a dressing table contrived out
of two sugar boxes, a cheap, painted chest of drawers, clothes
hanging on pegs.

Mary closed the door.  She felt that she had been spying upon his
secret poverty.  She was swept by a little gust of shame and pity.
Poor man--what a house!  But her pity could not save her from a
feeling of gradual and intense depression.  The great, rambling,
empty barrack of a place chilled her even though the sun was
shining.  It would be a tyrannical, heart-breaking house to care
for.  And her feelings of depression deepened when she explored the
kitchen and its belongings.  It had a brick floor, an old stone
sink with no water laid on, and a vast and rusty range whose bars
seemed to snarl at her like unfriendly teeth.  What a horror of a
place, with one single dark looking cupboard, and a larder that
smelt of mice!  Even the "Green Shutters" kitchen was a paradise
compared to this hole with its peeling walls and damp and chilly
floor.

"I couldn't," her heart cried, "oh--I couldn't."

She felt overwhelmed by the thought of the sordid struggle in which
a woman would find herself involved.  Water to be carried in, water
to be heated, that ill-tempered savage old range to be fought or
humoured, lamps to be cleaned and trimmed, floors washed down,
while the peeling plaster fell into your frying pan.  Not a decent
cupboard; a plate rack that looked as though it had absorbed the
grease of centuries; a sink that made her think of a drain.

She went back to Mrs. Damaris' parlour and stood by the window
where the sun poured in.  She looked at the garden and the
greenness of the hills.  Yes, they were dressed and pleasant now,
but she pictured them in the deeps of winter, with the windows
streaming--and the horizon blotted out.

Buried alive!

It seemed to her to be incomparably worse than Cinder Town, and she
felt a choking and a pity.  Poor man!  But was he to be pitied?
Were not men different?  That black hole of a kitchen, with the
coal shed away across a weedy yard, and the well outside the back
door, and the long gloomy dairy where she had seen his long white
milking coat, hanging like a poor, pale thing that had committed
suicide!  He could live here and appear contented.  And perhaps he
would expect a woman to enter upon an interminable struggle with
the cruel crudeness of the house, and think nothing of it?  He held
that a woman should work, and find her feminine salvation among the
scrubbing brushes and the pots and pans.

She fled out of the house, feeling guilty and pitiful; and to
justify her coming and those twenty minutes of exploration and of
disillusionment Mary Viner went down to Gore Wood.  She could see
the wild hyacinths as thin sheets of blue under the young foliage
of the oaks, and she sat down on the stump of a felled tree and
tried to co-ordinate her prejudices and her emotions.  So, he could
expect a woman to bring herself there, a modern girl?  Of course,
dozens of women must have lived their lives at Doomsday, and
scrubbed those floors, and drawn water on icy mornings from the
well, and blundered about in that great cavern of a kitchen by
candlelight, but they had been other women, country women, common
and strong, born and bred to it.  But she, with her fastidious
hands, and her sensitiveness, and her passion for movement?  She
who loathed poverty and its limitations?  It was not fair.

She cried out that it was not fair because there was a part of her
that wanted to open its arms and leap.  She wanted Arnold Furze the
man, but not Arnold Furze the farmer.

He was so strong.  He could rough it.  But she began to be afraid
of his very strength.

"He would not understand," she thought.  "The man on the land, the
woman in the house.  Yes, yes--I know.  A human partnership.  And
yet--"

She picked a few bluebells, not because she wanted them, but to
show that she had been there, for she might meet Mrs. Sarah in the
lane.  She disliked that woman, her cap, her nose, her sly and
sidelong ways.  O,--what a morning!  And she thought of him and the
wagon and the sale at Melhurst, and her heart hurt her.  Why did he
happen to be what he was, and why was she her fastidious self?

By the Six Firs she pushed her bicycle against the hedge, and
climbing the mound, sat down at the foot of one of the trees.  She
saw Cinder Town very new and flimsy, and behind her lay the old
house like a thing rooted in the soil.  Yes, that was permanence,
the life of the husbandman, getting up at dawn and going to bed at
dusk, looking at the same fields and trees, doing the same things
year in and year out.  No holidays, no movement, no sunlight on
southern seas, one's excitements a new litter of pigs or a record
mangel crop.

No, she felt that she simply could not stand it.


3


At Great Park Farm, Melhurst, country carts, cars, Fords, and a
light lorry or two were parked in the paddock, while their owners
went in search of bargains; and Furze, who had kept his greys under
the shade of a big chestnut tree and in the charge of a friendly
carter, wandered about catalogue in hand.  Great Park spread itself
in the arms of a pleasant and untidy old garden full of monkshood
and lilac and guelder rose, and since the weather was fair much of
the gear to be sold had been laid out in the garden.

Furze, pencil in hand, marked the lots upon the catalogue for which
he wished to bid.  Harnett the auctioneer had gathered in
extraneous material, and it was a composite sale, and Great Park
sheltered for the day much furniture that was strange to it.  In
the farm-house parlour, with its wallpaper of red roses and blue
garlands, Furze found a massive old oak table with chamfered rails
and square legs, black-brown with age, put together by some village
carpenter a hundred and fifty years ago.  On the table was laid out
a pink lustre tea-service, six cups and saucers, teapot, sugar bowl
and milk jug, and Furze, the lover, saw Mary's hands fluttering
over the old china.  He marked down the table, Lot 33, also the
pink lustre tea-service, Lot 67.  Wandering about the house with a
crowd of farmers' wives and Melhurst women, and bargain hunters and
snatchers up of the antique and the curious, he found many pieces
fit for "Doomsday."  His pencil left marks against an oak bureau, a
mahogany chest of drawers, three old Windsor chairs, a bedstead, an
oak chest, a long mirror in a faded gilt frame, a length of green
cord stair carpet, a kitchen table, a deal cupboard, a set of
knives, a willow pattern dinner service, a Chesterfield sofa that
would need recovering.  He jotted down against each item the amount
that he could afford to bid for it.  Particularly did he covet the
old oak table and the pink lustre tea-service.

A dealer, old Symonds of Carslake, spoke to him in the kitchen.  He
knew Furze as an implacable bargain-hunter, a buyer of useful
rubbish.

"Anything doing to-day, Mr. Furze?"

Old Symonds was a decent old boy, and Arnold confided to him his
passion for the pink lustre.

"I suppose you fellows will be after it?"

Symonds screwed up his eyes.

"Not enough of it to be worth a scrimmage.  Dare say I could get it
for you."

"How much?"

"Can't say."

"Go to three pounds.  My day's extravagance, Mr. Symonds."

Harnett held the sale in the garden, standing on a kitchen table
under the shade of a lime tree, with a smaller table to serve as a
rostrum.  He was a bald-headed, cynical man, with a set smile, and
a tired, flat voice.  His gagging was conventional and perfunctory.
"Thirteen shillings I am bid.  Thirteen shillings!  Unlucky number,
ladies and gents.  Make it fourteen.  Thank you, Mr. Brown.
Fourteen shillings I am bid, good kitchen table.  Fifteen
shillings, Mr. Furze.  Fifteen shillings--"

It was a hot day, and the bidding was languid, and the crowd one
such as Mr. Harnett was apt to describe as a "Lot of gaping stock-
fish."  Arnold was lucky.  Mr. Symonds bought in the tea-service
for one pound, fifteen shillings.  Furze lost the oak bureau, but
he won the table, the mahogany chest of drawers, the Windsor
chairs, the bedstead, the oak chest, the long mirror, the stair
carpet, the kitchen table and half a dozen other bargains.

With the help of a gentleman from Melhurst who was there to earn
some casual silver as a porter Furze loaded his possessions on to
the wagon, covered them with a rick cloth, and started for
"Doomsday."  His lunch had been a slice of bread and a piece of
cheese, and some cold tea out of a bottle, but it was one of those
days for him when a man does not feel physical hunger.  He was
happy.  He walked beside his two "greys" with a mind full of
possessive symbolism.  The rose lustre tea-service, carefully
packed in a box, was the cynosure of the day's happenings.  Already
he was making plans for the disposal of the furniture.

It happened that from the bank above the road Mary Viner saw the
blue wagon pass as she had seen it set off in the morning.  But
much had happened.  The wagon was full, but her heart felt empty.

Furze saw her and pulled up for a moment, and his face was happy.
Her conscience smote her.

"I have done rather well."

She smiled down at the lover in him, because she loved the lover.

"I'm so glad."

"You must come and have tea, you and your people, when I am
straight."

"We should love to."

He waved his hat and went on, leaving her to wonder why the lover
should not suffice, and why he should be lost in the husband.  For
that is what happened; she had read it and been told it.  Marriage
was a wholly different affair.  "My dear, flirt with the bank-clerk
if you like--but marry the banker."  Clare's philosophy.  Marriage
should be comfortable; it needed cushions.  Lovers might be content
with a haycock or a bank of heather, and an ephemeral moonlight
madness; marriage was a house to be lived in.

She returned to her "Green Shutters" and her old people, and the
making of a gooseberry tart.  Gooseberries were early that year.


4


Will Blossom worked until seven o'clock that evening on his
master's beer and great good humour, helping to unload the wagon
and carry the furniture into the house.  The bedstead, the chest of
drawers, and a little old mahogany wash-hand stand had to be
persuaded up the narrow stairs.  The rest of the purchases were
left in the living-room.

Mrs. Blossom heard about it when her man came home.

"I tell 'ee 'e 'as bought a bedstead."

Mrs. Sarah laughed.

"Looks like business, hee, hee, hee, though most gal's first bed be
a grass bank or a dry ditch bottom."

Her man growled at her.

"Muster Furze be'unt that sort."

"Oh, ben't he!  She was round there to-day."

"Who be she?"

"That there Mary Viner.  She looks ready for it, she do.  Come to
pick bluebells!  Hee, hee, hee."

Her man, irresponsibly stubborn, clumped through into the scullery
to wash.  He, too, had been caught at the haymaking season, and for
his sins was the mate of the lady who annexed and wore his old
caps.  To Will Blossom marriage was symbolized by a tongue, and a
jeering voice that never had anything good to say of anyone when
the particular person was not there to hear it.

Meanwhile Furze was busy, happily busy, a pipe in his mouth, and
all the windows open wide.  And so were the windows of his soul.
Having cleared the living-room by carrying the kitchen table and
the cupboard and other necessities into the kitchen, and added to
them his own home-made gear, he arranged the new life about the old
oak table.  The oak chest looked well under the east window.  The
three Windsor chairs he tried in various positions.  The lounge
sofa, the long mirror, a little old pie-crust table and two rugs
went into Mrs. Damaris' parlour.  Certainly, the sofa needed some
attention, some flowery piece of cretonne draped over it
temporarily, and a man who could mend harness ought to be able to
tackle such a job.

Last of all he unpacked the pink lustre and laid it out on the oak
table, while Bobbo, puzzled by so many movements and mutations, sat
with his head on one side and watched this new game.  The evening
light slanted through the west window, and the metallic and rosy
glow of the old china seemed to float upon the dark sheen of the
oak.  Furze stood back with his hands in his pockets, and felt that
the room was good.



VIII


1


At "Doomsday" Arnold Furze had been preparing for a tea-party.
Mrs. Sarah, chartered for an extra morning, had scrubbed the tiled
floor of the living-room, and the brick floor of the kitchen, and
poked her nose into all sorts of matters that did not concern her.
Furze had locked up the pink lustre tea-service in a cupboard, and
that locked cupboard had tantalized the lady through the whole of
the morning.  Now--what--had he got in there?  The sugar and the
tea no doubt, and his tobacco tin?  Mrs. Sarah could not abide a
suspicious temperament.

But the labour of love was the man's.  With oil and beeswax and two
old socks he polished the oak table and the chest, and having
brought a length of flowery cretonne at Carslake he ingeniously
fashioned a sort of apron for the lounge sofa.  It was stitched at
the back and tucked in round the cushioning, much to the interest
of the dog who attempted to lie on it, but was removed gently yet
with a firmness that he understood.  Furze brought in flowers.  An
old red bread-pan he filled with foxgloves and stood it in a
corner, and on the oak table were crimson stocks in a blue bowl.  A
cream-pan on the oak chest held a mass of red and white may, and
the scent of it was a sweet and heavy fragrance in the room.  Mrs.
Damaris' parlour had a sheaf of yellow flags from Rushy Pool.  As
for the sunk garden, the Canterbury bells and the sweet williams
and the stocks were in early blossom; the grass had been scythed
and the beds weeded.

The ritual of tea gave Furze some thoughtful moments.  He decided
to have the lustre service set out on the piecrust table, and the
bread and butter and the cakes on the painted table.  And he would
make the tea himself, or with Mary to help him.  Young Blossom was
sent up to Carslake for cakes, and getting seven for sixpence
purloined and ate the seventh and most sugary one on the way back.
Then there was the thin bread and butter.  Furze cut it himself
after his dinner, with great care and concentrated solemnity,
finding the loaf rather too new and the knife too blunt for the
carving of slices of ideal thinness.  The beastly things would
buttonhole!  Still--there it was, twelve slices well buttered, and
laid like weather-boarding on one of the willow pattern dishes.  He
put it away in the dairy to keep moist.

If Mary Viner could have seen him!  The big, deliberate, devoted
thing with his large but sensitive hands arranging the flowers, and
cutting that bread and butter!  It is possible that his labours
with loaf and knife and butter, breath held, eyes very serious,
might have conquered her.  It would have won him most women, the
women who have touched the little, trivial, pathetic things of
life.  But Mary wished to have her bread and butter cut for her,
and brought in by a spruce young woman with a bobbed head and a
white-laced apron.  She did not see it quite in that way.  Her
desire for happenings had outgrown her heart.

At half-past three Furze came in from hoeing weeds, and washed and
put on his best suit.  Afterwards, he strolled about the house,
observant, excited, half in a dream, listening, giving some chair
or piece of furniture a touch.  He fetched the bread and butter
from the dairy, saw that the kettle was on the boil, and kept
looking at his watch.  It was a hot day, abnormally hot for May.
Should he wait in the house, or go up at the lane to meet them?  He
hesitated for a moment, on the path by the yew hedge, fancying that
he could smell his bean field in bloom though it lay two hundred
yards away beyond the Doom Paddock.  Still, the wind--such as it
was--came from the southeast.

He decided to wait in the house.  That confounded cat might try to
get its head into the milk-jug.


2


Mary Viner sometimes wondered how her mother and father had managed
to be born, for always they were late for any party or occasion.
Like many people with nothing to do they did not appear to have
sufficient leisure even for the accomplishment of nothing, nor had
they any sense of time.  Their unpunctuality was one of the
afflictions of her youth.  Mrs. Charlotte could not write a letter
without a final flourish of "In haste."  Old Hesketh had a habit of
taking a bath just when his daughter was ready to serve up dinner,
or he would have to be summoned from some pottering job in the
garden by the tinkling of a handbell.  Furze had asked them for
half-past four, and at four-twenty Mary could hear them twittering
away upstairs like a couple of sparrows busy building a nest.

She called up the stairs:

"It is nearly half-past four."

The door of the room opened.

"We shall not be five minutes, dear.  Your father found two buttons
off his summer waistcoat."

The door was reclosed and Mary knew that nothing would hurry them.
Yet--presently--they would come downstairs in a fluster, and
looking very hot, having odd gloves or no gloves, or a broken shoe-
lace.  Or the hat-brush had been mislaid.  Such agitation!

She would sigh, but not resignedly.  And to-day it was she who felt
fussed and agitated, and was yea and nay in the same breath.  The
weather was abominably hot; she had had a good deal of cooking to
do, and she had dressed in a hurry, putting on a new biscuit-
coloured frock and a brown hat; and at the last moment a stocking
had "laddered."  Yes, she felt cross and agitated, and her heart
seemed to be in a hurry, while her head was attempting to construct
some compromise.  What were they talking about upstairs?  Absurd,
futile, garrulous old people!

Then, her heart smote her.  Poor old things, they were so very old,
while she felt all the drive and impatience of her youth pushing
against their little dawdling ineptitudes.

Yet the conversation upstairs concerned her, and was less selfish
than her thoughts.  Old Hesketh had accomplished a very indifferent
knotting of his tie, and Mrs. Charlotte was retying it for him.  In
some ways he was still a great lanky, irresponsible, and rather
lovable boy.

"Well, if it does happen, Nellie will come.  She always said she
would.  And it would be a home for her.  Do stand still--Hesketh."

"Sorry, my dear.  These things have to be faced.  One can't stand
in the way--"

"That's better.  Of course--a farmer's life--not quite what one
might wish."

"A good life.  A very decent fellow; character; and kind--"

"And quite near.  Besides, he does own the farm.  Mary has been so
restless lately.  I was almost afraid that she might do something
foolish--like marrying Colonel Sykes."

Old Hesketh bristled.

"Sykes!  You don't mean to tell me--"

"I think so."

"Preposterous!  Why, the man is only ten years younger than I am.
My dear, it is five-and-twenty minutes to five."

"Dear, dear, we shall be late.  Where is my sunshade?  I'm sure I
put it out.  Look in the cupboard."

Mary had to find the sunshade for her mother, and then the three of
them set out as though they had had just five flustering minutes in
which to dress and were chasing the wheels of a social whirl.  Mrs.
Charlotte tripped along very fast with her sunshade bobbing up and
down, and Hesketh had the air of a man late for his own wedding.
Like timid old birds they were flustered so easily.  Youth drifted
in the rear, impatient and absorbed, thinking its own thoughts,
aloof and troubled.  Brown eyes, staring vaguely at green
hedgerows, saw nothing but an inward tangle of thorns.  Her silence
passed unnoticed like the flight of some brown bird from tree to
tree.  She was full of questions that would not let themselves be
answered, of warning impulses and impatient wisdoms.  What a pity
it was that life could not have been arranged differently, that is
to say--as she would have chosen to arrange it.  If she could have
put Arnold into a fat chair in a fat London office where men seemed
to make money just by sitting still?  As Clare's husband made it.
And here was all this sentimental pother, with her heart wanting
something, and her head refusing to let her want it, and the hedges
white with may blossom, and her stocking "laddered," and a man over
yonder threatening her like a deep sea.

"Hesketh, isn't it green?"

She found her mother poised in the middle of the lane, surprised by
a childish delight, while her father stood and smiled as some old
men can smile.

"A green valley, a wonderful green valley."

"And those larches.  And the two American oaks, and that white weed
on the pond.  Every shade of green."

The daughter felt irritated.  Somehow it seemed to her absurd that
her mother should have eyes for the greenness, and a childish
delight in its beauty.

"It must be nearly five o'clock."

She shepherded them on, though they showed an inclination to dawdle
at the gate because Mrs. Charlotte had seen a swallow, and because
two young pigs were thrusting friendly noses under the bottom of
the gate.

"Tig-tig," said her mother.

Absurd old lady!  With Furze visible at the corner of the yew
hedge, a man who had been kept waiting for half an hour.

"Mother, there is Mr. Furze."

She looked at Furze a little anxiously, and then denied him her
eyes for quite three minutes, while he, with an air of unclouded
pleasure, shook her mother's hand and then her father's, and said
how hot it was, and how glad he was to see them.  But the house was
cool; it was not built yesterday; and would they like to look at
the garden?  No; he was sure that Mary's mother wanted her tea.  He
took her sunshade from her and closed it, and gave her his arm up
the steps.

"You must not expect too much of a mere bachelor, Mrs. Viner."

Mary's mother fell into a sudden delight with the first room, and
her delight was quite genuine.  "What a lovely room, so restful.
The old tiles and the oak.  And what is it that is smelling so
sweet?"  He told her--"May blossom."  He looked very happy and a
little shy, and his eyes kept touching Mary with quick, deep,
tentative glances.  What did she think of it?  She stood there by
the door, her brown eyes fixed upon nothing in particular, while
her mother went on twittering.

"Your flowers, Mr. Furze!  Who arranged them?"

"I did."

"And what a lovely old table.  Look at it, Hesketh."

Captain Viner passed a lean brown hand over the oak surface.

"English oak; nothing so good."

Bobbo had sidled in to have his head patted by all save the queer
young woman who looked as though she had lost herself somewhere
outside the house.  Furze was opening the door of Mrs. Damaris'
parlour.  "We will have tea in here.  Yes, it was an ironmaster's
house, and I suppose Rushy was a hammer-pond."  His deep eyes were
a little anxious, and Bobbo knew the look, and connected it with
straying cattle or a sick sheep--but where was the sick sheep on
this particular occasion?  Furze stood aside and they passed in,
and he looked at Mary as she passed him, as though asking for
something.

Mrs. Viner sat down on the sofa.

"Sweet," she said, "perfectly sweet.  And the garden!  Why, you
ought to have a peacock on that wall."

"Perhaps we shall," he laughed.

Mary's mother was pulling off her gloves, and looking at the pink
lustre.  Her bright eyes glimmered.

"Well--you have got pink lustre!  I've always wanted pink lustre.
Mary, dear, isn't it sweet?"

"Yes, very," said the daughter.

Old Hesketh was held by the window and the view, that complete and
wonderful greenness, with distant hills floating a bluish grey
between the spring woods.  He was lost to the party for the moment.
Furze was explaining that he had the tea to make, and that the
kettle was boiling in the kitchen, and his eyes hoped for a
consenting playfulness in Mary's.  Would she not want to help him,
and to see the kitchen?  She had seen it, but he did not know that.
She sat down in one of the basket chairs, with a troubled forehead
and self-conscious eyes, and then got up quickly and joined her
father at the window.  Furze went out alone to make the tea.

Bobbo sidled out after him.  He watched his master fill the pink
lustre tea-pot, and they returned together to Mrs. Damaris'
parlour.  Mary had joined her mother on the sofa.

"Who will pour out for me?"

He looked from one to the other.

"Of course--Mary will," said her mother.

"Will you?"

His eyes besought her.  She rose from the sofa, but without looking
at him, and took one of the chairs by the tea-table.

"We none of us take sugar.  Do you?"

"I'm afraid I do."

He was waiting to pass the cups, and thinking how well that biscuit-
coloured frock and the little brown hat suited her.  Her hands were
moving over those pink cups, and they gave him a sense of tremulous
agitation.  But she was here, in his house, touching his
possessions, the things that he had striven and waited for.  She
had picked up the milk jug; its handle had been riveted, and with
the weight of the milk in it the riveting gave way.  There was a
crash as the jug struck the edge of the table and broke; milk ran
across the table and fell in a little stream upon the floor.

Her eyes trembled up at him.

"Oh,--I'm so sorry."

He laughed.  He wanted to tell her that she could break everything
in the house.  Her scared brown eyes and plaintive mouth made his
love hold its breath.

"O,--that's all right.  Not your fault.  I ought to have tried that
handle.  Besides--there is plenty more milk."

He gathered the broken pieces, and suddenly inspired--called the
dog.

"Here, Bobbo, tongue--old chap, nice new milk."

The dog came and lapped at the white pool, and Furze laughed, and
so drew a little awkward laughter from the others.

"Forestalling the cat!"

"But what pity!  That sweet jug!"

"Things with weak handles deserve to be broken, Mrs. Viner.  I'll
get some more milk."

"And a cloth.  We must wipe the table and the carpet."

The providing of more milk in a plain white jug was an easy matter,
but the finding of a respectable glass-cloth was more of a problem.
These domestic etceteras were not to be picked up so easily at
"Doomsday."  Mrs. Sarah washed and dealt with such cloths as
existed.  And where the devil were the clean ones?  He was away
quite a long time, rummaging, and wondering whether he could use a
clean handkerchief.  Then he remembered the box of cloths in the
dairy, for he was far more meticulous about the cleanliness of the
dairy than of the kitchen, and he called himself a fool, and went
and fetched a cloth.  Mary took it from him.  She looked very near
to tears.  She mopped up the spilt milk on the table, and would
have gone down on her knees to complete Bobbo's operations upon the
carpet, but Furze would not have it.  He thought her remorse
adorable.

"No, no,--I'll do that, while you pour out.  I hope the tea isn't
stewed."

"It can't be too strong for me, my dear fellow," said Captain
Hesketh kindly.

"Oh, a little hot water," said his wife.

"Hot water!"  Another problem.  What the dickens was he to use for
hot water?  Had he another jug?  But why not put a bold face upon
it and bring in the kettle?  He did so, throwing the milk-soaked
cloth into the stone sink.

So--at last--tea was served, and they ate his laboriously shaved
bread and butter, and three of the cakes, and conversed brightly so
that the death among the china should be forgotten.  But Mary
looked as though tragedy had overtaken her, with a dewy sadness of
the brown eyes, and a poignant droop of the mouth.  And Furze loved
her for looking like that.


3


Afterwards they went out into Mrs. Damaris' garden, and where one
of the old yews threw a band of shadow Furze placed two of his
Windsor chairs.  He would have carried out a third for Mary, but
she--in a moment of wilful self-effacement--told him not to bother.
She would sit on the grass.

"But in your new frock, my dear!" said her mother.

Mary looked peeved.

"Well--a cushion then, if Mr. Furze has an old one."

She had broken his milk-jug, and now she was asking for cushions,
and a cushion was a thing that he did not possess.  But happily he
remembered that the padded seat of one of the basket-chairs was
removable, and he went in and fetched it for her and placed it on
the grass.  Captain Hesketh was lighting a pipe.  Mrs. Charlotte,
sitting under her sunshade, and feeling the moody silences of her
daughter, made chirpings like a cheerful sparrow.

They talked about the farm, Mrs. Charlotte asking questions, and
Furze answering them.  Did he get up very early in the morning?
Yes, at about five o'clock, for when you had twenty or thirty cows
to milk, and the milk to be put on the train or delivered at
various houses, you had to be early.  And she assured him that his
milk was excellent.  And was it true that the cows had to be washed
before milking?  He assured her that it was true if you did your
job properly.  Your milk cans and dairy had to be cared for like an
operating theatre and its fittings.

"That is where a woman can help.  There are times when a farmer's
hour should contain seventy minutes."

He was leaning against the stone wall, filling his pipe, and trying
to assure himself that Mary's silence was not the silence of
boredom.  He wished that it was the daughter who was asking these
questions, instead of sitting there with her hands clasped over her
knees, and her eyes looking at the horizon.  Or was it that the
breaking of that precious milk-jug had upset her?  She seemed lost
in a mood of aloofness; she had uttered no impulsive word of
interest or of pleasure; and yet she was very much awake,
distressfully self-conscious.

He turned to the father.

"You don't shoot, sir, do you?"

No, Captain Hesketh did not shoot.  He had never been able to
afford "huntin' and shootin'," not even in India.  Besides, he had
to confess that he was not very fond of killing things, live
things.

"That's the difference between the old boy and the young one, my
dear fellow.  At fourteen you will crawl round a field to get a pot
at a sitting rabbit, and go all hot with joy when you bowl over
your first running one.  But--of course--a farmer has to shoot."

"I do as little as possible.  One has to keep the rabbits down, and
it is kinder than snaring.  Wood-pigeon too.  But I don't like it,
not a fine bird like a wood-pigeon."

"No pheasants--of course?"

"Oh,--other people's--occasionally.  Self-defence."

Captain Hesketh had something to say on indigo planting, and the
rice fields and the difference between Eastern and Western smells,
and Furze listened, and then spoke of English scents, hops and
mustard, and hay, and a bean field in bloom.  Yes, he knew of
nothing more exquisite than the smell of the black and white
flowers of the common bean.  He confessed that it had the same
effect on him as the cuckoo's note in the green of the year; it
sent a thrill through him, and filled him with a sense of strange
yearning.

"I have a field in flower.  Why not stroll down there?"

Captain Hesketh and his wife exchanged glances.  Some telepathic
message seemed to pass.  Old Viner looked at his watch; his wife
explained that she was a poor walker in hot weather, and that the
day was very hot.  Besides, they ought to be getting home.  But
there was no reason why Mary should not go down to the bean field
while two old people toddled back to Cinder Town.  It was Mrs.
Charlotte who suggested it.  Young people were young people, and
Mrs. Viner was vaguely annoyed with her daughter.  Mary had made no
effort, no effort at all, and could a man have been kinder?

Furze, deep-eyed, watched the girl.

"What do you say?"

She knew what the inner voice of him was crying.  "O, my beloved,
my beloved!"  And something stirred in her, an inarticulate,
physical agitation.  Her heart hurried.  Her brown eyes were like
shimmering windows hiding all that was within from those who stood
without.  She pulled at a piece of grass, and with a kind of sweet
sullenness, looked up slantwise and as high as the man's collar.

"I might."

Captain Viner stood up.  He was a little flushed, the old child
full of young and vicarious emotion.


4


Bean Acres lay between Rushy Bottom and Maids Croft, surrounded by
old thorn hedges that were like lines of foam, and when the two
were half way across the Doom Paddock the scent of the bean flower
met them.  Furze, walking beside and slightly behind her, kept
watch upon her face, that sulkily sweet profile overshadowed by her
dark hair.  She had gone forth with him without a word, as though
under some compulsion, looking at everything and nothing with a
silent and self-conscious vagueness.

They came to the gate, and Bean Acres lay spread before them, six
acres of grey green foliage glistening in the sunlight, six acres
of fragrant black and white flowers.  A wayward wind, coming and
going, stirred the bean tops, and seemed to blow the heavy and
exquisite perfume into their faces.  Furze breathed it in deeply.
It was the very scent of her and her presence.

"Heaven might smell like this."

Her hands were resting on the rail of the gate, and on either side
of the gate the shaggy old thorn hedges added their scent to the
fragrance of the field.  It was overwhelming.  Her brown eyes had a
blurred sheen.  The flicker of the sunlight and the grey green
leaves seemed to intensify her mental and emotional inter-
confusion.  She stood there rigid, like a wild thing conscious of
its peril, yet unable to take to flight.  He was so very near, and
they were so utterly alone.  She had felt his voice like a strong
hand gently touching her.

"I mustn't--I mustn't," she kept saying to herself; "it would be so
hopeless, so wrong.  I ought not to have come out here."

He was leaning beside her over the gate.

"Clean land, Mary.  It nearly killed me--getting it clean.  I'm
glad it didn't."

She began to shake.  The smell of that field seemed to be
intoxicating her.  And all this greenness, and the whisper of
growing things, the insidious sweet stealth, the call of the sap to
her blood!

"Yes, you must have worked.  I can understand that--because I work--
and because I am lazy--really--"

She was talking as though to keep fate off.

"I should like to lie down in that field and do nothing--for ever
and ever.  So you see--"

She stole a panic look at him, and found him regarding her with
such quiet and slightly smiling adoration that she lost herself and
seemed to clutch at any floating words that came.

"I'm--I'm so sorry about that jug."

So--that was what had been worrying her.

"I bought it for you to break."

In the sweetness of her terror she was silent.

"You can take the service piece by piece and break it--if you wish.
You could take me--the man--and break me--my darling--"

She uttered a cry.  It had happened.  She was trying to hide her
face, and his arms were round her.  He was saying things to her,
sacred and infinitely tender things, and though his arms held her
they were very gentle.  "O, my beloved."  Her confusion was like a
beating of wings.  His man's tenderness seemed to overwhelm her
like the smell of that flowery field; she put her hands on his
shoulders, and laid her cheek against the roughness of his coat.

"O,--my dear--"

She closed her eyes.  His arms seemed to grow more strong.  She
felt his warm breath, and then--kisses on her eyes and mouth.  She
was returning his kisses.  Her mouth was plaintive and passionate.

"Oh, it's wrong, it's madness," cried a voice in her.

But her surrender was like a falling into a sweet and deep sleep.
She felt herself lifted up and carried in his arms to a bank under
the shade of the old thorns.



IX


1


In the dusk he went with her along the lane as far as the Six Firs.
And here she withdrew herself, separating her young body from him
as though some mystical web threatened to join them together.

"Don't come any farther, Arnold."

He stood looking down at her dark comeliness made more swarthy and
southern by the dusk.  The smooth, white sleekness of her was
flushed like an autumn leaf.  Her eyes were both coy and wise.

"As you wish, my darling."

"Not to-night."

She fled from him suddenly with one quick backward glance, a
sidelong gleam of the brown eyes, leaving him standing there in the
green twilight, serene as one of the tall trees, his head in the
world of wonder.  It had happened.  And his thoughts had the scent
of the bean flower and the perfume of a girl's hair.  Wonderful!
Yes, how wonderful it all was.  Mary Viner, his Mary Viner, quick
of breath and quick of colour, his Beloved of the poignant mouth.
Thank God for it.  His love was a love that stood with head
uncovered.

He wandered back down to the lane to the house, and there he heard
poor Bobbo whining, Bobbo who had been shut up away from the
blessedness of that May evening.  He let the dog out, and bent down
and held the beast's head between his hands.

"Bobbo, she loves me.  Wonderful, isn't it?  Why should she?  But
she does."

In the dusk he went all over the house with the dog at his heels.
He was full of a sacred and tender exultation.  "Doomsday" had a
new meaning; it was her house; she would sleep in that bed; her
feet would go to and fro across the old, undulating floors.  She
would look out of this window and that at the woods and fields.
He could see himself coming in from his labour and calling her.
"Mary--Mary."  And there would be the sound of her footsteps like
the beating of wings, and she would come to him quickly with those
coyly glancing eyes and a hurrying of her blood and breath.

No more loneliness, no more long evenings alone by the winter fire.
She would be with him.


2


Mary returned to "Green Shutters" with a white lie on her red and
burning lips.

"I'm late.  We went all over the farm."

How far the lie carried she did not know, but she felt that she had
come breathlessly out of a struggle, that she had been overpowered.
O, the smell of that bean field, and the May blossom, and the green
shadows under the hedge, and the tall grasses with the sunlight
flickering through them!  And to be held like that, sweetly and
tenderly, crushed and conquered!  The strength of him, the gentle,
compelling strength of him!

She sat on the edge of her bed and shivered.  For behind the
glowing gold of the evening she saw that old house like a cavern
ready to swallow her and her insurgent restlessness, and though she
had lost her heart, she had not given her head.  He was so strong,
so devoutly serious, and she knew that she was afraid of his
strength.  His love, man's love, was calling her to come and be his
sweet slave, and so--perhaps--she could have been, but not on a
lonely farm and in that house.  It was extraordinary how she feared
that house, as a child fears some darkly mysterious corner.  No,
she must keep her head and not let herself be overpowered.

Furze wanted to see her people that very night, and she had put him
off.  "No, not to-night, Arnold."

And when he had spoken of marriage she had looked playfully
confused and self-conscious.  "What a hurry you are in!  I like to
dawdle over my cake!"  But he was not the sort of man to be put off
for long, and the more she put him off the more devotedly would he
urge marriage upon her.  She lay prone and clasped her pillow.  He
had breathed the fatal fire into her, and she was burning, for she
was a dark girl and warm blooded.  She wanted him just as he wanted
her, yet differently.  And yet--was their wanting of each other
different?  Would he sacrifice his farm if she asked him to do it?
He was asking her to sacrifice herself, but then--of course, it did
not appear to him like that, for he did not understand or even
suspect her point of view.  And could she tell him?  It would be
honest to say--"Arnold, I can't live such a life; I'm not made for
it.  It would mean unhappiness for us both."  She felt that it
would not convince him, that his dominant tenderness would try to
get her into his arms and overwhelm her with sweet reassurings.
"What is my girl afraid of?  It will be all right.  It--must--be
all right.  What is it that frightens you?"  And if she were honest
she would have to tell him that she loathed housework, and poverty,
and loneliness--and that she wanted--Well--what exactly did she
want?  Movement, variety, comfort, a good time, her little triumphs
and adventures?  She would have to say--"I am not up to my job, the
woman's job, if you mean by that--a life of cooking and mending and
dishwashing.  I can't help it.  I am made that way.  Lots of women
are."

And she supposed that he would despise her, because he loved work,
and was rooted in the soil, and did not seem to need the modern
excitements, but with a quite amazing contentedness followed the
plough.  Where was his war restlessness?  How had he been able to
bear burial alive in this Sussex valley?  He was utterly different
from herself, and she saw disaster in an attempt to mate with such
a difference.

What should she do?

She wanted him--the lover, and the arms of the lover.

Tell him she could not leave her people--at least--not yet?  Yes,
that was an idea.  Meanwhile she would be fondled and kissed--and
the woman's yearn in her assuaged.  Yes, to a point.  But how far?

She sat up and shook her hair out of her eyes.  Embraces,
clingings, kisses!  Should she risk them, and dissemble, and hope
for some compromise?  If she could persuade him to give up
"Doomsday" and take some nice farm nearer London, and on the edge
of the world's happenings?  She felt sure that such places existed.

So she left the problem waiting, and slept in snatches, and woke
with a feeling of being embraced; and snuggled into the sensuous
warmth of the feeling.  At breakfast, realizing that there was
wisdom in regularizing the affair, she let it be known that Arnold
Furze had asked her to marry him.  Consented?  Well, not exactly.
She wanted to know more of him, and also she did not see her way
yet to leaving "Green Shutters" to the mercy of casual servants.

"Oh, but we have thought of that," said her mother archly--and much
excited; "it was always agreed that your Cousin Nellie would come
to us.  It will be a home for her."

This was rather unexpected.  Mary had not properly reconnoitred all
her defences.

"I don't wish it talked about yet."

"But, my dear, the things that are not talked about are just the
very things that are talked about."

She countered that.

"Arnold is coming this evening to see you both.  But I wish it to
be understood that I want more time."

She passed a most difficult day, and in the evening, at the end of
the day's work, Arnold Furze came down from "Doomsday."  She met
him at the door, and in the little passage he bent and kissed her
hand like an old-world lover.  She left him along with her father
and went out into the garden, and at the end of five minutes they
joined her there.  The discussion had been a very brief one.  They
appeared to have come to a very rapid understanding, possibly
because of Furze's archaic attitude towards her parents.  Had
parents to be consulted in these modern days, and when a girl was
six and twenty?

"I am afraid that I can give your daughter only a working home,
sir.  But it is a good life."

"My dear fellow, Mary knows what work is."

She did, but not as her father understood it, nor as Furze
understood it, and when they were left alone together in the garden
she had to warn the lover in him.  For she knew that Harold Coode
was sticking a row of peas on the other side of the fence, and that
Mr. Jamieson was smoking an after-dinner pipe in the little red and
white hammock-tent on the back lawn.  That was the worst of these
cramped, cheek by jowl lives; you had to be so careful.

"Have you ever seen the sunset from Six Firs?"

No, she had not.  But as she had certain things to say to him she
accepted the sunset, and the public parade past the windows of
Cinder Town.  No, she would not need a hat.  At the gate she was
aware of his pausing, and looking at poor Coode's iron hut, that
most lamentable of improvisations, but there was no scorn on his
face, for he had no scorn in his nature.

"Rather pathetic--that."

She allowed herself a moment's moodiness.

"Aren't we all rather pathetic?"

"I did not mean--you.  But a one-eyed life like that--Mary."

"Yes, it is not 'Doomsday'--oak."

He glanced at her questioningly.

"I cannot help loving that place.  English clay and oak--if you
like.  You will learn to love it, too.  A little world of one's own--
English, where you can say what you please--just as loudly--"

Her face silenced him.  She had seen the Twist's blue car turn into
the cinder road, with Winnifred at the wheel and late home from a
tennis party.  And she was walking with Winnie's "milkman."  O,
what a monstrous snob she was!  And cowardly.  She felt a sudden
scorn of herself, and was able to give her friend a radiant look,
and a smile that introduced Captain Arnold Furze of "Doomsday."
She was kinder to him after that, because she felt in wistful need
of his kindness.

"You won't hurry me--will you, Arnold?"

She was sitting at the foot of one of the trees, and he was
standing and leaning against the trunk.

"I mean--it is such a serious business, getting married."

He understood a part of her better than she knew.

"The five minutes before zero hour, dear one.  Serious for a woman;
her 'going over the top.'  But we shall go over together."

"I have my people to think of."

"I know."

Above them the red-throated firs pressed the sunlight in their
green arms, and he--standing there with an air of supreme
contentment and a tenderness that was tranquil as the sunset, spoke
deep and simple words.  She was touched by them, so touched that
she felt like clasping his knees and pouring out all her doubts and
distresses.  How big and strong he was; but somehow she could not
surrender to his strength.

"I'm at your service, my beloved.  When one is very happy--one does
not want to hurry.  Besides, there is more to do yet before you
come to me.  I have had so much to do on the land that I have had
neither time nor the money to do justice to the house.  It shall be
the house now--because it will be my beloved's house."

She felt a choking in her throat.

"You are a good man, Arnold."


3


So, finding it sweet to be loved as this man loved her, she
temporized.  It was not fair to him, and she knew it, but at the
back of her mind was the hope that something might happen, such as
her being able to move him by imperceptible degrees towards a life
that would be less lonely.  As yet she had no philosophy of life,
and neither knew what was worth getting, nor how to get it.  She
was ignorant of those dear and durable loyalties, or a calmness of
mind that is independent of the crowd.  To hundreds of sensitive
women that old Sussex homestead would have put forth many appeals.
They would have understood its sureness, its permanence, its happy
and green isolation, secure from the yelling voices of little
common children and the cheap and gaping crowd.  It had beauty, and
permanence, but much of modernity asks for neither.  Almost it
would seem that the new spirit asks for permanence, and regards
marriage or any such human relationship as a citizen of God's Own
Country regards his motor-car, good for a year.  That, in a way was
Mary's feeling, and it was a very natural feeling, though she was
unconscious of the rather pathetic vulgarity of her so-called
ideals.  She was both attracted and repelled by sex.  She was
experiencing all the curiosity of youth in the presence of a new
and old sensation.  To be kissed and held close, and to be looked
at as though the lower part of her was human, and all above her
breasts divine!  It made her feel smooth as silk, and warm in her
body.

Well--well!  She sighed, and kissed back, and temporized, and
supposed that men might be persuaded out of the deeps of their
devotion to uproot themselves and take root elsewhere.  Surely,
land was land, and a farm a farm.  She even went so far as to write
to Clare, in strict confidence of course, to ask her whether people
did not farm near Weyfleet.  Yes, twenty or thirty miles from town,
where you had shops, and a tennis club and dances, and cheap
Wednesday tickets to town, and where those expeditions--so dear to
women--were possible.  Clare wrote back to say that--of course--
people farmed in Surrey.  Weyfleet was "country," not a suburb.
Mary must most certainly not bury herself in Sussex.  The servant
problem would be too awful; it was sufficiently awful at Weyfleet.
Leslie, Clare's husband, knew one of the local estate agents very
well--and should they make tactful inquiries?

The letter put Mary in a panic.  She wrote in a hurry to say that
she had nothing definite in mind, for she did not wish to feel the
close grip of finality.

And servants!

For suddenly she had come to realize that they would not be able to
afford a servant, at least--not yet.  That woman--Mrs. Sarah or
something--with the blue nose and the cap, would come in three
times a week and help.  He expected her--his wife--to work in the
house as he worked on the farm.  Certainly he had put it to her
gently, and as though he was just a little sensitive about it, but
he did not appear to think that there was anything inhuman in her
working like a servant.  "You and I together, Mary."  A labour of
love--what?  Cooking her beloved's puddings, and making his bed,
and sweeping his carpets--when there were carpets.  O, very natural--
of course, but she was not asking how to give him the part of
domestic drudge.  She had had enough of that.  She was not so
strong as he was, and she was different.

Ye gods, how different!  The difference between them, glozed over
and concealed beneath a shimmering mist of amorousness, began to
frighten her more and more.  Even when his kisses were on her mouth
she would shudder a little at the finality of these embraces.  Yes,
she began to know now what they meant, and that the ultimate end of
them would be children.  Children in that great house, and without
a servant!

Was he mad?  Or didn't he realize?  Or was it just the blind way
things happened?  She began to feel like a fly in a web, with the
strands trembling under the rush of fate--the spider.

He talked to her about the farm and the farm's economy, and she
realized with a new fear that he could bore her.  Perhaps--too--she
was a little jealous of his beloved farm.  But it did not interest
her to be shown his "milk book," with the records of the milk each
cow gave, nor could she thrill over the yearlings and porkers, or
the weight of a crop or the prospects of the hay fields.  He talked
of cutting and selling more timbers in order to furnish the house
completely, and he took her down to Gore Wood, and she sat on a
stump while he measured some of the oaks and worked out a rough
estimate of the cubic capacity of the trunks.  She said--"Yes, yes-
is that so"--when he explained the system of measurement to her,
and how you had to allow a twelfth for the bark.  He seemed to take
it for granted that she would be interested in all that interested
him.  But why should she be?  She was interested only when he was
interested in her, and came and sat on the tree stump beside her
and kissed her.  His kisses made her feel that as a woman she
mattered.

Moreover, she was coming to understand all that life on a farm
implied, and how desperately hard Furze worked.  Dawn till dusk--
with no holidays, and very rarely a half-day off.  With cows to be
milked and beasts to be fed a man cannot indulge--like the
industrialists--in temperamental peevishnesses.  Grind, grind,
grind, as a part of the growth and the greenness!  And he seemed to
love it so well that he was eager for her to share it.

The issue grew yet more final when he took her over the house, and
with an air of tender seriousness asked her to suggest any
improvements and alterations.

"Your department, you know, and a woman has ideas.  Anything to
save labour."

She stood beside him in the centre of the dark kitchen.  His arm
was round her.  She felt both stubborn and compassionate, and her
warning thoughts and emotions rendered her voiceless.  But
something had to be said.

"It is a very nice kitchen."

"Anything that you think ought to be altered?"

"That range must be very extravagant."

"I suppose it is.  We might scrap it, and put in a small one."

"And the sink.  It ought to be glazed, and stand higher, and have
draining boards."

She wondered whether he would be offended, but she found him
intelligently interested.  He made her stand at the sink and go
through the shadow process of washing up.

"Yes,--that's obvious.  With a higher sink you don't have to stoop.
And that plate rack looks obsolete."

With the handle of a broom he measured the height of an ideal sink
as it would suit her, and nicked a mark on the handle with his
knife.

"Most important--all this--Mary.  I know what it means to have to
work with bad tools.  Anything else?"

There was one most obvious defect, and the worst of them all.

"No water laid on, Arnold; not even a pump.  Every drop has to be
carried in."

He looked very serious over this.

"By Jove,--yes,--what an ass!  I have managed somehow, but I always
meant to have it altered.  It will have to be altered.  I'll have a
pump fitted in the well, and the water piped to a tank in the roof,
and piped down here.  Of course, what I mean to do some time is to
have a water-ram fitted in the brook, and so get an automatic
supply, but it would mean at least two hundred yards of piping."

His enthusiasm troubled her.  Here she was inspiring him to all
sorts of schemes that were to improve the internal economy of the
house for the benefit of the woman, and she had no intention of
becoming the woman in charge.  No, not even if he had hot and cold
water laid on in every room, and an electric plant put in, and
electric radiators, and every swindling gadget advertised in the
household papers.  With all the so-called labour-saving devices the
woman would still remain a slave.  And she had a temperament.
Domestic work should be left to stolid women without temperaments.

He had got hold of a notebook and a pencil, and was making notes.

"I'll go up to Crofts at Carslake and get them to give me an
estimate for these things.  Now, what about coal?  Supposing we had
that corner bricked in and covered, and a shoot made in the wall,
so that we could tip the stuff in, and it would be ready to hand."

She agreed that it would save labour, and watched his busy pencil
and his intent face, and tried to find the courage to throw herself
upon his mercy.

"I can't live here, Arnold; I can't.  It is too lonely and too big
and too overwhelming.  Can't we live somewhere else?"

But her realization of his fixity stifled her.  He loved the place;
it was his bread and butter and hers; and if no regular servant
could be afforded here, well, there would be no servant elsewhere.
And all this happy scheming was part of his love.  She continued to
be a coward, and to temporize.

"Yes,--those trees will have to go this winter," he said quite
cheerfully.  "Hot water in the house is better than oak in a wood.
Yes, we will have a good range and a hot-water boiler put in while
we are about it."

He put his arm round her and kissed her, and swept her up the
stairs to look at the bedrooms.

"I thought you would like this one, my darling."

He opened the door of the room overlooking the south garden, and in
it he had installed the bed, and the mahogany chest of drawers, and
the little wash-hand stand and the long mirror.

"More needed.  It gets all the sun.  And what about curtains?  If
we bought the stuff, do you think you could make them?"

She laid a hand along a pensive cheek.

"Yes,--I think so."

"Well, we shall have to go shopping.  What about a day in London,--
when I am through with the hay?  I dare say we could pick up a few
good second-hand pieces."

She tried to withdraw him from too much tragic spending.

"But--you need not furnish the whole house, Arnold.  The parlour
and the living-room, and one bedroom.  It would not be necessary."

He seemed to think this very sweet and sensible.

"Dear God," he said; "thank heaven for a woman who knows her own
mind."

He kissed her, and she felt like weeping.



X


1


They were cutting the grass in the Long Meadow.  The whir and
clatter of the reaper had begun very early, and from the iron seat
Furze guided the "greys."  The swathes had fallen with the dew upon
them, and a potent sun was turning them from green to grey, and
already the fragrant smell of the dried grasses was floating on the
air.

The cutting had begun yesterday.

"T'dew be off t'grass, ssir."

Will had been scything the dead corners under the hedges.  The back
of his neck was the colour of a hedging-glove, and all wrinkles.
There were no women in the field, and no casuals from Carslake
lazily shaking twists of grass on sleepy pitchforks.  Furze had
learnt better than that.  Colonel Porter at Carslake Great Farm had
a new swathe-turner, and had allowed Furze to hire it, and now that
the dew was off the grass and the sun strong, the swathe-turner was
put to work.  The field grew more fragrant.  Furze, with his shirt
open at the throat, rode to and fro, the sunlight cutting a sharp
shadow from the brim of his hat.  His eyes had a dreaminess.

Yes, life was good!  The crop was a heavy one, and he was getting
it under ideal conditions.  And up at the farm Messrs. Crofts--
ironmongers and sanitary engineers--were fitting a new and
efficient little range in the kitchen, and installing a force-pump
in the well, and a tank in one of the attics.  A super-sink with
teak draining-boards lay outside the back door.  Mary, the
housewife, was to be lovingly humoured.

Furze ate his lunch beside Will under the thorn hedge, Mrs. Sarah
had brought down her man's dinner, and looked evilly at the swathe-
turner.  Nasty machine doing honest people out of a nice day's work--
plus beer!  And would she be wanted in the evening?

"No," said her man, "you won't be,"--and was grateful to the swathe-
turner.

When he had eaten his bread and cheese and drunk two glasses of
beer, Furze lit a pipe and strolled up to the house to see how
Crofts' men were progressing.  They had bricked in the new range,
and were proposing to tackle the sink when they had finished their
midday pipes.  Furze found the three of them sitting on his kitchen
table.  And in spite of it he smiled at them.

"You won't get that up by to-night--I suppose?"

"Maybe we shall," said an old fellow.

They belonged to no trade union.  Nor did Furze, for the soil, and
beasts, and growing things are above trade boards and time-tables.

He went back to Will and his work.

"Had a good drink, Will?"

"I have that, sir."

"We are in luck to-day.  We shall get three turnings before we use
the slide rake.  It's mellowing fast."

So, the heat of the day passed, and the horizontal sun shot arrows
of gold over the tops of the hedgerows and into the western windows
of the woods.  The dew would be coming down on the shorn grass.
Will had gone home, and Furze was idling in the lane, waiting for
his beloved.  She tarried; she had made excuses to herself, little
flimsy excuses; she considered the good opinion of Cinder Town; she
went down to Perrivales and tried to persuade Phyllis to join her,
but no Phyllis was available.  So, she went alone, a little
fearfully, with a guilty eagerness and a prudish circumspection
that quarrelled with each other.  She found her lover by the Six
Firs with a face that had the glow of the hayfield upon it.  He
seemed to smell of hay and of his labour and of the clean linen he
had put on before coming out to meet her.

She was afraid.

"Things to show you," he said.

His possessive arm encircled her, and they went down between the
green hedgerows to the farm, and her fear of his sureness contended
with the warm lure of the June evening.  A tired languor descended
upon her.  To walk two ways at once in the world of the emotions is
exhausting, and as she felt the firm muscles of his arm she herself
grew less firm.  He smelt warm and sweet to her like some clean,
well-groomed animal.  He looked at her silently and with a smile of
deep meaning.

"Things to show."

The labours of Messrs. Crofts' men in the kitchen had left behind
them a smell of mortar and brick, dust and stale tobacco, but the
new grate had a polished and genial face, and the glazed sink was
waiting for her hands.

"How's that for height, Mary?"

She had to try it, drooping pale hands over the edge of it while he
stood and looked and loved.

"You don't have to stoop."

"No."

She was glad when he spoke of going down to the Long Meadow.  They
shut Bobbo into the living-room to remain the dog in charge, and
went down through the farmyard into the Doom Paddock.  At the gate
by the wagon-shed he took her full in his arms and kissed her, and
she felt the thrill of her breasts.  "My darling."  A bat circled
overhead, very black and noiseless.  The shaggy old hedges were
webbed with gold.  A cart track led to the lower field gate, and
they walked between the tracks of the wheels, their bodies flank to
flank.  She looked up and she looked down, but he looked only at
her.

"Happy, sweetheart?"

She nodded, but would not speak.

"So am I.  Not a little.  Isn't it good to think that we own all
this?"

Again she nodded, and under the big chestnut by the lower gate he
held her and kissed her with more abandonment.  She half closed her
eyes, feeling herself floating in a soft green twilight under the
dome of the tree.  Cows had been sheltering here during the heat of
the day.  They went on through the gate into the Long Meadow, and
her knees felt weak under her, and she let herself hang more
heavily in the hollow of his arm.  She smelt the hay, and something
yearned in her and was afraid.

"Tired, Mary?"

"Just a little."

"We'll find a seat."

Their feet brushed across the fragrant swathes, and over the pale
stubble.  The dusk seemed to come suddenly, and so still was it in
that solitary green valley that the Rushy stream could be heard
though it slid through the green like brown silk.  The swathes were
turning from grey to black, though the trees on the opposite slope
remained green towards the glow in the north-west.  They went
towards Gore Wood and the oaks, and here--in the narrow angle
between the wood and the stream--Will had been scything.  He had
raked the scythe swathes into a cock under the overhang of an oak
tree.  The grass was fragrant and dry, for the oak leaves above
caught the dew.

"The best crop I have had, Mary.  Someone has brought me luck."

He sat down on the hay-cock, and held her hands.  She felt the draw
of them as she stood, and was both thrilled and dismayed.

"My darling--"

She melted, went limp of a sudden.  He had her on his knees and in
his arms.  He was kissing her mouth and eyes.

"My little wife."

He laid her gently on the hay, and lay beside her and a little
above her, looking down into her face.  The hay was soft, and smelt
sweet.  The sun seemed to linger in it, and her languor was like
the dusk, sinking into secret and shadowy completeness.  He was
bending over her, looking into her eyes.

"Mary--"

For a moment, on that soft June bed, pressed into the tumbled
fragrance of it, she forgot to feel afraid.


2


When she left him at the Six Firs, Mary fled down the Melhurst road
in a panic.  She felt sure that her hair was full of hay, though
she had shaken it, and--dissembling her terror--had made her lover
comb it with his fingers.  Yes, how she had dissembled!  And her
dissembling had saved her, so she thought, when she had realized
that she was ready to go over the edge of things with him if he so
willed it.  Yes, they had both been very near the edge of things.
But suddenly she had struggled up, and had begun to laugh a little
hysterically, and to tease him and throw the dry grass in his face.

"Oh--Arnold--what a couple of children--"

She had recovered herself and her breath; and her heart had begun
to beat fast for a different reason.  Heavens, how near she had
been to disaster, the disaster of giving herself to him
irretrievably!  She had been seized with terror.  "Oh, I must go
home now.  They will be wondering."  And all the way to the
Melhurst road she had trembled at the dark places and the shadowy
retreats under the hedges, and at the possible descent upon her of
a second crisis.

So, when he had kissed her good-night, she ran down the road on the
slim legs of a scared and flying virgin.  Heavens, what an escape!
From herself as well as from him.  The sex storm had both
frightened her and given her a sort of decisive courage that
culminated in her running away.  She felt that she must run and
never stop, or that old horror of a house would swallow her.

Having begun her running she kept it up.  The physical act spilled
over into mental movement.  She sidled along the Cinder Town fences
like any little wench returning after a breathless adventure, and
nearly collided with poor Coode who was leaning over his front gate
and hanging his melancholy on the pegs of the stars.  She let out a
startled "O!" and scuttled past, though she knew that he had
recognized her, and had watched her go out, and had watched for her
return.  Silly fool!  She banged the gate of "Green Shutters," but
it was her only act of positive defiance, and Coode was a poor
provocation.  Yet her thoughts were taking shape as she slipped in
at the back door and up the stairs to her room.  On all sorts of
occasions a woman consults her mirror.  No broken glass, thank God!
She went, downstairs with apparent calmness, and found the old
people sitting up and making a state affair of it.

"You are very late, Mary," said her mother.

"Am I?  I had no watch.  And these long evenings--"

Old Viner looked self-consciously at the toe of a slipper.  Yes,
these summer evenings, with the hay lying out, and the stars
blinking, and your little girl grown big enough for the arms of a
man!  Life had all sorts of sadnesses.  But--then--the man was a
good fellow.

Mary had possessed herself of the daily paper and, curled herself
up in a chair behind it.  She read about the French in Morocco, and
those unclean people the Communists getting something of what they
deserved in Bulgaria; and a girl of ten clubbed to death in a wood
by a young boy.  Nice, progressive, wholesome world it was.  But
for all the interest it had for her the printed sheet might have
been upside down.  It was a screen, and behind it her panic
thoughts were changing their garments, and putting on a sudden and
definite costume, the disguise for escape.  It was not that she had
lost her head.  She felt it more firmly on her shoulders, though it
might be full of an over-excited wilfulness, and a hurry to be
elsewhere.  The plan came to her quite suddenly while she was
glancing at the advertisement columns.

Her people were going to bed.

"Good night, Mary."

She understood the implied suggestion that she too should go to
bed.  Well, she would go to bed when she pleased, and get up when
she pleased.

"Good night.  I am going to read a little."

But she rose and gave her father a little, impulsive kiss, and he
patted her shoulder, having felt the vague compunction of that
kiss.

"Don't forget the lamp, dear," said her mother, who was full of
superfluous promptings.

When they had gone she showed no hesitation.  The whole plan had
crystallized out and deposited itself upon the thread of panic
running through her mood.  Yet the reaction was vital.  She chose,
though she chose with a furious and trembling haste, and a curious
mingling of callousness and compassion.  She put the paper away,
and sat down at the writing-table in the window, and wrote her
letter.  It covered three sheets.  It was a little hysterical; it
accused herself and Furze and everybody; it spluttered explanations;
it justified her running away by insisting on her not being able to
help it.  She said that she was writing to Arnold Furze, but that
she did not wish him to know where she was or what had become of
her.

When all was quiet, she lit a candle, put out the lamp, and took
the letter upstairs with her.  From under her bed she routed out an
old green suit-case, and set about filling it--largely by a process
of exclusion.  She would wear her new frock, and pack the second-
best one.  For the rest she had nothing very new, and her fugitive
body would be able to carry most of the newness.  She was quite
deliberate, and rather pleasantly self-conscious.  She was enjoying
a little piece of sensationalism.  The prospect of a possible
return did not trouble her, for in certain emotional crisis a
coming back may be the last thing a woman thinks of.

She undressed, set her alarum clock for five, and got into bed.  Of
course she did not expect to sleep, but sleep she did, to be roused
by the clock on the chair beside her bed.  The morning's adventure
rushed into her brain with instant clearness, and possessed it.
The great necessity remained, flight from her own enslaving
emotions.  She felt very clear headed, and not a little excited.
She had a pound note, three shillings, and fivepence in pennies.
She dressed.  She completed her packing.  She did not forget her
umbrella.

The letter was left outside the door of her people's bedroom.  No
one saw her flight from Cinder Town, or met her walking to Carslake
station.  She took a field path in spite of the stiles.

The train she caught was the 6.15, and at an hour when Cinder Town
was eating its breakfast she was carrying her suit-case across
Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo.  By half-past ten she was at
Weyfleet.


3


Arnold Furze was up at half-past four.  He came down in his shirt
and breeches to light the stove for an early cup of tea, and he saw
the sunrise through the kitchen window, a great yellow circle
hanging between the gnarled black trunks of two old apple trees.
Another fine day.  He stood and looked at the new sink over which
Mary's hands had drooped, and the lover in him had a seriousness
that did not remember to smile over the fact that a glazed sink
could be a vessel of romance.  Soon, water would gush into it from
new brass taps, hot water and cold water.  There was the new grate
too to be christened.  She should come and try it; there should be
a Viner party, and a baking of cakes.

When he went to the garden door and opened it, everything was wet
with dew.  White mist lay in the valley, and he could smell the
hay, and the smell of it was tangled up in the darkness of a girl's
hair.  But that mist meant fine weather, and a blazing surf, and
the swathes crisped by it and ready for getting in.  It would be a
busy day, but in the cool of the evening his beloved would steal
down to him.

When he had shaved himself, and drunk his tea, and before beginning
the day's work, Furze walked down to the Long Meadow.  Blackbirds,
thrushes, and starlings feeding there were disturbed by him.  A
thin, vapoury mist hung over the oaks of Gore Wood, and the swathes
were sleeping under grey coverlets of dew.  He turned one with his
foot, and saw that it was dry below, and that after a day's sunning
the crop should be ready for carting.  Bobbo, following at his
heels, saw his master go to the end of the meadow where a hay-cock
stood under the overhanging boughs of an oak.  Someone had reclined
there.  Furze picked up a handful of the dry grass and held it to
his nostrils, uttering a man's inward prayer.  "Wife, little wife,
that is to be, sacred housewife and mother of children, may this
good hay harvest be an omen."  And then he took a hay rake that
Will had left against the rails of Gore Wood fence, and combed down
the hay-cock so that the couch marks upon it were effaced.

The sun ascended in his strength, and the smell of the hay rose
like incense.  The swathe turner went to and fro, while Will used a
fork on the grass in the dead lands.  The day grew very hot, and
the shadow of Furze's hat cut a sharper line across the brown of
his face.  His eyes looked very blue that morning.  Eleven came,
and the "greys" were put under the shade of the chestnut, and
Furze, Will, and the boy sat in the shade of a hedge, ruddy and
shining.

"We shall get it in to-night, Will."

"We shall that, sir."

It was the boy who spotted Captain Viner coming down across the
Doom Paddock.

"Someone be wantin' you."

Furze scrambled up and went through the gate to meet Mary's father.
Life glowed so strong in him that it was not apparent to him at
once that old Viner was the wooden soldier, stiff and correct, and
buttoned up in a tight distress.

"Good morning, sir.  Come down to see our hay crop?"

Old Viner looked through the gateway at the hay field, and pulled
his moustache.  It began to dawn upon Mary's lover that her father
was upset about something, and as much upset for Furze's sake as
for his own.  A most awkward predicament.

"Can I have a few words--my dear fellow?"

"Nothing wrong I hope, sir?"

Old Viner glanced at the hedge, faced about, and walked some twenty
paces back towards the house before he spoke to the man beside him.

"Fact is, Furze, my daughter has run away.  Early this morning.
Left a letter."

Furze's eyes looked as blank as the blue sky, and old Viner saw
that there was no cloud in them.

"Run away!--But--why--?  She was down here last evening--and we
were making plans."

Old Viner looked very upset.

"A great blow to us, my dear fellow.  Youth's awkward--very
awkward.  We all seem to have been to blame--if anybody is to
blame--"

"I don't understand, sir," said the lover.

Captain Hesketh fumbled for something in his pocket.

"Better read that, my dear fellow.  Don't be shocked, don't be
shocked.  Young things and young soldiers are prone to panic.  Know
that--don't you?  But I must say--I'm--I'm upset about it--very.
As if you and I had wanted to make her unhappy."

But Furze was reading the letter, his eyes growing strange under
the shadow of his hat.  He read it through to the end, folded it
deliberately, and handed it back to the father.

"My fault," he said.

He stared at the hedge as though he were trying to see through
something, and his whole face seemed to grow lean and dusky.

"My dear fellow--"

"But--I don't understand.  Loneliness--yes.  And a woman's work may
be dull.  All work is dull--unless you have got the spirit in you.
I thought--"

He turned away to master something in himself, and old Viner's
moustache twitched.  He stood very still, helplessly still, paraded
before life's unexpectedness.

"I'm sorry, my dear fellow, more sorry than I can say.  If you can
feel--"

Furze's voice was very deep.

"Poor little girl--Fright,--I know,--like the feeling before zero
hour.  She ought to have told me.  Love makes one rather blind."

He glanced at old Viner, and felt a big man's pity.

"It was good of you to come, sir.  All my fault.  Look here,--I'll
take it quietly.  The thing is not to frighten her any further.
Let her sit quietly on a branch and get her breath back.  It's--
it's just temporary."

He felt for his pipe, but finding that he had left it and his pouch
in his jacket pocket, he went for his jacket where it was lying
under the hedge, with Bobbo guarding it.

"All right, old chap."

His voice was gentle.  He put on his jacket, and filling his pipe,
rejoined old Hesketh who had been recovering his parade face.

"Don't worry, sir.  We'll just keep quiet.  She'll get her courage
back.  I'm not a selfish beast, though I must have seemed so."

"You are a good chap, Arnold.  I--I'd like her to marry you."

Furze held a steady match to the bowl of his pipe.

"Where is she, sir?"

Old Viner looked very humble.

"We don't know."


4


Three days later Furze had his letter.  It came to him without an
address, and with a London postmark on the envelope.  It was the
first time that he had seen her handwriting.

He took the letter into Mrs. Damaris' parlour, and sat in the
window-seat and read it.  The fine weather had gone, and the rain
was coming down upon a green world, and upon the rank growth of
sheep's parsley and pink campion and grasses under the hedges.  A
south-west wind ruffled the trees, and blew a heavy scattering of
drops from them.


"Try not to think hardly of me, Arnold.  I ought to have told you
before.  I'm not fit for the life on a farm.  It would have been
wrong of me to marry you.

I suppose I have had too much of that kind of work.  I loathe it.
I'm pleasure-loving, really, and a town bird.  I like places where
things happen.

You will say that I am being frivolous and selfish.  I cannot help
it.  I am going to get a job of some kind--but not in a house.  I
expect my cousin will come to 'Green Shutters.'  She is forty-
three, and her hobby is cooking.

Try and forgive me--and don't worry.  I'm quite all right and
feeling so much happier now that I have been honest.  And please
don't try and find me.  It will only hurt--you and me."


But that letter hurt him more than she could have guessed.  She had
let him go so far and plan so much, and then had snatched the fruit
away, and broken the picture he had painted of her.  Cinderella!
Yes, Cinderella married a Prince and not a farmer.  And he had
idealized the woman in the house, the sacred presence, the beloved
hands.  Either her love was different from his, or his estimate of
woman was masculine and fallacious.

He sat and watched the wet dusk gather.  He felt very lonely and
sad.  He thought of the home he was preparing for her, the lustre
tea-service, the simple and secret joy of his contrivings, her pale
hands hanging over the edge of the new sink.  Romance--even there,
and it clung.  O, yes, it could not be final.  He would have to
fell those oaks in the winter, and she could not let him fell trees
and not come to him.  This was but a panic mood.  She loved him.
Why, down there in the hay--almost she had been his wife.  Perhaps
he had been too passionate, but this panic would pass, and she
would come back.

Sitting there in the dusk, a man who had learnt to be patient with
things, and who typified the immense constancy of the born tiller
of the soil, he felt that he had to be patient with her.  She would
learn--she would find things out.  Yes, it would be like humouring
a shy and tender crop.



PART II

THE ORCHID HOUSE



XI


1


Clare Biddulph--née Viner--was waiting for her husband.

For a woman who never acted upon impulse she had had no difficulty
in understanding the impulse that had swept her sister out of the
arms of a man and brought her breathless to Weyfleet.

Seven years ago Clare Biddulph had escaped the same hazardous
romance, and come forth from it cool and fresh, like a washed
primrose, to hang upon a green and shady bank where the hot sun of
a too primitive maleness could not wither her.  Seated now at her
writing-table in the bay window of the "Caradoc" drawing-room, she
looked out upon the drive and the garden, a stretch of grass with
formal rose-beds grouped about a bird's bath, and backed by a belt
of flowering shrubs clustering around the trunks of five tall
Scotch firs.  The garden was small, and yet it contrived to convey
an impression of sunlit space and of dignity, like Clare herself
who had demanded dignity and a pleasant smoothness, and had
attained to them by the wise stimulation of an easygoing husband.
A Viner, she had reacted against the cheap scuffle of modern life.
Like the rest of the moderns her god was "A Good Time," but it was
a god with a difference, for she had a nice taste, and a loathing
of cheapness, and nostrils that could express scorn.

She had had a day of it with Mary, an emotional day,--though her
emotions were as well under control as her tongue or her tennis
racquet.  She sympathized because she understood, but depth of
feeling was not her métier.  She had sided with the woman and the
sister against the man and the parents.  Mary was lying down with a
headache.  Clare never had a headache or a heartache.  That golden
head above the white throat and the black dress displayed a pale
and capable fineness.  She suggested white light clad in a midnight
gown.  The room was hers, black, mouse-grey and gold.  Her very
writing-table had a studied vividness.  Made of rosewood it held a
cerise-coloured blotter with a jade-green tassel, two quill pens--
one blue and one black--standing erect in a gold inkstand, a
scarlet lacquer box, an ivory paper-knife with a black handle.  She
wore her hair shingled, and carried her head like an eager and
questioning boy.  Her face had the quality of a face that baffles,
and yet shows an easy mask to men.  Her eyes were greenish grey,
her lips a little thin but of good colour.  She smiled easily, but
there was much behind the smile that listened and watched.  She was
ambitious.  Almost she had a man's delight in accomplishing things,
and in her energy she was more male than her husband.  She set
herself objectives and attained them.  "Caradoc" had been an
objective, this white house with its multitude of gables and little
tricky bits of brown roof, and unnecessary windows in unexpected
places.  It had a Gothic iron lantern over its loggia-porch.
"Caradoc" had spelt accomplishment, and already it was behind her,
and as wrong as that Gothic lantern.  She had turned herself
towards something simpler, more spacious, more Georgian.  One can
change one's house more easily than one can change one's mate, and
it is possible to grow out of both.  Clare had grown beyond Leslie
Biddulph but not away from him.  He had many virtues.  He was an
ass, but a good ass.  He did not know that he was an ass, nor was
his assishness too obvious.  Moreover, he hailed the angel of the
Lord in her wherever she raised the shining sword.  He would fit
quite well into her Georgian house.  For Clare had realized early
that to be conventionally successful a man must not be too clever.
If he can bray heartily and loudly to other asses, and stand upon
platforms, and get up and tell fat after-dinner stories, and utter
platitudes with emphasis,--so much the better.  He is a good
citizen.

But what of Mary the refugee, the possessor of a few odd shillings
in silver, an old suit-case, and a deplorable wardrobe?  "Let me
stay here two or three weeks, and I'll get something to do."
Something to do!  Good lord!  Still, the impulse towards freedom
was admirable.  The simplest solution of the problem would be to
get her married to some convenient man; though the competition in
Weyfleet was furious, being a simple question of supply and demand.
Six marriageable young women to every marriageable male, and the
war generation straining against the shelf towards which the
building generation was thrusting it!  And why marriage?  Yet,
marriage was not so hopeless a career as many of the moderns would
have us believe.  Clare agreed that you should consider the
alternatives.  Granted that your aim was to live and to attain to
as much comfortable and cultivated self expression as was possible,
marriage, with money and no children or not too many children, had
much to recommend it.

She glanced at her wrist-watch.  If Leslie had caught the 4.40, he
should appear in the drive at any moment, his bowler hat well back
on his round and baldish head, and his very blue eyes sighting
dinner.  She would have no trouble with Leslie.  He was an
adjectival man, fresh and florid, and so pleasantly pleased with
himself that he was an easy man about the house.  If you allowed
him to show off, and listened to his throaty tenor voice, and did
not interfere with his sense of personal picturesqueness he was
what is called "a dear."

Clare Biddulph knew her Leslie through and through.  She was aware
of the fact that he just escaped being a philandering ass, but that
there was a little kink of self-consciousness in him that stiffened
his sentimentality.  Hence he was able to call himself a feminist,
and to run after some woman or other like a simple and harmless dog
who came to heel when his real mistress called him.  They were
attached to each other, as attached as most moderns can be.  She
allowed him his tendresse.  A man with a round head and a little
fair moustache and such very shallow blue eyes, and who wore his
hat well back, and had a tenor voice and loved using it, and was a
Plus 1 at golf and wore the most flocculent tweeds, and took the
daily press seriously, and was particular about his ties, could not
be anything but sentimental.  His sentimentality would accept Mary
and her panic mood.  The thing would be to prevent him accepting
Mary and her romance too thoroughly.

The telephone rang, and Clare Biddulph went to answer it.

"Hallo."

"Is that Mrs. Biddulph?"

"Yes."

"O,--this is Mr. Biddulph's office.  Mr. Biddulph told me to ring
you up, madam.  A client has turned up unexpectedly.  Mr. Biddulph
is very sorry, but he could not catch the early train."

"Can you find out what train--"

"The 5.15, madam.  He asked me to say--"

"Why didn't you ring me up before?"

"I am very sorry, madam,--I could not get through.  You know what--"

"Has Mr. Biddulph left the office?"

"Half an hour ago."

"Thanks."

She hung up the receiver, glanced at her watch, and returned to the
writing-table and the window.  Leslie was to have caught the early
train, and after tea and a change they were to have driven up to
the Hills Club to play a practice single.  The 5.15 arrived at
5.50.  Should she take the car out and meet him at the station?

Meditating upon Mary's revolt and its possibilities, she stroked
her firm chin with the feather of the blue quill, and chose to
remain at home.  She decided that it would be better not to treat
the affair too seriously.  Her man could be histrionic.  He liked
to appear as the wonderworking male.  He was quite capable of
launching an indefinite invitation to Mary:  "My dear girl, make
this your home for as long as you like--"  Men can be so generously
vague.  It had taken her three years to curb Leslie's impulsive
asking of unexpected people to unprepared dinners.  "Pot luck, old
chap."  He was rather regal in his hospitalities.  As the angel of
the Lord she had appeared in the path of the prophet and had
confounded him by having cold boiled mutton and steamed potatoes
placed before a very special but unexpected guest.  His face!  "My
dear old girl--surely--you could have rummaged up something--"
But he had sprung no more surprises upon the larder.

She nibbled the end of the quill.

"A month--at the outside.  We can arrange something."


2


Leslie Biddulph stood up and gave his seat to a girl wearing a red
hat.  She had come in with the crowd at Piccadilly Circus, a
little, dark, sallow thing who looked tired.

"Please take my seat."

"O,--thanks so much."

He was a very kind creature and a very vain one, and his wife's
clever hand had taken hold of his kindness and used it for the
controlling of his vanity.  He stood quite close to the girl in the
red hat, his right knee almost touching hers, looking down at her,
and noticing her well-worn attaché case and shabby gloves.  She was
a pretty thing, and inhaling the perfume of her pallor and her
poverty, Biddulph felt protective.  Little dark women with pansy
faces provoked him, especially those like this one who kept her
duskiness hidden under the brim of her hat, fully conscious of the
sentimental male poised there hanging to a strap.  At Waterloo she
made ready to rise, and Biddulph stood back and kept the
enthusiastic thrusters off her toes.  He expected her to give him a
glance; he felt that he deserved it; but she went out with veiled
eyes, and he followed, walking close behind her and admiring her
legs, pretty, slim, feverish legs.  He entered the same lift and
managed to place himself so that he had a view of her profile.
These dusky, pansy faces!  How pleasant to possess a garden full of
them, and to walk out in the cool of the evening, a male god with a
sentimental if polygamous watering-can, while all the pansy faces
were raised gratefully to the dispenser of male dew.  From the lift
Biddulph followed the red hat up the steps and along the passage-
way.  He had to walk fast, for she was one of the feverish crowd,
rushing homewards like a lot of blown leaves, dodging, making
little gusty dashes and circumlocutions.  She was out of breath for
the suburbs,--"To half an hour's bumble-puppy tennis," as he put it
to himself, "or a cheap novel in a little back garden, or a cheap
boy."  Being bald-headed at thirty-three he liked to philosophize
about women.  He supposed that the little thing in the red hat
disliked work as nearly all moderns disliked it, and his feeling
about it was that all pretty women should be lying about in punts
or hammocks or on sofas, pleasantly dependent upon munificent
males.  As for that little tired, dark-eyed thing, she ought to be
comforted with caresses.  Meanwhile he lost her and her hat.  She
had scurried through the gates to catch some suburban train, and
Biddulph, feeling tenderly regretful, went on to a first-class
corner seat in the 5.15 for Weyfleet.

He was filling a pipe when a man named Sark joined him.  "Pale
hands I loved" was running in Biddulph's head, and Sark was neither
pale nor particularly lovable.  He was fifty-five years old, and
fat, and seemed to be in a perpetual perspiration.  His red face
looked as though it had been broadened and flattened by long
pressure against the warm bosom of prosperity.  He wore spats.
Sark did business with Messrs. Thomson and Biddulph.  He was a warm
man, and in some senses a hot one.

Biddulph nodded.

"Evening, Sark."

He did not like Sark, though they travelled together, and played
golf together, and argued.

"Dashed hot to-day."

"It is."

Biddulph opened his evening paper, and Sark eased his trousers over
his fat knees, and after staring rather brutally at a girl who was
passing the window, seemed to sit and possess the vision of her.

"Fixed up for Sunday?"

"I'm playing tennis.  Wife wants some practice."

"She's hot stuff these days."

"She plays a nice game," said the husband.

Two more men entered the carriage, and lit pipes and opened papers,
and sat at their ease while the hurrying thirds pressed forward
strainingly, looking for places.  Sark watched the hustle of the
lesser people and enjoyed it.  He never failed to enjoy it, the
sense of superiority that it gave him, for--after all--when you are
five-and-fifty and own two motor-cars and a house with "grounds,"
it is pleasant to sit in a secure and well-padded corner and watch
the cheap folk getting the knocks.  Sark was honest about it.  He
thought of the crowd of underlings as silly sheep.  He liked to sit
in a first-class carriage or in his big car and see the sheep being
thoroughly uncomfortable.

Biddulph read his paper.  He was not feeling conversational, or
interested in Sark's views on the coal-miners and their spokesmen.
Who was interested in miners provided that your coal was
forthcoming at a reasonable price?  Red hats were much more
piquing, and people who smelt dainty.  At Weyfleet he dashed to
catch one of the station buses.  It dropped him at the end of Oaks
Road, a pleasant and shaded highway, the newness of its houses
softened by the presence of old trees.  Here were Scotch firs,
oaks, limes and acacias.  And hanging over the oak fences lilac and
laburnum, and red thorn, and syringa, and purple buddleia, and
pyrus floribunda.  Oaks Road had a quiet aloofness.  Little common
children were not known in it.  Clare--in her wisdom had said--
"Never live where there are cottages."  The democratic illusion
dies in a garden.

Biddulph passed through the oak gates of "Caradoc."  He talked a
good deal in the train about his roses.  "Must have loam--you
know," and he pronounced it "loom."  "Caradoc" made him feel good,
just as a nice white dress shirt did.  Not so bad for the junior
partner in the firm of Thomson and Biddulph, solicitors!

Then his wife saw him, and a something that was motherly came into
her eyes.  A woman may surrender many illusions, but the feeling of
motherliness to the whimpering pup in man may last her her
lifetime.  She saw Leslie so very clearly, hat well back, round
face buxom and self-pleased, black coat just so, his striped
trousers perfectly creased.  He called her darling a dozen times a
day, when he had lost his socks or his cigarette case was empty.
His blue eyes saw the surface of things and women.  She was quite
sure that some day she would get him into the House of Commons.

"Leslie."

She was playing with the blue quill, and her voice fastened upon
him as he reached the porch.

"Hallo,--darling."

He came to the window.

"Awfully sorry.  A blighter up from Manchester.  Simply had to see
him--"

"Oh, of course.  I got the message."

"I'll rush in and change, darling."

But Clare, balancing the blue quill like a miniature spear, looked
upwards.  The pink room was nearly overhead.

"No hurry.  Come in here."

She had to tell him to close the door; he had a way of leaving
doors and drawers open, though he spoke of himself as a methodical
chap.

"Mary is here."

"Mary!"

He was tapping a cigarette on a silver box.

"Yes,--a little trouble.  The romantic moment arrived, and she ran
away from it."

Leslie looked solemn and a little shocked.  He took romance very
seriously.

"Love affair?"

"Well,--yes,--and a general reaction against Sussex clay.  We have
got to be kind to her, Leslie, for two or three weeks."

"Of course, darling."

He sat down on the back of the sofa.  It was obvious that he wanted
to know exactly what sort of kindness he had to display.  Besides--
his wife's sister was one of the dusky, poignant women.

"Anything serious?"

"A woman's first love affair always seems serious--to her."

"Of course, darling.  But I don't quite see--unless the man is a
blackguard--"

"There is such a thing as being too much in love--with the wrong
person."

Biddulph's voice grew throaty.

"O, that's it,--a married man, one of those polygamous fellows--"

"No,--he's not married."

"Not!  But do I understand--she cares?"

"In a sort of way.  She'll get over it.  We must help her to get
over it."

"Of course,--darling,--rather."

And then, when she had told him just as much as she thought it good
for him to know, and had tinted the picture to her fancy, she chose
to remember the John Bull in him, also that he was a legal light,
and rather punctilious about it.

"As a man of the world,--Leslie,--don't you agree?"

Of course he agreed.  He mounted his chivalrous horse.  That farmer
fellow deserved to be kicked.  Selfish, tyrannical, obsolete fool!
To expect a sensitive modern girl,--and a gentlewoman--mark you--to
bury herself in an old barn of a place, and scrub and cook and mend
and make butter!  Preposterous!  Did the fellow think that a wife
was nothing but a servant?  No,--by Jove!  Sort of case that made
you feel hot--because you knew just where it would end.  The
Divorce Court.  O, yes, as a lawyer, he knew a little.  And the old
people too--they appeared to have encouraged the affair; having
made a slave of poor Mary, they had been for pushing her into
married slavery.  Not that he was saying anything against
"Darling's parents."  Old people were old people.  Let them send
for their Cousin Nellie.  Meanwhile poor little Mary should be
comforted.  And she wanted to work--did she?  Splendid!  O, yes, he
was quite sure that he could find her a job, not too onerous a job.
Yes, but it was their business to give her a good time for a month
or so; she needed a holiday, rest.  And supposing that fellow Furze
should try to follow her up and make trouble?  Leslie the lawyer--
the man of the world--would deal with him; he would enjoy it; he
would open the fellow's eyes.

"You are a dear," said his wife.  "I like a man to be a rock, but a
kind rock."

So, Mary was persuaded down to eat a little dinner.  She was made
to drink two glasses of port, poured out in person by Darling's
husband.  He was consciously tactful, and you could see him
exercising it, riding it with dignity.  Nothing was said about the
Sussex romance.

Mary must have a good time.  They would put her up as a temporary
member at the Hills Club.  Did she play much tennis?  A rabbit!
But he was sure that she was such a nice brown rabbit.  Clare, who
was a regular pro these days, would give her some coaching.  And,
of course, they must go to Wimbledon.  And Henley.  He might manage
a day off for Henley; he would arrange for a punt.

His kindness reduced a young woman, who was still in a very
emotional state,--to tears.  It was a signal triumph; he was quite
moved by it.

"What a dear Leslie is," said one sister to the other.

"Yes, he's a kind old thing.  I'll come and tuck you up,--baby."

"Does Leslie know--everything?"

"Not--quite--everything.  But he approves.  That man was expecting
the impossible from you."


3


Mary had spent a week at Weyfleet three years ago, but that was
before the Biddulphs had climbed as high as "Caradoc."  They had
lived in rather a stuffy little red villa near the river.  A lucky
speculation in real estate, and an alliance with an enterprising
building contractor had given the firm of Thomson and Biddulph
considerable pickings.  "Caradoc" was half-way up.  The Biddulphs
had left the Valley, but they had not quite reached the Hills,
though they played tennis, and golfed and danced there.  Clare had
her eyes on the heights, and she meant her man to scale them.

In order to live upon the Hills it was necessary to possess a
considerable income.  That and that alone was necessary for the
near dweller upon Olympus.  A crude criterion, but capable of much
refinement, and Clare Biddulph was not crude.  That mysterious
community living in spacious seclusion among the pinewoods, and
much beauty of bracken and tall trees and gardens, did not cohere
in the matter of self-consciousness.  Much of it was very self-
conscious, but not quite self-sure.  It was a mixed community; you
met Midas and you met his Master, and it was the Master who
mattered.  That Clare knew.  You had to back your money bluff with
something better if you desired to be the real thing.  There were
other values.  To play games rather superlatively well was one of
the most important.  Smartness counted, that ultra-refinement of
smartness, expensive simplicity.  You must dance well, and play a
good game of bridge, and be able to look other women calmly in the
eyes, and "my dear" them with complete composure.  If you had one
or two little cultured hobbies, and did not advertise them too
flagrantly a little mysterious radiance was added.  It was allowed
that you might know something about mezzotints or lacquer, or
dabble nicely in Theosophy, or be an amateur connoisseur of the
dramatic or collect first editions.  The Hills had their select
few, some really charming and notable people, and Clare had her
eyes upon these.

She was not one of those who pressed blindly upwards clutching a
purse.  She was not prejudiced.  She had never--like many of the
Valley women,--spoken sneeringly of the Hills--because they would
not be able to arrive there.  "Just a lot of Jews, my dear, and
Central Europeans."  Clare knew better.  What that mysterious
community signified was a problem in psychology.  Certainly--it did
not itself know.  Self-analysis is not for the many, nor is self-
realization.  But Clare had vision.

Clare had understanding, and so had Mary Viner.  She was less
clever than her elder sister, but she too knew instinctively all
that the Hills offered to a woman.  It was a porcelain bath, a new
art garden, a jewel case, a perfect motor-car, a ball-room, a
sumptuous little corner full of cushions.  Life was very easy, or
seemed so.  A little pleasant boredom sent you off to Switzerland
or Spain or the Riviera or Dinard.  You were less than twenty miles
from New Bond Street.

She lay in bed and felt both miserable and happy.  She had run away
from her poor lover, and her running away had made her angry with
him.  Clare and her husband had reinforced this anger, insisting
that she had been shamefully proposed to, and threatened with
exploitation.  A common drudge in a farmer's house!  So she too
insisted upon her anger, because she was not quite sure of it, but
she meant to be sure of it.  She would take Clare's advice and
quickly forget those kisses, his possessive but devoted strength,
that fragrant and tumbled hay-cock.  He would find someone else
with a broader and easier lap.  She was too slimly built for that
sort of love.

As Clare had put it--"My dear, woman's most blessed escape is from
the first man she falls in love with.  Leslie was my third."

So Mary let herself be spoilt and persuaded.  No, she could not go
back to Cinder Town, not permanently, and Cousin Nellie could carry
on.  Of course, when she got a job she would help the old people,
send them presents, go down for week-ends.  But she wished the
break to be final, a hiatus that could not be bridged with useless
sentiment.

"I feel that the life would have killed me."

Clare was more of a realist and less emotionally emphatic.

"It would have bored you to skin and bone, my dear, which is worse
than being killed."

Mary wrote her letters.  Furze had read two of them, and her people
read a third.  Meanwhile Cousin Nellie had arrived, the devoted and
predestinated stop-gap, and built for it, being rotund and busy and
cheerful, with a passion for doing things for other people.  She
had little to say about Mary, and that little was kind and to the
point.  "I felt like that myself--once.  These young things!  Now--
I wonder where on earth she put the fish-kettle?  There--must--be a
fish-kettle--somewhere."  She was more sorry for Furze than for
anyone else, for Furze came to "Green Shutters" and looked many
things and said little.  "Well, she has missed a man anyway, if she
has missed him.  Still--we are not all made the same."  Cousin
Nellie was a philosopher.

Yet, at Weyfleet, there was a secret part of Mary Viner that was a
little sad and ashamed.  She was not being selfish; O--no; she was
only seeking self-expression.  None the less there were times when
that old Sussex house haunted her, seeming to project its softened
gloom into the bright and pagan life about her.  It reproached her.
That new kitchen range, and the sink, and the hot water, and the
rose-coloured china!  "Traitress," it called her; "you will let him
sacrifice his trees."

Yes, but better the trees than herself.  Diligently she set herself
to repress awkward memories.  Darling's husband, generous fellow,
had given Clare a cheque for her sister, and Clare knew of a clever
little woman in the place who made you delightful frocks for half
the price you had to pay in town.  Mary hid herself in a thicket of
pretty-pretties.



XII


1


Clare Biddulph had been given tickets for Ranelagh.

She parked her two-seater car on the grass under the elms beside
the drive, and smiled at a large-eyed child of a sister who stood
there between fear and wonder.

"What a lot of cars!"

The world streamed cars, cars of all sizes and colours, and of
every degree of luxuriousness.  A haze of dust hung in the sunlight
between the trees, and while one sister spoke to a one-armed man in
charge of the cars, the other stood in the shadow, a little
shrinkingly, like a woodland spirit brought suddenly to the edge of
a glade in the forest of the Roi Soleil.  Here was a Fete Gallante,
and brown eyes gazing at the beginnings of a world that possessed
those things that the heart of her desired.

Mary was scared.

"It's awfully smart."

Clare had given her sister one of her last year's frocks, a black
marocain dress, and a little cerise-coloured straw hat.  "O, my
dear, how generous of you!" had been Mary's cry, though as
Cinderella she had not probed too carefully for motives.  Clare
herself was wearing painted chiffon, a beautiful, fluttering gauzy
thing, with the texture of a butterfly's wings, a blurr of soft
blues and greens and greys and purples.  Her eyes were serene and
cool under an amber-coloured straw.  Could anything be more
satisfying and fascinating than dress?  To be smart and to look
smart with the perfection of easy simplicity.  Mary fluttered a
little and was shy.  Really, Clare was wonderful, and Clare had the
pleasant sense of being felt to be wonderful, and generous, and
wise, a complete woman of the world.

"That's the club-house.  We'll have tea--presently--on the lawn."

Her voice was casual.  She dawdled.  A well-dressed woman should
never hurry, or be caught in a moment of breathlessness, physical
or spiritual.  The thing was to trail coolly in the sunlight, or
under the shadows of the trees, while other women gave you those
little significant glances which you noticed and yet did not appear
to notice.  A perfectly dressed sang-froid could approach very near
to the holy of holies.  Moreover, it was of much more importance to
impress women--the real critics with eyes that could pull you to
pieces.  "Shaftesbury Avenue, or Leicester Square, or St. Paul's
Churchyard, my dear!"  No, that must not be whispered.  The men
were far less important.  They just thought a woman looked nice.
Not one man in a hundred could discern details.

Mary was crude.  She looked about her too much, like a young person
at a fête.  She was a little scared, and inclined to exclaim and
ask questions.

"They have a golf-course!"

"Yes."

"And tennis-courts."

"Of course."

"What are all those coloured things over there--where the horses
are?"

Those liquid brown of her eyes suggested a melting short-
sightedness.  Almost she was pointing a finger across the polo
ground.  Her colour came and went quickly.

"Turbans," said her sister, "Indians, grooms, syces.  An Indian
team is playing."

"They look like great red flowers."

Clare's voice was casual.

"The thing is to get a seat in the shade.  Which side shall it be?
Polo--or the pony show--and the four-in-hands and the ladies'
hacks?"

"I want to see everything."

Clare smiled.  Would this eager breathlessness appeal to some man?
The male was supposed to be more vulnerable when innocence, the
Arcadian nymph, shot her virginal and haphazard arrows.  Men were
so obvious and yet so unexpected.

Casually she appropriated a chair under one of the chestnut trees
close to the white kiosk where the orchestra sat.

"Going to be a big crowd."

Mary took another chair like a child seizing a cake.  Yes, it was a
crowd, such a crowd as she had never seen.  The dresses!  These
painted chiffons, and muslin and laces, floating, softly brilliant,
beautiful with a beauty that made her afraid.  She was happy,--and
she wanted to weep.  She adored beauty.  She thrilled to a
beautiful frock, a hat, the pattern of a sunshade.  She felt like a
thirsty child in a garden full of fruit.  It was wonderful and
exquisite and frightening and tantalizing.  All these colours!  And
the men in the red jerseys with the red bands round their straw
hats!  And the other men in top hats, grey and black, and bowler
hats, and soft hats.  The orchestra was playing a fox-trot.  She
dreamed and gazed, and drummed with her fingers on the back of a
chair.

"Everybody must be very rich."

"You are as rich as you look, my dear."

For a while Mary was voiceless.  She palpitated like a bird.  She
gazed at people, other women, and now and again a man glanced at
her.  What a world--what an exquisite world!  She thrilled between
the polo and the horse and pony show.  She kept jumping up and
going from one side to the other, flying like an eager shuttle
through the web of sunlight and shadow.  Clare, cool and serene,
moved very little, and when she did move it was to be looked at.

It was Mary's first game of polo and she watched it like an excited
child.  The verve and the virility of it set the feminine part of
her stirring.  These brown, lean men on the little galloping
ponies!  How they rode!  Surely, someone would be hurt!  And when
they came galloping to the boards after the white ball she felt
that she was in the face of a cavalry charge and flinched a little,
but with the delight of the woman in the hot and the helter-skelter
courage of the men.  She thought only for a moment of that other
brown man cutting hay in Sussex, and she put the thought aside with
a quick qualm of pity.  He seemed poor and obscure beside these
galloping cavaliers, a fustian figure.

She asked questions.

"Why do they keep riding off the field?"--"Aren't they clever with
their mallets."  "Why are the ones in blue and white knocking it
the other way now?"

Clare had to muffle up these crudities.  Mary had yet to learn her
lesson, to keep her mouth shut unless she was sure of bringing out
the right word when she opened it.  Mallets--indeed!  Her
sisterliness sat poised between amusement and the urgent need of
hinting.  But when someone stood up and opened a sunshade, and Mary
was for climbing on her chair, Clare gave a tweak to the black
frock.

It restored Mary to self-consciousness; it brought her childishness
tumbling like a winged bird.  From that moment she was the woman,
painfully so, but in a way that was good for her own soul.  Caution
came to her, and the eye that looks slily round; her face became
expressionless, and a little moody; she remembered the other women;
she became aware of a frock.  Everybody--or nearly everybody--was
wearing colours, and she blushed suddenly for her blackness.  But
what an ungrateful blush!  She looked anxiously around for other
figures in black, and was a little consoled when three smart French
girls passed by in the colours of night.  She scrutinized them
interestedly, their frocks, their hats, the white creaminess of
their skins.  She realized that she was too rustic and too ruddy.

Clare's voice drawled.

"What about tea?  I hate rushes.  We may as well make sure of a
table in the shade."

They went, and on the way Mary surprised her.

"Thanks--for pulling me off that chair."

"My dear--"

"No, I'm not narky.  I needed it."

They strolled across the lawn and possessed themselves of a table
under the shade of an acacia.  A red-coated waiter brought them
tea.  The crowd grew thick about them as other people sought the
shade, and Clare became aware of a change in her sister.  Mary was
controlling her glances and her movements, cloaking too provincial
a curiosity, powdering out the flush of her self-consciousness.
Clare's soul gave a little, approving nod.  Mary was quick; she had
the understanding that could keep quiet, and muffle the too obvious
ticking of her cheap clockwork.  Good girl!  The woman who can
smooth out her face and hold her tongue can conjure up possibilities.

"Enjoying it--Baby?  That frock suits you."

"It is lovely here."

She spoke as though she had tasted some new and exquisite fruit,
and its luscious mellowness was all to her liking.  Only a week ago
she had been gnawing a crab-apple sort of life in Cinder Town.
Good heavens, had Arnold really made love to her by offering her a
kitchen range and a new sink?  She smiled at her sister.

"I like this.  So complete and well done, isn't it?"

"Pretty fair."

"Not my world, of course--but I shall hope to get glimpses of it--
even though I may be working in an office."

"O,--things happen," said her sister.

The drive home was a silent one.  Clare had the sun in her eyes,
and she did not like talking when she was driving a car.  "Too many
fools on the road, you know."  She drove very well, better than
Leslie did, but then she did most things well.  Mary lay back and
was full of the afternoon's significance.  She had no doubt at all
but that this was the sort of world to which she wished to belong,
for even if you did not quite belong to it you could share much
that it enjoyed.  She allowed herself to dream.  The dream might be
absurd, but then all dreams are supposed to be absurd, and even a
pretty girl with three half-pence in her pocket and wearing her
sister's cast-off clothes can venture beyond realities.

In a narrow road beyond Esher they had to pass a wagon loaded with
hay and the smell of it was a sudden shock to her.  What a complex
structure was the human heart!  You had cupboards in it, and rooms,
which you had to shut up.  That Sussex hay-field, and the moon and
the dew, and a man's arms, and his kisses, and the weight of his
love upon her bosom!  She struggled to free herself from the
memories, as she had freed herself from his passion, urging herself
towards resentment, because she was able to tell herself that Furze
would have dragged her down to a cheap struggle with poverty.  She
did not want to be poor, and if she had to be poor she would prefer
to be poor by herself.  Moreover, he was just a common farmer, with
no mystery about him, powerless to give her the things she desired.
He would have looked clumsy on one of those polo ponies.

Her warmer self reacted.  Poor Arnold!  How beastly of her to feel
ashamed of him.  She humiliated herself for a little while, and
tried to escape from her heart's accusations by assuring herself
that she had been kind in being cruel.  Yes,--even to her parents.
They would be far happier with Cousin Nellie.  And yet she was one
of those creatures who like to be propped by someone else's
opinion, and to be reassured by sympathy.

"You don't think me too horribly selfish, Clare?"

Her sister did not take her eyes off the road.

"For wanting to be yourself?"

"Yes.  I expect they are saying terrible things about me--down
there."

"Let them.  Better to have terrible things said--than to be
terribly bored.  Words break no bones.  The thing is--in these days--
to keep your eyes on the road."

"You have such pluck.  You always had.  Do you remember fighting
that horrid boy on Hastings beach--because he threw sand at me?"

Clare smiled.

"I do.  How old was I then?  Ten.  Don't be too soft-hearted, Baby.
We have added a duty to all those other duties to one's parents and
neighbours and the Deity--duty to oneself.  And it comes first, my
dear.  Charity begins at home."

She looked kindly at Mary as she turned the car into the Oaks Road.

"If we listened to all that the previous generation said of us!
But we don't.  That's youth."


2


Bobbo the dog had been run over by a lorry on the Melhurst road.
It had been a hopeless case from the first, in spite of the
veterinary surgeon from Carslake, and Furze's gentle and devoted
hands.

"Better shoot the poor beast."

"I can't do it, man."

The vet. looked pityingly at both dog and man.

"I know.  Like shooting your best friend.  But if--you like--"

"Chloroform--or something."

"A shot is quicker--and as kind.  If you'll send your man in--"

Furze went into Mrs. Damans' parlour and shut the door, and sat
down on the sofa.  With his elbows on his knees, and his hands over
his ears, he waited, hearing what he did not wish to hear, the low
voices and the movements of the two men, and a whimper from the
dog.  He set his teeth, while his heart was the heart of a little
wailing boy.  He heard them go out; they were carrying the dog
between them on an old rug, and presently from somewhere he heard
the dull report of the gun.

He stood up, quivering, conscious of a sudden and deep anger, a
voiceless rage against fate.  His dog!  Such a kind-eyed, trustful,
wise creature.  Just an inert and bloody mass--now.  He hoped that
Kelly had not shot him in the head.  But did it matter--if Bobbo's
suffering was over?  And yet his anger spread.  It enlarged itself
like the red glare of a fire seen through a fog, and until it
included in its glow half the field of his consciousness.  Love had
let him down a second time.  Meanwhile, Will Blossom had got poor
Bobbo into a sack so that Furze should not see the dog's dead body,
for Will as a man had a man's understanding of certain things.
Kelly the vet. had mounted his horse and ridden off.

Will came to the door.

"Kelly be gone."

Furze stood up.

"I've put he in a sack by t' gate."

"Thanks, Will.  You are a good chap."

So, Furze went out and buried his dog, digging a grave in the grass
under Mrs. Damaris' window.  And when Bobbo was laid in his brown
hole, the anger went out of his master, and pity entered in,
compassion for all dumb, and unfortunate and gentle things.  It
spread to the woman who had given him kisses and then run away from
him.  Poor little Mary.  Timid, quick-breathing, brown-eyed thing.
Marriage had frightened her, and all that marriage implied.  The
strangeness of it.  And children.  Yes, perhaps some women dreaded
that ordeal, the sickness, and the pangs, and the vague terrors.
He had not thought of that before.

His face cleared, and his eyes grew gentle.  He went to call the
cows in from the field at milking time, and as he sat with his head
pressed against a warm flank, and watched the white milk purring
into the pail, his compassion deepened.  These cows of his were
gentle beasts, and life should be gentle, and full of the
wholesomeness of good milk.  Things seemed so simple when you had
understanding, the understanding that a deep love gives; it was the
greeds and the prides and the restlessnesses that turned life sour.
Why were people restless?  Because they were not happy with simple
things, and wanted elaboration, and ceased to want it when they had
got it, and started wanting something else.  Hard work kept a man
straight, the work that entailed the care of live plants and
creatures, and taught him sympathy for them, and convinced him of
man's elemental duties.  Having a good time!  Man was not on the
earth to have a good time.  "By the sweat of thy brow--"

Great men those old Hebrews.  When man--and woman with him--ceased
to labour they cease to live.

In the cool of the evening he went down to Cinder Town, taking a
basket of eggs with him.  At "Green Shutters" he found old Hesketh
pottering in his garden, tying bast round his sweet-pea sticks.
Poor Coode, with a curly and melancholy pipe pendant from his
mouth, was hanging over the fence.  He slipped away when he saw
Furze.

"Brought you a few eggs, sir."

"Thanks, my dear fellow."

Old Hesketh looked tired.  Youth had departed, the young bird had
flown, and though he had recognized the inevitableness of it more
readily than his wife had done, something had gone out of life.  He
was at the end of the last lap.  He looked gentler; the lovable
awkwardness of his long legs and body suggested a new feebleness.
The old people had taken it very well; they had naturalized the
adventure.  O, yes, Mary had gone to her sister's to take a post in
London.  Very natural and proper; young women had to work these
days; his pension would be reduced to a minute allowance to his
wife when he died.  He had very little to leave.  Mary had looked
ahead.  Young women had to think of the future.

Furze did not tell old Viner about Bobbo.  He was the sort of man
who kept his troubles to himself.

And how was Mary?  Had they heard again?

Yes, Mary was with her sister.  Her brother-in-law was looking out
for a post for her.  A secretaryship, something of that sort.
After all, you could not blame the girl.

"I blame myself," said Furze gravely; "I frightened her."

Old Hesketh unravelled a length of bast.

"Oh,--I should not say that, my dear fellow.  We have to live and
learn--you know.  Let her try another sort of work--"

"To my mind--work is the only thing that matters, especially when
there is someone else--"

"Ah, just so.  Women find that out--I expect.  You'll come in and
have some supper with us.  Miss Farren has made a gooseberry tart.
And there is the cream you sent us this morning.  Very good of you,
my dear fellow."

Furze stayed to supper, for in that little house the scent of a
girl's hair seemed to linger.


3


It was three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon, and a day of heat
and of pleasant languor, and Mary, standing in front of the long
mirror in the white wardrobe, saw herself as June.  White muslin
with a patterning of blurred rose upon it, a present from Uncle
Leslie.  He had claimed an avuncular interest in her, and now he
was out there in his flannels, sitting in the car, and squeezing
the bulb of the horn.

"I say--you two--it's three o'clock.  I fixed up with the Ryders
for three."

Mary went to the window and looked down at him lounging in the car.

"So sorry, Uncle Leslie.  I'm ready now."

"O, you are--are you."

The upward glance of his appreciative blue eyes assured her that
she was a pretty thing, and that she looked charming in that white-
brimmed straw with its black ribbon and gold medallion.  Leslie had
views upon hats.  He disapproved of the "cloche," and said that a
woman's eye and forehead should be shaded.  "Bit of mystery--you
know.  Who wants to look at a Spartan wench in a hard thing like a
helmet?"

They were going to the Hills Club for tennis, Mary in the dickey,
Clare beside her husband, and the car ascended towards those
fortunate regions.  To one of the three it was a sun-chariot.  She
had come fresh from a scented bath into her muslins, and she felt
exquisitely cool, and the smell of the bath-salts lingered.
Blessed symbolism, a perfumed bath!  And she could smell the pines,
and had glimpses of big houses and gardens, and spreading lawns and
roses, and herbaceous borders threading strands of colour.  The car
turned in at the white gate and glided along the avenue to the
clubhouse.  On the left stretched the courts, and they seemed to
Mary to be innumerable with the high stop netting on green
standards, and their yellow posts, and upon them happy figures, men
in flannels, young girls--short skirted and short sleeved and white
armed in the sunlight.  High woods of beech and pine threw a
protecting greenness about the place, and all those sleek lawns
ended in soft shadows.

Biddulph drove to the broad space in front of the clubhouse and
turned the car there.  He need not have driven so far, but the pomp
and the joy of life prompted him to it.  The high terrace in front
of the neo-Georgian house was crowded with people, girls and women
in Dryad chairs, or sitting upon red cushions laid on the coping of
the terrace wall.  Scores of eyes looked down at them.  And
Biddulph turned the car at his leisure, smiling at friends, knowing
that he had two pretty women to show off, his women, and that he
himself was a good-looking chap and a successful one, and no rabbit
at games.

Clare understood the manoeuvre, and approved.  That was why she and
her man ran so well together in double harness, for they liked high-
stepping and showed each other off, but Mary had less right to be
confident.  Her eyelids drooped under the gaze of all those other
eyes; she felt perched up--and too prominent.

"Where are you going to park?"

"Under one of the trees, Darling."

He turned the car to the left of the club-house where a grove of
trees threw a pleasant shade, and a little lake lay cool and
placid.  There were other cars here, and Biddulph had to insinuate
the two-seater into the shade.  He struck a patch of sunlight.

"I'll have to back a bit."

Behind him rose a warning hoot, and Mary's voice quickly anxious.

"A car behind us."

Biddulph put in the hand-brake and looked round, smiled, raised a
hand.

"Sorry, Fream.  Didn't know you were there.  I'll crawl up a bit
farther."

Mary had exchanged glances with the solitary man in the other car.
She thought that it was the biggest car that she had ever seen, a
blue monster, the colour of a blackbird's egg, and all a-glitter.
Its immense balloon tyres looked as big as bolsters.  The man in it
had a very pale face, and wore rimless pince-nez.  He sat there
with a stiff passivity and in complete silence.

Biddulph was helping her out of the dickey, and keeping her muslin
frock away from the grease-caps on the back springs.  He smiled
over it--and enjoyed it.

Clare had drifted back to the blue car and was talking to the man
in it, and her eyes looked round at Mary.  "We have my sister with
us.  She's a nice child, but rather shy.  Mary--"

The man in the blue car raised his grey hat.



XIII


1


"Mr. Fream--my sister--Miss Viner."

The man in the car did not smile, but he gave her a sort of stiff
movement of the body, nor did Mary then know that he was incapable
of smiling.  His age was an uncertain quantity; he might have been
an old thirty or a young fifty.

She was looking into a large, firm and expressionless face.  It was
very flat and white, and the pale blue eyes seemed to flatten
themselves behind his glasses.  He was clean-shaven, his hair very
black and lustreless, and growing too far down the nape of his
neck.  When he got out of the car she realized his height.  It
seemed to exaggerate the narrowness of his shoulders.  He held
himself stiff as a poker.

Yet he had a certain presence, an imposing stiffness, a negative
dignity that owed its quality to the fact that it was perfectly
expressionless.  Everything about him suggested wealth; he was
admirably tailored; and yet he lacked something.  And he seemed to
know that he lacked it, and wore steel corsets to hide the secret
from the world.

"Delighted," was all he said.

Biddulph bobbed beside him like a white yacht in the neighbourhood
of a lighthouse.

"We are supposed to be playing Tom Ryder and his wife at three."

"Are you?"

Fream looked supremely uninterested, but his length attached itself
to the Biddulph party.  He walked as though he were on stilts.  He
was not in flannels, but wore a grey tweed suit, black socks and
shoes, a soft white collar and a black knitted tie.  He looked at
neither of the women, and yet his expressionless rigidity was not
exactly indifference.

Clare suggested that he should come and watch their match with the
Ryders.  There would be just a trace of healthy venom in the game.
The Ryders fancied themselves in a mixed double, and Clare had made
up her mind to beat them.

Fream expressed no opinion, nor did he show any desire to watch the
game or to avoid watching it.  He was never heard to express a
definite opinion on any subject, or to betray an inclination or a
liking or a prejudice.  He stood on his long legs, with that
perfectly expressionless and pallid face of his looking down on the
lesser people with the impartiality of a full moon.  He would
listen and not utter a word.  He cast a chill over the cheery soul
like Biddulph who was a Sun in Taurus.  His enemies--and he had not
a few and mostly envious males, called him the "Whited Sepulchre."
But he went along with the Biddulph party to No. 3 Court where the
Ryders were waiting, and stood with a pallid silence in the midst
of the clatter, his arms pressed to his sides, his right hand
grasping his left wrist.

Hence, when the Biddulphs and the Ryders went on to No. 3 Court,
Mary was left beside Mr. Fream to share his uncomfortable silence,
for his silence did make her feel uncomfortable.  She wondered why?
Or was it wholly due to her own shyness?  They were standing, and
she stole a look at him.  "I should like to sit down," she thought,
and her thought seemed to penetrate, for he went off and fetched
her a chair.  He came back, holding it very stiffly, almost as
though he was competing in an egg-and-spoon race.

"Won't you sit?"

She sat.  She had coloured up and thanked him, and had caught a
vague something in his eyes that she had not been able to
interpret.  He stood beside and slightly behind her, and the
silence continued.  They watched the game as it was played by four
people who had some right to consider themselves to be experts.
Mrs. Ryder was a lean little woman with a yellow face who popped
her tongue out whenever she hit a hard drive.  Her husband was an
irritable and busy player, all red where his wife was yellow.  The
Biddulphs were much more pleasant to look at: Clare gracefully
intent, and clean in all her movements: Leslie smiling like the
perfect sportsman.

The silence continued.  Mary had a feeling that unless she broke it
she would lose her self-respect.

"Don't you play this game?"

His reply arrived after a moment of deliberation.

"Not often.  Do you?"

"O, very badly.  I am not very good at games--not like my sister."

After that--he went and fetched another chair, and placed it within
a yard of hers, and for fully a minute neither of them uttered a
word.  Mary caught her sister glancing at them as she came up to
the net before Leslie's service, and the glance had a quality of
interest and of slight surprise.  The silence continued, and she
continued to be piqued by it.  Either he was completely bored or
wholly indifferent.  Or was it that he did not consider it to be
good form to talk when four people were playing a grim and friendly
game?  He sat perfectly still, following the ball with his eyes.

"Good style--your sister."

He fixed the remark at her suddenly, but without looking at her,
and when he had fired that one shot he withdrew to reload.

"Clare does things so well."

He nodded very slightly.

"Four--two to them, and thirty love.  Want them to win, don't you?"

His aside was almost intimate, though it appeared to cause him
trouble with his collar.  He tugged at it as though he found it too
tight.

"I'm afraid I do."

She was smiling, and he was the receiver of the smile.  For quite a
minute he sat beside her with the air of a man who had made a
discovery and was pondering it and turning it over in his mind.
Once or twice he looked intently at her profile.  She was watching
the game, and the softness of that smile seemed to linger.  He
brought out a cigarette case.  It contained three different kinds
of cigarette, and he chose a cork-tipped Virginia.  His face
expressed effort, an inarticulate striving against a queer form of
self-paralysis.

"Been here before?"

Again an abrupt question, but she had begun to feel that the
abruptness was not intentional.  She was provoked to curiosity.  He
did not seem to her to be an ordinary sort of man, and she had
begun to wonder about him.

"No--not here.  It is a lovely place."

"Staying long?"

"Three or four weeks."

"Come from the country?"

The question annoyed her slightly.  Why should he assume her to be
a rustic?

"Unfortunately--yes."

Again he sat in silence as though he were doing figures in his
head.

"You don't like the country?"

"Not being buried."

"No."

"The joy of life.  That's it."

His way of uttering those last words made her jump like a fish at a
strange and compelling fly.  What a strange twist in his voice, a
mocking flick, something of a sneer!  Yes, and more than that--a
twinge of pain.  Was he mocking at her little confession, her
eagerness to enjoy things?

"Why shouldn't one?"

Her colour had quickened, and her mouth and eyes were poignant.

"Why not?  Of course--why not?" he said.

Almost he had a startled look.  He dropped the half-smoked
cigarette and placed his heel upon it.

"Quite natural--what!  Suppose people feel like that.  Hallo,--they
have won the first set."

And then his voicelessness seemed to grow more profound.  He sat
without a movement through the whole of the second set, a veritable
William the Silent, the strong and silent man--if a girl chose to
think of him in that sort of way.  Strong and silent and laconic,
with more understanding behind those glasses than the world knew
of?  She felt that she was getting her picture of him, and the
picture was a little mysterious.  She wanted to hear about him,
what he was and what he did.

The Biddulphs won the second set, but just before victory declared
itself Fream rose on his long legs.

"Tell them I'm going to get a table for tea.  You and your sister
and Biddulph.  Not those--others.  My tea--you know."

He went striding away towards the club-house with that queer,
constrained, mechanical walk of his.


2


"O, Clare; Mr. Fream wants us to have tea with him.  He has gone to
get a table."

Clare gave her younger sister a look that was surprised and intent
and calculating.

"Wants us to have tea with him.  O, very well."

Clare had a funny look.  She went across to her husband who had
left his sweater, scarf and jacket on a green seat on the other
side of the court.  The Ryders, a little heated, and on the edge of
a squabble, were disappearing towards the club-house.  The husband
had been criticizing the wife's lobs--"You don't get down to 'em
properly; you play 'em with too stiff an arm.  Biddulph was killing
'em."  There were lengthy arguments between the Ryders whenever
they lost a match.

"Old thing."

"Yes, darling."

"Fream has asked Mary to ask us to tea."

She smiled suggestively at her husband.  She saw his blue eyes grow
more round in his hot and shiny face.

"By Jove!  Not really--"

"He has gone off to get a table."

"By Jove!" said Biddulph again, and pulled his sweater over his
head, and emerged looking more ruffled and astonished.

"Bit dramatic--what!  I say--old thing--"

"Well?"

"He's a funny devil--you know.  I suppose it's--"

His wife's serenity waited upon him.

"Well?"

"Oh,--I don't know--funny--awful boiled shirt.  Must have brains--
though!  Pots of money; made it himself."

"I think he is rather--interesting."

Her husband stared.

"Interesting!  Good lord!  Well--I suppose women look at things
differently.  You don't mean to say that you think he has developed
a sudden pash?"

Her glance said:  "Don't be so crude, my child," but she smiled,
chin up, head slightly on one side.  A wise woman allows for man to
rediscover the things that she has discovered for him.

"Hardly.  See what you think."

"See!" said her husband.  "Why--you never see anything on Fream's
face.  It's as flat as a wall.  Personally I don't believe there is
anything to see."

"I wonder," said his wife.

They had tea on the terrace.  Mr. Percival Fream had secured a
table for four in a shady corner under one of the red-brick arches,
a much-coveted corner.  The steward had pocketed a ten-shilling
note and prepared a polite lie for the other people who should have
had the table.  Fream's eyes had a bright and glassy look, and his
long body seemed slightly less rigid.  Would Mrs. Biddulph pour out
for them?  Good.  He drew back Mary's chair for her, and finding
himself both seated and voiceless, he began pushing dishes jerkily
at his guests.  There was only one sort of jam, and the lack of any
other sort of jam stimulated him into breaking silence.  He called
up their waitress.  "This yellow stuff.  Do you never have anything
else?"--"Sorry, sir, we have nothing but apricot."  Fream
apologized for the "club," and his apology was wafted towards Mary.
He said that the next time they had tea with him he would bring his
own jam, real jam, and in six different varieties.  It was a joke,
or the Biddulphs accepted it as a joke.  His guests laughed.
Laughter eased things a little.  It was Leslie who said:  "Like
you--I prefer my stuff red, old chap."  His wife suppressed an
inclination to raise her eyebrows.  Her husband had called Mr.
Fream "old chap."  After all, the world was very human, like her
Leslie.

Meanwhile Cinderella had nothing to complain of.  Posed on this
spacious terrace, and wearing a smart frock, she looked at the
world of the Hills, and found it good.  Here was the atmosphere
that she dreamed of, green lawns and pleasant woods, a stage for
people who led pleasant lives.  She appreciated the quiet
sumptuousness of the scene--yes, she revelled in it.  The butter
was spread on fairy bread.  She looked at all those cars parked
along the avenue, at the well-dressed women and the girls in their
simple tennis frocks, at the men who looked as though they had
parts to play in the great adventure.  There was money here and
taste and ease and no soiling of hands, and no paltry contrivings.
Moreover, to the two men at her table she was obviously a pretty
thing, though she suspected that a man of Fream's largeness asked
for more than prettiness.

At the point where Fream was offering them cigarettes Biddulph
lapsed like the unseeing male that he was.

"We'll have a knock up, Mary; make up a four."

But she did not want to play, and Clare understood her sister's
disinclination, but closing the lid on Leslie was at times like
suppressing an amiable jack-in-the-box.

"It's so hot, and I'm afraid I'm lazy."

"O, nonsense."

"But I would much rather watch."

"We can't allow it, my dear."

Clare blew a little cloud of smoke at her husband.

"You are too energetic.  Like Mary--I am going to sit out and
watch.  Get up a man's four."

The suggestion germinated.  If you cannot persuade a pretty girl to
play with you, you can show off your own play before her in a
virile game with three other men who are just nicely your
inferiors.  Biddulph was what is called "a pretty player."  He was
watched by Mary--but with less interest than he deserved, for when
the imperceptible fruits of a potential conquest are lying in a
woman's lap she must be allowed to consider their bloom and their
ripeness.  Fream was sitting beside her.  Clare had drifted away,
ostensibly to fix up a four for the afternoon on Sunday.

"Never was much good at games."

Mary understood that he wanted to talk, and perhaps to talk about
himself.

"Nor am I."

Glancing at him she had an impression of strained solemnity.

"Keener on my job, you know.  Always was."

"Well,--I suppose a man ought to be."

"More results.  Though--mind you--I like my own sort of play--"

"Of course.  It need not be hitting a ball--need it?"

She was watching the game for the moment, and he looked at her
intently as a man might look at a financial page in his morning
paper, or at a rare print, or a horse, or at the shadows under a
beech tree.  His glance seemed to grope.  It was both shrewd and
perplexed and troubled.  It suggested that he was out of his
element, as much so as a coalheaver posed in front of the Mona
Lisa.  He mistrusted himself in this particular situation.

"Glad you feel like that."

She coloured very slightly, and he went on, jerking out the words
with a kind of spasmodic abruptness.

"You do?"

"Yes."

"Most women--these days--think a man--silly ass--unless he can hit
a ball or something.  Hit it well--you know.  Got to be able to
follow up your service--and volley.  Think more about that than
their business.  Prefer something more solid--personally."

"I think you are right," she said.

And there this advance towards a possible intimacy halted for the
day, and Mary returned to "Caradoc" in the Biddulph car and was
somewhat silent during the Biddulph dinner.  Later, alone for
twenty minutes with her sister in a corner of the drawing-room, she
regarded the sunset with eyes that asked questions.

"What does Mr. Fream do?"

Clare had expected some such question.

"Financial expert--runs companies--and all that."

Finance was Einstein to Mary save in its personal significances.

"He seems very keen on his work."

"Well, he is pretty good at it.  I suppose he is the richest thing
in Weyfleet.  Married before.  Divorced his wife.  They did not get
on."

Mary's eyes were sympathetic.

"Rather sad.--Men are such lonely creatures."

"And difficult--sometimes," said her sister, with a feeling that
she had a duty to Mary.

"Oh,--I suppose so."

But her tone was cheerful; she was looking at a richly coloured
sky.  To a woman the "difficulty" of a man who is inclined to
admire her may not seem so very insuperable.


3


"Hill House" was the only old building in the Hills, and Percival
Fream lived in it.

Built somewhere about the end of the eighteenth century, its grey
façade looked across a terrace towards a piece of parkland that
still held the barbarians at a distance.  The house had long
windows, a balustraded parapet, and an Ionic portico jutting out
with unconvincing shallowness over its big central doorway.  There
were those who compared the rather expressionless flatness of the
house to its owner's face, but like Fream it had a grey "presence,"
a constrained dignity.  In old Weyfleet it had been spoken of
always as the "House," just as its owner was referred to as Mr.
Fream, or perhaps as Mr. Percival Fream.  No one ever "Percied"
him.  An irreverent person had referred to him on a pantomimic
occasion as "Pallid, pontifical Percy," but affectionate
diminutives were not thrown in his face.  He was Mr. Fream of Hill
House.  "Sir Percival--some day--my dear," was a prophecy thrown
out by Clare Biddulph, and a hint that somebody might yet be Lady
Fream.

Fream drove his car up the drive and brought it to rest outside the
portico.  A chauffeur was waiting.  He opened the door, and his
master got out.  The man took Fream's place at the wheel, closed
the door gently, and turned the car on the gravel.  Nothing was
said.  A like muteness met Fream in the hall.  Jessup, his man,
standing there like a lay figure which uttered no sound unless a
string was pulled, took Fream's hat and gloves and sank away into
the prevailing silence.

This silence was the most noticeable of the house's qualities.  It
seemed to fall like a curtain when Fream had passed between the
pillars of the portico, a voiceless silence, suggesting--not peace,
but rather--an unhappy dumbness.  As a rule Fream did not notice
the silence, for it was a part of himself, but on this June evening
he seemed to question the inarticulate muteness of the house.  He
paused in the hall, looking about him somewhat aimlessly, as though
he had mislaid his self and had suddenly remembered its existence.
A little tremor passed over his face.  He took off his glasses and
polished them with the corner of a blue silk handkerchief.  He
looked a lonely figure in the great dark space of the hall.  It was
panelled in oak, and the portico darkened its two long windows,
turning the brown of the walls and of the parquet floor to a
subdued blackness.  It was full of furniture, beautiful pieces,
armoirs, Jacobean cupboards, cabinets on legs, clocks, tables.
They were possessions.  They had been bought at high prices by a
man who had tried to understand them, and had not been able to get
nearer to them than the appreciation of what they had cost him.
Furniture can be misunderstood as well as misplaced.  These pieces
of oak seemed to share in the house's silence.  They stood there
mute and dark and shadowed.

Fream replaced his glasses.  It had occurred to him before that the
hall needed more light, and on this evening there was a part of him
that resented the darkness.  "That damned portico!"  It had an
imposing appearance, and in Fream's world imposing appearances were
of supreme importance.  But what if appearances kept out too much
light?

He opened a door and entered the library.  Yes, this was a cheerful
room, and he stood by one of the western windows with the Turkey
carpet spreading its blues and reds behind him.  He stroked his
right eyebrow with the tip of his right forefinger, a trick of his
when he had a problem to solve or a decision to consider.  Yes, he
could have the lead roof of the portico replaced with glass.  The
alteration would lessen much of the darkness.  Light was good, and
so were other lightnesses.  By George, what a pretty neck
Biddulph's sister-in-law had, that little triangle of soft white
skin above the collar of her dress, with the curves of neck and
shoulders bounding it!  And above it the soft black wreath of her
bobbed hair.  Yet, how absurd that those inches of white skin
should be so disturbing!  And yet that was but a part of her that
had disturbed him.  His interests had lived celibate for years, and
now of a sudden he had found himself conscious of the provocations
of this pretty creature.  It was as though his thoughts had fallen
to the rush of male feelings after years of concentration upon
other figures.  Yes--a figure, curves, swelling softnesses, arms,
the glint of light in brown eyes, the arch of an eyebrow, the
shadow of a hat.

He remembered that he had felt very bored when driving down to the
Hills Club.  His financial world was very dull for the moment.  He
sat on a window-sill, with his back to the open window, and lit a
cigarette.  This room was full of possessions, packed with them
like a spoilt child's nursery, books, thousands of books which he
had never read and would never read.  A wireless cabinet--a
sumptuous affair--stood in one corner, and a three-hundred-guinea
pianola occupied the space between the windows.  A gramophone stood
open with a record on the wheel, and he crossed the room and
pressed the lever, and stood listening to a sentimental waltz.  He
had tried that record after lunch, and had thought it a poor thing,
but now the effect was different.

He took rather a long time dressing for dinner.  Jessup had laid
out the clothes in the little blue and white dressing-room.  His
master was always buying clothes; there were two dozen or so coats
hanging on the hangers in the patent wardrobe; three different
trouser presses saw to it that the creases were as they should be.
Jessup calculated that Mr. Fream's shirts must be legion.  Boxes
were always arriving from Melody's in New Bond Street, boxes full
of silk pyjamas, ties, socks, collars, shirts, and Jessup had his
pickings.  Three differently coloured dressing-gowns hung on the
pegs fastened to the white door.

Yet Fream put on a ready-made black tie, for the fact was that he
could not complete a hand-made bow with any niceness, and he would
not confess to the failing to Jessup.  A ready-made tie saved time.
That was his justification.  He tucked a white silk handkerchief up
his sleeve and went down to dinner.  The walls of the staircase
were lined with prints that would have kept a collector dawdling on
the stairs for twenty minutes.  Fream knew the names of them, and
on the back of each print was scribbled the price that he had paid
for it--but he had had them framed in polished oak.  And very
rarely did he look at them, save with a vague and empty glance that
included them among his possessions.

He sat down at one end of the Georgian mahogany table.  It was some
four yards long, and the polished surface of it stretched away from
him like one of those formal water-tanks that the garden artists
impose upon their patrons.  A little gathering of silver and
Sheffield plate and glass kept Fream company at the extreme end of
the table.  A silver rose-bowl full of red and white roses occupied
the centre.  Jessup stood behind his master's chair, between it and
the Sheraton sideboard.  The walls of the room were panelled, and
painted white, with the mouldings powder blue.  A Romney, two
Kuyps, a Reynolds, and two flower-pieces by Baptiste hung on them.
The carpet was Chinese; the chairs Sheraton.  A china cabinet full
of Chelsea and Worcester ware stood between the two long windows.
Through the windows Fream could see the evening sunlight upon the
old trees in the park.

Jessup, mute and efficient, dealt with plates and dishes and
decanters.  It struck him that his master had a better appetite
than usual.

"Roses smell nice, Jessup."

"Very nice, sir."

That roses should emit a perfume was not a surprising phenomenon,
but that Mr. Fream should make a remark upon their perfume caused
Jessup to experience mild surprise.


4


In the library Fream unlocked his cigar cabinet and chose a cigar.
He lit it, walked to the window, and stood looking at the formal
garden and the park.  A dancing faun,--joyously exultant upon a
pedestal,--faced the setting sun.  The foliage of the trees had a
tinge of gold.

How much or how little he saw had no part in his decision, for to
some men all that is possessed is nothing, and that which is not
possessed but desired is the one thing that appears desirable.  He
sat down at his big desk, took a sheet of paper from a drawer, and
remained motionless for a while with the hand that held the pen
resting on the paper.

Presently he wrote:


DEAR MRS. BIDDULPH,--If you are not booked for anything will you
and your husband and Miss Viner dine with me to-morrow night at
eight?  I expect you will be playing tennis late, so tell your
husband not to change.  No formalities.  Or he can bring his things
in the car and change here if he wishes to.

Sincerely yours,

PERCIVAL FREAM.


He considered the letter before placing it in an envelope and
ringing the bell attached to his desk.

"O, Jessup, get Barter to take this letter down to Mrs. Biddulph's
at 'Caradoc' in Oaks Road, and to wait for an answer."

"Yes, sir."

"By the way--dinner may be for four to-morrow.  It must be the best
that Mrs. Cox can do.  Tell her so."

"Yes, sir."

The letter went by Fream's chauffeur, and in half an hour he was
back with the answer.

"Delighted--"



XIV


1


Three tiers of stone steps led up to the portico of Hill House, and
as Mary climbed them her knees felt smooth under the skirt of her
black frock.  Delicious sense of smoothness!  She stood at gaze a
moment, forgetful of the other two, looking back and down over the
park with its old trees spaced upon the evening grass.  The
slanting sunlight touched everything and smoothed it, and even the
shadows looked sleek and gracious, like soft eyes--meditative and
gentle.

Fream met them in the hall, appearing in a doorway like an
automaton that had been set in motion by the sound of their voices.
Jessup stood to take wraps and coats.  There was a moment's
chatter.

"Good of you to come--"

"Well, we wanted to--"

"I took you at your word, Fream--about changing."

"Quite right."

The brown gloom of the hall was flecked with gold.  Its cool
loftiness seemed to offer a spacious entry to Mary Viner's dreams.
She stood looking about her, absorbing the quick impressions of
coolness and largeness and of silence, with the sunlit park lying
behind her, and all the discreet mystery of the house yet to be
discovered.

Fream was speaking to her.

"I hope you will like my house."

She looked up quickly into his face.

"It's lovely, so cool and restful."

She was given a little, abrupt nod, and a fleeting gleam of his
glasses.  His self-consciousness, exaggerated by the occasion,
stood up stiffly, while the man in him tried to unbend.  Yet, from
that very moment she knew that she was the live flame, and the
others mere accompanying shadows, and that the very silence of the
house and its owner was spread out at her feet like a Raleigh's
cloak.  She was conscious of a tremor of excitement.  She felt
enlarged, smoothed out, raised to a new dignity.  Her self-
confidence caught the rebound of her quickened vitality.  She felt
at ease, able to talk securely, and to fit herself into this
comfortable corner.  Without realizing it she had become more vivid
to herself and to others; a sudden bloom came to her; her
femininity exhaled a richer perfume.

Biddulph was talking.  He always made a cheerful, social noise.

"I say--your oak--Fream.  Priceless--what!  My wife will be wanting
to burgle the place--"

"That cupboard--I must stroke it."

They drifted pleasantly into the drawing-room.  The others might
chatter, but Mary floated, and the man of silence moved long legged
beside her.  He seemed to hover like an awkward bird, but to her he
was supremely interesting, surrounded by the aura of his material
significance.  She liked his stiffness and his silence; she thought
that there was something Spanish and pale and intense about him; he
was her reaction, the stately couch, the black velvet curtain--
after that hay-cock and the smell of fustian.  Her inclination was
ready to acclaim the grandee, the man of exciting reservations and
of power.  She was a woman, and for a woman he could smooth things
out.

Jessup was there with a tray of cocktails, some amber-coloured
stuff in little tapering glasses.  She took her glass and her
drink; the stuff went blandly down the velvet of her throat; she
sat on a brocaded sofa.  Impressions came to her quickly, of the
long white room with its cerise-coloured carpet, and its air of
lightness and of space, and of the gilded but sunny extravagance of
its old French furniture.  She had an impression of richness, of
Clare poised on an amber-seated fauteuil, of Leslie radiantly
absorbing cocktail, of Fream standing stiffly with a glass in a
wooden hand and looking down at her with round, glazed eyes.

She was conscious of a triumphant tingling of her senses.  His
glance dropped slightly.  It investigated, and was captured.

"I say--Fream, this is a jolly good drink.  Would it be rude to
ask--?"

Fream came out of a set stare, and from a consideration of his
preference for curves in contrast to the prevailing modern
flatness.  He could see no charm in an angular chunk of a woman.

"Don't know--I'm sure.  Jessup makes them.  He's rather good at
it."

"Dinner is served, sir."

Her impressions continued.  The Hill House dining-room conquered
her with its air of distinction.  Her soul felt as smooth as the
polished table.  What silver and glass!  And the food!  Exquisite
sensations!  And he did not give them champagne; champagne was so
obvious.  She put her lips to a very beautiful and soft red wine,
and wondered what the sauce with the fish was made of.  They were
using only a third of the table.  She sat on Fream's left, with the
Biddulphs opposite her, and Leslie's face shone like a cherub's.
"Scrumptious" it said--"scrumptious.  And why not?"  And she agreed
with Leslie's face, and admired her sister's deliberate and calm
feeding.  You could not get Clare to betray the greedy child that
lives in every healthy person.  Fream said very little.  His queer,
expressionless, but polite stare came to her very often, and
lingered, and managed to suggest a live smile.

Roast duck and new peas!  She purred.  The wine warmed her.
Through the window she could see the dancing faun exulting on his
pedestal.  It seemed to her that Fream grew more Spanish and
mysterious and pale and restrainedly intense.  She rather liked his
pallor; it had ceased to be chalk and had become marble, Parian
marble.

Biddulph made social noises.  He told a funny tale or two.  They
laughed.  Mary laughed.  She had the impression of the pale man
inhaling her laughter and drinking it in.  O, yes, she enjoyed
things; it was very obvious that her senses could draw quick
breaths and flush and struggle and quiver.  She would know how to
spend money, and to enjoy it; he felt her youth like a tremor down
his straight, stiff spine.

Fream's little party was proving a success.  Two bottles of
exquisite red wine between the four of them, port,--and then
liqueurs.  A great mellowness descended; they were pleased with
each other.  Delightful people--all of them.

Fream and Biddulph, lingering for five minutes over coffee and
cigars, felt warm and brotherly.  Even Fream's pallor had
decreased; the ice had thawed; in handing Biddulph the cigar box he
had laid a large white hand on Leslie's shoulder.

"Charming girl your sister-in-law."

"Rather.  And as good as she is charming, old chap."

The two women heard laughter as the men came across the hall to the
drawing-room, and the laughter was Leslie's.  Really--Fream had
quite a nice, dry wit.

"Oh--I say--you two, don't be shocked--but Fream--"

He was interrupted by Fream asking permission for their cigars to
be kept alight, and though his first and proper glance was given to
Clare, it was the second glance that mattered.  He stood looking
down at Mary on the brocaded sofa.

"Sure you don't mind?"

"I like it."

Biddulph, momentarily interrupted, gushed forth again.

"Don't be shocked.  I'm going to see it.  Fream has been telling
me--"

Clare's eyes were on her husband.  He had dined just a little too
well.

"What,--old thing?"

"Fream has a new bath, a super-bath--I say, let's all go--"

Fream, very erect, and properly presiding over the dignity of the
occasion, kept a hand--so to speak--on the handle of Leslie's
humour.

"An idea of my own.--All marble--you know.  Of course--"

Clare laughed.  The best way to deal with a delicate problem may be
to laugh at it.

"Why not?  I'd love to see it--"

So, the four of them, on that first social and historic occasion,
went upstairs to be shown Mr. Percival Fream's new bathroom.  He
had taken a room, and had it marbled, and the bath, a marble
cistern, lay sunk in the raised floor.  Every sort of device had
been installed for providing every sort of spray and douche.  The
curtains were of old rose, and the shades over the lamps of the
same colour.  Fream switched on the lights, and the whiteness of
the room became tinted like the petal of a wild rose.

"Perfect," said Biddulph's wife.

"You like it."

"It's the poshest thing I've ever seen, old chap.  Like a picture
by one of those Classic fellows, Alma Tadema or Leighton.  You
only want--"

But Fream's sudden hand switched off the lights, dimming the
unconventional friendliness of the adventure.  Clare's voice
trailed itself across a silence that needed linking up.  She
slipped an arm under Mary's.

"Yes, quite charming."

She was annoyed with Leslie.  A bathroom might be a thing of
beauty, but why blunder in and suggest the nude, especially
feminine nudity?  The broad staircase was descended with gravity,
Fream bringing up the rear.  He was examining the ash on his cigar.

"Suppose we try the library.  Excuse me--"

His stiffness retrieved the dignity of a situation that had been
shaken by the cheery Sun in Taurus.  Would they care for any music?
He could switch on the wireless, or start the gramophone, or give
them the latest thing on the pianola?  Had Miss Viner ever tried a
pianola?  No?  Well,--why not now?  It was supremely easy.  He
would show her.

And so Mary and her grandee sat solemnly on the cushioned bench
that was like an organist's seat, and produced music together, and
Clare watched over her husband, and pointed the toe of an
admonishing shoe at him.


2


The first stars, looking in through the kitchen window at
"Doomsday," hung as silver points in the criss-cross of the
casements, and fraternised with the flame of a shaded candle.  A
small fire reddened the bars of the new range.  In the centre of
the brick floor a big galvanised bath stood in a circle of wetness.

Furze had stepped out of it.  He was towelling himself, standing
very erect with hollowed loins, his skin showing very white save
where the work of the day exposed it to the sun.  His forearms,
neck, head, and the V of the chest where his shirt would lie
unbuttoned were brown as scorched grass.

A pair of pyjamas lay on one kitchen chair; his clothes on another.
He had had a hard day, though all days were hard, and as he flicked
the towel over the back of a chair and reached for his sleeping-
suit his face came nearer to the light of the candle.  It was the
face of a man who was tired both in spirit and body, and to whom
sleep would mean a little period of forgetfulness, a short truce
between himself and nature.  He had slipped on the jacket, and had
the trousers in his hand when some sound breaking in on him out of
the night's silence caused him to pause.  He knew every sound that
could come to him from the little world lying about his house, more
especially such rare sounds as the night gave, the wind in the
chimney, a branch tapping a window, a horse pulling grass close to
a hedge or wall, the squeakings and screams and twitterings of the
creatures of the night.  A farmer has to be familiar with such
sounds; he must be able to detect a note of pain in a beast's
lowings, or restlessness in the stable.  And Furze listened.  The
silence was profound, but his countryman's ear detected something
that was disturbing.  He had heard a sound of crackling as of the
brittle sticks of an old faggot being broken, and now there was
another sound, very faint but familiar.

He slipped out of the jacket, and put on breeches, shirt and shoes.
Bobbo would have given tongue long ago; the new dog--Jim--was young
and not much use as yet.  "No peace for the wicked--and for
farmers," was his thought, but he went patiently out into the
darkness by the back door leading into the vegetable garden.  He
stood very still,--listening.

Heavy breathing--and the sounds of big beasts feeding!  Yes, there
was no doubt about it, and a little flame of anger was lit in his
brain.  A thistle-spud was leaning against the wall.  His hand
touched and grasped it.  He went softly past the well-house, and in
the tangle of the garden's gloom he could make out the vague bulk
of two or three cows.  They must have broken through two hedges and
got in among his young winter greens.

"It's Doll," he thought; "what's come to the beast?  The quietest
of the lot."

He went forward, conscious of a fierce restraint.  He wanted to be
angry; his tired brain and body rebelled against this last wanton
labour, but a man has to keep his temper with the beasts of the
field.  He called softly to the cows--"Come then--coop-coop.--Doll,
come then you mischievous girls."  But the beasts were guilty and
scared; they blundered away from him, trampling, and breathing
heavily.  He shut his mouth hard.  He knew that he would have a
devil of a job getting them out of the garden, and that if he lost
his temper the game would be more serious.  He searched for and
found the gap in the broken hedge.  The beasts must have come
through from the "Gore," breaking the hedge on that side of the
lane.  There was a gate at the corner near the pond.  He went and
opened it.  He fetched and lit a lantern.  He began the game of
shepherding the animals out from among the garden crops and bushes.

It was an exasperating amusement.  He persuaded two of them out
into the lane, but the last of the three led him a devil's dance.
He got her cornered at last.  He worked her down the hedge to the
open gate, and there she frisked and tried to cut away.  He lost
his temper, dashed to cut her off, and struck her with the spud.

"Damn you."

After that he had to chase a mad creature and two tricksy followers
up the lane.  He was afraid that they would get out into the
Melhurst road, but he managed to slip past them and to turn them
back.  Luckily for him one of the three broke back through the gap
in the hedge into the "Gore," but he had to go and hunt out a
hurdle and a beetle and set the hurdle up in the broken hedge.

He was sweating.  He stripped again in the kitchen, rubbed himself
down, put on his pyjamas, and taking the candle, went up to his
room.  He felt angry and discouraged.  He was sorry that he had
struck Doll, for roughness with beasts was against nature and his
traditions, and yet there was a part of him that was not sorry.  A
man must let out sometimes when he is over-tired or pushed beyond
the limits of his patience.

But things had gone so wrong lately, ever since love had failed
him, and Bobbo had died.  There was no reason for this wrongness;
it seemed to be just the cussedness of circumstances, and yet he
was used to the eternal cussedness of the things that man strives
to control.  To men who live on and by the soil it is the most
familiar of experiences, and as old as Job.  Cursing God did not
help one.  Nothing helped but patience and knowledge, and the
doggedness of footsteps treading the same purposeful road.
Character?  O,--yes, plenty of character was needed on a farm, and
he blew out the light and lay down in his bed.  But there was no
relaxation of his body.  He felt all strung up and restless, and
now that his muscles had ceased to contract, his thoughts took on a
troublesome activity.  All the worries and the disharmonies of the
day, and of many previous days, came and stood about his bed.
Confound them!  He felt most damnable wide-awake.  Why was it?  He
had had wagonloads of worries in the past five years, but always he
had felt himself the driver of the cart, and able to tip it when he
pleased.  Nothing had ever kept him from sleeping,--but now he was
not sleeping so well.  There were thorns in the bed, lonelinesses,
yearnings.

Passion denied,--tenderness balked?  O, no doubt, for he would lie
and think of her, and try to be patient.  After fluttering her
wings she would come back.  His dear bedmate and fellow-worker,
breathing quietly beside him after moments of fulfilled desire.
The quiet breathing of a mate, the soft touch of her limbs, the
comforting warmth of her!  All this would give him courage and
constancy; in touching her body he would be like Antaeus touching
the earth.  Patience,--loyalty!  But why was it he cared so
profoundly, as he had never cared before?  What was there about
her--?

He lay and looked at the stars, and her vision paled a little.  He
had not seen her for a month, and there were times when her face
would grow unaccountably dim,--as though she were ceasing to exist,
had never existed.  That dear face!  And there were times when she
was so vivid to him that he would clench his hands and shut his
eyes as though to hold and confine the vision of her.  Her hair was
just of that blackness.  And that wavy, poignant mouth, with its
wreathing upper lip, and her quick colour, and the way her eyes
filled with a broken light of splintered brown and gold!  O,--
beloved!

But other things vexed him that night.  Damn it,--why didn't it
rain?  He wanted rain.  His roots needed it,--his grass.  He had
been hoeing the Sea Field all day to make a mulch for his mangels.
And Will had a poisoned hand.  And that damned new dog of his had
killed two chickens.  And he was worried about Betty.

Yes, Betty's case was the most worrying thing he had.  One quarter
of her udder had become hard.  There had been thick curds.  He had
tried massage.

Mamitis was a serious affair, especially the infective form.  He
would have Kelly the vet. over.

But, meanwhile, he wanted to go to sleep, and couldn't.  The
breaking of those three cows into the garden had left him on an
edge of painful wakefulness.


3


Furze was up at half-past four.  He made himself some tea, cleared
away the bath from the kitchen and went out to see what damage had
been done in the garden.

The dawn lay like a grey sheet upon the earth, with a pearling of
dew, and a silvering of the grass and the hedgerows.  Not a leaf
stirred.  The freshness of the dawn had the tang of a first kiss,
some of its shyness, its chilly tremors.  The earth smelt sweet.
There would be a fog at sea, and heat to follow, and as he stood in
the greyness, wishing that he could change the dew to rain, he
heard the dolorous complaining of a ship's siren far away like the
crying of some great beast in pain.

But the beauty and the secret stealth of that morning seemed to
slip a soft hand into his.  Was it true that men who lived by the
soil had no eyes for beauty, and skins so tanned and furrowed that
they were insensitive to the breath of it?  He felt soothed, more
ready to take the day's work calmly, for there is a calmness of the
land, the steady rhythm of the inevitable.  He found that no great
damage had been done in the garden, less than, in the darkness, he
had feared, and he brought up another hurdle from the yard and
closed the gap.  He felt that he had his peace to make with his
beasts, for the peace of the morning was upon him.  In the "Gore"
some of the cows were nosing the dew-wet grass, but Doll--the arch
offender of the previous night, was lying under an old thorn.
Furze went up to her.

"Well,--Doll, old lady?"

He saw a mark on one of her red-brown flanks where the edge of the
thistle-spud had cut the hide.  He was sorry.

"I ought not to have done that, Doll."

The cow looked at him with liquid eyes.  She lay quite still, and
allowed him to rub her poll, for Furze and his beasts trusted each
other.

"Well,--that's that, old girl.  Animals forgive.  Or is it that
they don't remember?"

Afterwards he went up to the Sea Field and stood there looking down
at the haze in the valley and at the misty woods, and the haste
died out of his soul.  Why fret?  Worry kills no weeds nor brings
moisture to plants' root-hairs.  His young mangels were standing up
sturdily, their leaves all grey with dew.

"The sweat of a man's brow is his dew," he thought.

He turned and looked towards Cinder Town, and his faith in the
future seemed to return.  His love felt tranquillized.  Surely she
would return?  Had he not sealed their love with his kisses, kisses
that she had given back to him with ardour.  That panic mood of
hers would pass.  He could picture himself being very gentle with
her--"There,--there, my beloved.  I'm strong enough for both of
us."

As for the house and the work, O--well--he could get help for her.
They could go into one of the sea-coast towns once a week.  What
was wrong with the rhythm of a country life?  Nothing that he could
see, provided that you had the unspoilt ear for it.  Was not work
inevitable?  Did everyone want to play these days, and to keep
their coats on, and their collars dry?  He must have faith in her.
She would come to understand that a woman has work to do, and that
no shirking of it will bring her ultimate satisfaction.  In fact he
was a little blinded by his own natural sweat; he could not
understand a healthy girl either disliking work or shirking it.
After all--Mary was not a child.

Out at sea the ship's siren wailed, but Furze was looking into the
dewy eyes of the morning.  He saw in them and in his fields and in
his coming labours the eyes and the face and the tremblings of his
beloved.



XV


1


Exit June!

Though June had died in a blaze of heat more than three weeks ago,
and if the rain was still denied to the thirsty soil, news was more
drenching and plentiful.  Old Hesketh, most upright of men, had to
shelter under his umbrella.  Mary had written to say that she was
engaged to be married to a Mr. Percival Fream of Hill House,
Weyfleet, and that the marriage was fixed for the end of September.
Mr. Fream wished to see her parents.  He proposed to drive her down
in the car for the week-end; he could put up at "The George" at
Carslake, and no doubt someone in Cinder Town would lend the bride-
to-be a bedroom.

Old Hesketh was shocked.  He had the military mind, and when men
were ordered to form fours they did it and remained in that
formation until another order was given them.  But women--!  He sat
over the breakfast table, and discussed Mary's letter with his
wife.

"Nothing about Arnold, my dear, not a word."

Mrs. Charlotte understood the reactionary impulses of human nature
much better than did her man.

"After all--there was nothing settled."

"Nothing settled!"

He looked so upset about it that his wife had to go round the table
and kiss him.  He was such an old Newcome.  White was white and
black was black, and a love affair was a love affair.

"My dear, doesn't she say that she is very happy?"

She took the letter from him, and skimmed it over a second time,
holding it in both hands.

"She says--'Percival is so kind and generous.'"

Hesketh filled a pipe with perturbed fingers.

"The other man was that.  So far as he was able.  Sounds very much
like shirking, my dear.  I wonder if she has written to
'Doomsday.'"

Mrs. Charlotte smiled gently.

"Why should she?  She had told Arnold quite frankly."

"Just six weeks or so ago.  He did not regard it as final."

"But this is, Hesketh."

Her husband fumbled with his matches.

"He'll feel it.  He ought to be told.  I shall go and see him.  He
is a good fellow.  This other chap, his name--?"

"Percival--"

"Percival!  H'm--"

"Mr. Percival Fream of Hill House.  He appears to be very well
off."

Old Hesketh struck a match with a sound that was like a "Damn him."

An unpleasant prospect, but old Viner was a Victorian, still
believing that a back should be stiffened against unpleasant
duties.  He had an old soldier's sense of rectitude; Gordon had
been one of his heroes; there had been an occasion when he had got
up and walked out of a theatre with a tall hat held severely
against his chest.  He advanced upon a duty as he would have
advanced upon a hostile battery, very stiff in the back, convinced
that to shirk a crisis was the unforgivable sin.  He put on his old
Panama hat, and took his ash stick from the umbrella stand, and
marched off down the cinder road, leaving two women behind him.
Cousin Nelly had to be told, and she had something to say on the
matter.  She--too--was sorry for Furze.

Thus--her father set out at the very moment when Mary was curled up
on a sofa at "Caradoc," with Leslie Biddulph's copy of The Times to
keep her company.  "London Fashions."  A very excellent article it
was.  It thrilled her.  "Coral, lavender, fawn, and ashes of roses
tissues and chiffon make light cloaks.  Many wraps are bordered
with summer fur, the favourite being fox dyed beige or pink, or
with chiffon.--Neck openings are lower than they were.--Some of the
simple dance frocks of bright flower coloured chiffons have a wide
flat applique girdle of roses or petals.--There are a few black
dresses relieved in various ways--black chiffon and flesh chiffon,
black net and steel lace--"

Captain Hesketh found nobody about the house.  It was to be
supposed that Furze was up the fields, but carrying his sense of
duty with them into the farmyard the captain found Blossom's boy
holding a saddle-horse.

"Mr. Furze at home?"

"In t'cow-lodge."

Old Viner paused in the doorway of the cow-house.  The smell of the
byres rose in the summer heat, and flies were ready to make you a
living halo.  After the glare of the yard the interior of the cow-
house had a pleasant gloom, with the clean straw the colour of
amber below the blue of the roof shadows.  Little shafts of
sunlight speared in between the sun-shrunken weather-boarding, and
painted blurs of light upon the walls, and upon the mangers and the
straw.  There were only two cows in the house, roped to the rings.
Furze and Will Blossom were standing by the cows, while a third
man, Kelly the vet. examined the udders.

"Mamitis--all right.  Afraid so."

Furze was in the shadow, and it seemed to old Viner that there was
a streak of gloom across his face.

"I wonder how she got infected?"

Kelly glanced up over a shoulder at Will's bandaged hand.

"Does he do any of the milking?"

"No.  But wait a bit--"

"I did it for you--last Sunday week, ssir."

"So you did, Will.  But your hand wasn't bad then."

"No, ssir."

"Anyway," said the vet. straightening his back, "here it is.
Infective form too--I'm afraid.  Just these two cows?"

"So far."

"If you can manage it--keep 'em away from the others.  Milk 'em
last.  Be careful about disinfecting your hands afterwards.  Treat
their milk with a disinfectant, and get rid of it where it won't
spread infection."

"Right.  What can I do for the udders?"

"Oh,--inject chinosol twice a day, night and morning.  And keep an
eye on the rest."

The three men turned.  Their feet and legs were in a pool of
sunlight, their bodies in the shadow.  They saw Captain Hesketh
standing there, prodding the straw with his stick.  He looked at
Furze, and in the shadowiness of the cow-house Furze's eyes seemed
sunk in the brown of his face.

"Good morning.  Trouble--I'm afraid?"

"Yes, trouble," said the farmer.

It was there for him in the cool gloom of the cow-house, nor was he
conscious of that other trouble in old Viner's eyes.  Sufficient
unto the moment was the evil thereof.  His face had a dark
thoughtfulness.  He came out into the sunlight, and looked back at
the straw.

"I'll be free in a minute, sir.--Had we better clean all this, Mr.
Kelly, and burn it?"

"Might be as well.  Anywhere where I can wash my hands?"

"I'll take you in."

He smiled round at Captain Viner, but the smile was a tired one.

"Go in, sir, won't you?  Or have a look at the garden.  It's rather
burnt up--I'm afraid.  I haven't much time."

Old Viner, pottering off on those long legs of his into Mrs.
Damaris' sunk garden, felt himself going into action at an
unpropitious moment.  He was sorry for Furze, more sorry than he
had expected to be.  The lad's cows were sick.  Yes, life was like
that; troubles came to you tied up in a bunch.  But there was a
wrongness about the situation.  Assuredly so.  If Mary had cared--
Yes, a warm-hearted girl ought to care--And marrying this other
fellow, a Percival--!  Old Viner, discovering a young thistle
spearing up in one of the beds, attacked it with the point of his
stick.

"Sorry to keep you, sir."

Furze had come down into the garden where the plantains were the
only green things in the dried-up grass.  The flowers of June were
over, spread for a lover's occasion, and now gone to seed.  Old
Viner, feeling that if you had to fire bad news at a man it was
best done quickly, left the uprooted thistle to wilt on the caked
soil.

"We have had a letter from my daughter, my dear fellow."

"Mary is coming back?"

"No.  She writes to say that she is going to be married.  I thought
you ought to be told.  I'm sorry about it."


2


Captain Hesketh returned to "Green Shutters" looking hot and
unhappy.  Questioned by his wife as to how Furze had taken the
news, he had air of a man with nothing to communicate.

"But what did Arnold say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing at all?"

"He asked who the man was.  Took the shot standing, my dear.  I'm
sorry about it."

"So am I," said his wife; "poor Arnold.  But Mary is not made for
that life.  I think it is better as it is."

Old Viner betrayed a sudden and unusual peevishness.

"O,--no doubt.  But there are different ways of doing things, my
dear."

Furze had said nothing,--for there was nothing to be said by a man
who had spent five silent years in recovering a derelict farm.  Old
Viner had gone off rather hurriedly.  He had pressed Furze's brown
hand with his thin fingers.  "I'm sorry, my dear fellow.  Hasn't
happened as I wished it.  Hope it won't make any difference between
us--personally."  And feeling a curious numbness within him Furze
had taken a hoe and gone up to the Sea Field where the mangels
stood out in green tufts against the baked and cloddy soil.  He
wanted to be alone, completely and utterly alone, to face the
sudden realization of a new loneliness.

He hoed a row, working mechanically, a solitary figure under a
cloudless sky, but the work irked him.  The soil seemed to have
lost its virtue; it was dusty and caked and lifeless; and presently
he paused, and leaning on his hoe, looked out over the landscape.
The woods were a heavy green.  He could see a strip of hazy grey
sea in the distance.  The parched fields seemed to crackle in the
sunlight, and the yellowing meadows looked sore and starved.  Five
years of sweat--and then--this!

But what of it?  Was he going to whimper because a girl had gone
elsewhere for her kisses, and because his kisses were like those
fields, poor and distressed?  O, damn sentiment, and damn the
balked years in him.  What was it--after all?  He had seen a boar
refused by the sow turn and lash at the pig-bound palings.  Was he
to behave like that?

The hands clasped on the top of the hoe's handle supported his jaw.

Wounded, he did not turn to melancholy.  "Doomsday" had wrung his
strength, but he had laboured and endured.  It was his life.

And that poor, sensuous, pretty creature, running away from life
and the sweat of it, hoping to wrap her body up in soft tissues!
Well,--well!  Never to smell of sweat; to be perfumed and cool and
nicely draped.  Some fellow with money, some city merchant--?

But he cared.  The smart in him was savage, and he went on with his
hoeing, jabbing at the caked soil, feeling the sun hot on his neck
and back.  The pain was fierce, and his labour was like the pain.
Damn these clods!  Why didn't it rain?

There was sweat in his eyes, or was it something else?  He paused
savagely, and looked up at the cool shade under the great green
cliffs of Beech Ho.  Shade,--ease, no sweating in the sun.

But--by God--that was the bitterness of it.  She had not only
humiliated him; she had humiliated his job.  She had taken his
life's work and thrown it back at him like some green, pulpy, rank-
smelling cabbage.  She had put her pretty feet upon the few little
flowers he had tried to grow for her.  She had let him spend that
money.  And next winter those oaks in Gore Wood would have to fall.

"Mary," he thought, "you might have left me my pride."


3


Mr. Percival Fream brought his royal blue monster of a car to rest
outside the gate of "Green Shutters."  Beside him in a little
cherry-coloured hat and a biscuit-coloured coat Mary smiled, for
smiles were necessary.

"Here we are.  The white gate."

She was sorry to have to feel ashamed of Cinder Town, both sorry
and glad, for provided that her grandee was not too much ashamed of
it, her own realization of its meanness did not matter.  She was a
little in awe of Fream, and such a long way from understanding him
that she had to set her own moods to the rhythm of his silences.
She believed it to be the silence of strength; it was mysterious,
and quite as exciting in its way as the windows of a luxury shop
with the shutters up on a Sunday.  On the way down she had tried to
prepare him for Cinder Town.  She had talked about the meanness of
the War Office.  Pensions were so ungraciously inadequate, and
after all those Indian frontier campaigns in which Captain Viner
had taken part!  She had said--"I am very proud of my Daddy," and
Fream, diverting a momentary glance from the road along which they
had been travelling at some forty miles an hour, had given her a
faint, and glassy smile.  "Of course you are."  To him she was also
a luxury shop with the blinds down.  He was not a little nervous
about raising them, or perhaps as to his ability to raise them.

"I think I'll turn her,--before we get out."

"Will you?  O,--there's Daddy."

She waved a hand.  She had had glimpses of people in gardens and at
windows, of Colonel Sykes' monocle grimly attentive, and of the
melancholy Coode gently disappearing.  Her father did not respond
to the wave of her hand.  He stood there rather stiffly in the
middle of the weedy little path, an affectionately rigid figure
with eyes of attention.  So this was the man who was to marry his
daughter, and this was his car!  It was a very big car, and its
brightness made old Viner feel moved to blink.

Fream was a bad driver, and the cinder track was very narrow.  The
big car jerked backwards and forwards as he tried to work her
round, and at the third reverse he hit the Vachett's fence with his
luggage-grid.  Two or three palings cracked, and Mary, with hands
clasped together, emitted a faint "O!"

Fream said nothing.  He ground his way into bottom gear, lugged at
the steering-wheel, let his clutch in with a bump, and stopped his
engine.

"It's such a wretched narrow place," said she.

Fream said nothing.  He looked stiff and white.  She commented to
herself upon his silence, and thought it admirable, the silence of
self-restraint.  But she did wish that he had made "Phoebus" show
his paces a little more gracefully.  She had christened the blue
car "Phoebus."

"Have to pay for that fence.  Much damage?"

She turned to look, and became aware of the embittered Vachett
staring carefully at the broken palings.  He bent forward, and
pushing at the fence, made sure that a post had not been broken.
Mean, meticulous creature!

"Nothing much."

She slipped out before the process of turning the car was complete,
and went and kissed her father.  He patted the middle of her back.

"Well,--my dear."

"Have you forgiven me, Daddy?"

She had come back to him as the child, full of an intriguing and
irresponsible self-importance, snuggling up as women do, and
putting a man's courage out of countenance.

Captain Hesketh kissed her forehead.

"So long as you are happy, my dear--"

She was reproached and she knew it, but success can bear
reproaches.  Fream was standing in the gateway, and she brought the
two men together.

"How d'you do."

"Glad to meet you, sir."

They shook hands, and seemed to be looking about for something else
to say to each other, and Mary had to exert herself and carry the
conversation for both of them.  She showed less confidence when she
met her mother and Cousin Nellie, and they were all crowded in that
poky little room.  Fream's head seemed to be within a foot of the
ceiling.  "O, mind the lamp, Val."  The old life rushed back at
her, and got itself tangled up with the new one.  She thought of
poor Arnold sitting there by the window.  O, bother one's past and
its implications!  Her eyes showed a sudden wetness, and tears
blurred the harsh outlines of life.  Fream stood stiffly aware of
her tears; he liked them,--but he did not know what to do with
them, for when a man has kept his emotions in cold storage they may
refuse to thaw, or come out as so much pulp, tasteless--even to
himself.

"Your room is all ready,--Mary."

This was from Cousin Nellie, that most kind and efficient soul, who
could not help producing the right key at a crisis even though her
prejudices were arrayed against the pretty egoist.

"O,--thank you, Nellie.  But I am turning you out."

"I have a room at the Twists."

"And my suit-case."

It was Nellie who fetched it for her and carried it upstairs while
Fream and the two old people sat and looked at each other through
loopholes, and said quite meaningless things.  Mary closed the door
of her little room.  What a tank it was, hot and stuffy, and yet
full of the old perfume of vivid emotions.  She went to the window,
and the beeches of "Doomsday" assailed like a huge and distant
cloud.

She paled a little.

"Oh,--Arnold--!"

She was conscious of terror, a nameless fear.  She drew the blind
half-down, and sat on the bed, staring at her suit-case.

Did he know?

Supposing he came--?  O, she could not see him, she could not
possibly see him.  One of her panic moods arrived.  She went to the
head of the stairs and called.

"Daddy--daddy."

He heard and came up with eyes that still seemed to be avoiding her
wet face.

"Daddy,--he won't come here--will he?"

Old Viner shook his head.

"Well,--I told him, my dear."

She was voiceless, and he turned and went down the stairs and she
into her room to close the door and sit on the bed with her face
between her hands.

She was afraid.  She had divined a possible fear, but not the
strength of the fear, and it paralysed her.  She felt that she
dared not leave "Green Shutters" or its garden until Fream's car
should carry her away late on the afternoon of Sunday.  He had to
be in town early on the Monday.

No; she did not want to see any of these people, the Twists or the
Perrivales or poor Coode.  She wanted to forget them all.  And she
had felt so triumphant!  But she found that her Winged Victory was
a little unsteady on its feet.


4


The only incident of note that happened up at Carslake was that
"Phoebus" proved too big to be housed in any of the "George"
stables.  A man had to be sent for from a local garage to take the
monster away and dispose of him for the night.  Obviously, the
"George Inn" should have felt humbled, but that was not so, and the
Sussex odd-man-about-the-yard was coarsely ironical.

That short week-end puzzled Fream considerably.  Very properly he
tried to talk "Mary" to old Viner, and was surprised to meet in
Mary's father an obtuseness, a seeming lack of interest.  Mary was
to be a rich man's wife, secure and comfortable, but the old
campaigner's eyes remained dull.  Fream got on better with Mrs.
Charlotte, perhaps because she did nearly all the talking while he
sat there like a pale and beglassed Buddha.  But Mary was the most
baffling of the humans, and yet she gave him something that was
almost a thrill.

She chose to sit all that day in the garden at the back of "Green
Shutters."  He was made to stretch his long, stiff, awkward body in
the only deck-chair, while she occupied an old basket-thing dragged
out of the house.  The "George" breakfast had not agreed with him
very well; nor had the "George" bed.  He felt that he had earned
exercise, a little Arcadian seclusion, a field path and a pretty
creature near his arm.  His!  Another possession, and yet not quite
possessed as yet.  He was not a little afraid of his powers of
possession.  He was so rusty, so awkward.  At the office he always
dictated his letters.  Had he forgotten how to scribble like a boy?

"We ought to see something of the country--"

He was uneasily facetious.

"Look for mushrooms or blackberries--or something."

She had a mysterious headache, the malaise that is completely
puzzling to the bachelor-minded man.

"I'd much rather sit here with you, Val."

"Would you?"

Her calling him "Val" brought a smirk to his solemn soul.

"Yes, it's so restful."

He appeared to be trying to say something, but the right echo would
not come.  The surface of him had become so flat that it could not
return an echo.


5


For lunch they had blackcurrant pudding, a dream of a pudding made
by Cousin Nellie.  And there was cream with it, "Doomsday" cream.

Mary would not touch the cream, poor Arnold's cream.  But Fream
disposed of a good helping, and thought the pudding excellent.  As
a pudding it was not unlike his sensuous appreciation of Mary, dark
fruit richly juiced, purple hair and a soft and creamy body.  She
would have the flavour of fruit, with just a twinge of tartness
under the cream and the sugar.  He accepted a second helping.

Mary had a frightened look.  Absurd--to be afraid of a cream-jug,
though she did not even know that Furze had two cows sick, and was
having to spend extra money on feed because the grass was parched,
and that he was worried about his "roots."  How should she know of
such things, or even imagine them?  But the cream was there, and
Fream's cream cheese of a face looming possessively on the other
side of the table.

She was in a fever to get away.  She stroked the head of the silver
mascot on "Phoebus'" radiator where the big blue car stood waiting.
She climbed in after the family kisses, flushed and breathing
quickly.

"Oh,--I'm glad."

She sat a little more closely.

"This place makes me sad, Val."

He found a smile, and a thin elbow that transmitted a nudge of
tenderness.

"Well, it needn't.  Take my word for it."


6


Yet, she was to see her lover, for Fream chose to drive back
through Carslake and strike the London road, and as they passed the
mouth of the lane where the six pines stood upon the green mound,
some impulse made Mary look up.

He was standing there, leaning against one of the trees.  Their
eyes met, and into hers a little flicker of fear leapt instantly.
But Furze's eyes seemed to her quite expressionless, two dark
circles in a tanned face just glooming at her from under the pines.

She shivered and drew away into her corner.  It was as though
"Doomsday" itself had looked at her with a fatal and tragic
meaning.



XVI


1


In August, while Furze was fighting the drought, Mary was preparing
her trousseau.

The marriage had been postponed until early in October, for her
grandee had some financial affair in the process of flotation, and
already she had discovered that when he was pursuing the golden
hind it was unwise to come between him and the pursuit.  The
discovery did not worry her.  She was in no hurry.  This was no
haycock affair, tumultuous and poignant.  Her great man extended to
her a Spanish courtesy, and an air of high financial endeavour.
She accepted his kisses; they could not be called disturbing
kisses, and she could not quite make up her mind as to their
nature.  He kissed her as though he were taking a tentative nibble
at strange fruit, not feeling sure of its ripeness or of his own
capacity to digest it.  She added an imagined shyness to her
conception of his silent strength, and it did not displease her.

"The best-dressed woman in Weyfleet; that's the idea."

He became articulate for the moment, standing very stiff and
straight, and holding a new cheque book as a self-conscious man
holds an overful tea-cup.

"Opened an account for you at the local bank.  Need not bother your
people."

She kissed him.  "Val, you are a dear.  But you ought not to do
this--before we are married."  He looked pleased.  Where was the
difference?  She was the prettiest thing on the Hills, and she was
going to be the smartest.  Yes, and her inclinations were in time
with his.  Five hundred pounds at the bank, and a cheque book, and
all sorts of delicious possibilities hanging on the point of a pen.
How generous he was!  He had given her the most gorgeous ring, and
pearls that must have cost him a thousand pounds.  She was in
heaven, but she had the sense to lean upon her sister, for she knew
that Clare had the magic touch in her finger-tips, and that a rose
and an orchid are very different flowers.  There were expeditions
to town.  Two very serious women gave all their attention to that
most fascinating of arts.  Clare selected her sister's wardrobe,
and Mary, accepting domination, was like an excited child out upon
Christmas shopping.

"Isn't he generous?"

Clare allowed Fream his generosity, but she was searching for the
promptings behind it.  It did not satisfy her to explain it too
easily, or to see it in mere amorous excitement.  Clare knitted her
mental brows over the phenomenon.  She was inclined to reduce
Fream's generosity to a form of self-expression, perhaps his one
and only method of self-expression.  He was articulate--as a cheque
book.  Hence--she was cautious.  She gave her sister little shrewd
nudges, subtle and persuasive touches, pregnant hints.

"Every man has his particular vanity."

"I'm sure Val is not at all vain."

"Every man.  I am not being cynical.  Cultivate it.  It's your
business."

"But that sounds so--"

"Not a bit of it.  If marriage is worth while, the man is worth
while.  If he wants you to be smart, obviously--be smart.  Your man
is ambitious."

"Yes,--I suppose he is."

"Power--you know.  Power--and its expression.  You may have to
express yourself--with things, if you can't write books or paint
pictures.  Fream paints pictures."

The brown eyes of Mary questioned her.

"Does he?  I didn't know--"

"His environment, Hill House, motor-cars, bathrooms, wine,--you."

Mary looked thoughtful, too thoughtful, and Clare had to penetrate
the cloud.

"Not quite so--bald--as that.  He has paid you a very nice
compliment.  He has asked you to help him paint the picture.  And
not a bad game--for a woman to dabble in, with frocks for your
paints, and flowers, and the way you sit at the head of his table,
and wear your furs, and walk through the lounge of the 'Grand' at
Monte Carlo.  It's up to you, my dear."

Mary looked a little plaintive.

"But surely--it means more than that?"

"Of course.  Don't be a goose.  He is very much in love with you."

The pink room at "Caradoc" was full of the "flowers" that Clare had
selected; an evening cloak of black chiffon velvet with silver fox
collar and lined with rose and silver brocade; three evening
dresses of rose chiffon, black georgette, and rose and silver
brocade; three day dresses, a black satin coat and dress lined rose
with collar and cuffs of skunk, a flowered ninon of rose, blue,
gold and black, a black crêpe de chine.  There were tennis frocks
of cream crêpe de chine, and two country coats and skirts, and two
coat frocks.  Also hats, jumpers, lingerie, shoes of brocade and of
satin and suède.  And silk stockings of black and grey and flesh
colour.  So, Fream's future wife found herself expressed in
clothes, just as he wished one of his possessions to express
itself.  A child among the strawberries.

The grass of Hill House park was as brown as a berry, but it had no
cattle to feed, and only once to Mary did it suggest "Doomsday" and
the farm.  Her consciousness flicked a thought at "poor Arnold,"
and quickly drew back.  Bad weather for cows and the milk pail.
But how little she understood, and how little she knew of the sweat
and the labour, of the fierce patience, and the tired eyes and the
set jaw.  She had had her little scuffle with poverty, and had fled
from it.  She had shrunk from the soiling of her hands with the
world's work.

Poor Arnold!

She could not quite forget those eyes of his, and the way they had
looked at her.  But surely she had done the honest thing?  She had
run away from him with no ulterior knowledge of grandees and cheque
books--and rose-coloured bathrooms.  All that had arrived later.
Could she be blamed for it?

She did not go again to Cinder Town; she did not want to go; she
was afraid of going.  She was to be married from "Caradoc."  She
sent her mother a twenty-five pound cheque, explaining the gift by
saying that Val had insisted on advancing her a portion of her
dress allowance.  "He is so generous."  It was her father who
returned the cheque.  "My dear, you must not send us money."  She
was a little hurt and distressed, but reminded herself that her
father was touchy and eccentric about money.

She had various letters from her mother, and in one of them Mrs.
Charlotte mentioned Furze--"It is still terribly dry here.  I'm
afraid poor Mr. Furze is having a hard time with his cows.  No
grass.  And he has had three cows sick.  The poor man looks quite
worn out."

She felt a little stab of self-reproach.  Poor Arnold!  But--then--
why be a farmer?  It was a horrid, worrying, lonely life, and she
could not understand any man choosing it or loving it.  She had not
yet realized man's nature, Furze's nature, the inevitable combat,
the effort, the strivings, the passion for swimming against the
tide.  She wanted to drift, and he--the fighting man--had tried to
snatch at her and make her swim with him.

Poor Arnold!  Why didn't he sell the place and try to do something
easier?

She did not know that there are men who do not ask for the easy
things.


2


Nor were things easy for Furze.  He went about looking lean and
self-absorbed, with his blue eyes sunk deep into his tanned face.
His temper was short; he was thinner, and not only in body but in
soul, he had no smiles to spare for anybody; and when he spoke to
Will or Will's boy or to his beasts his voice had a rougher note.
He was concerned for his farm, and for his pride in it, and deep
down in his consciousness was a raw-red place, the sore of an
inward humiliation.

Things had gone wrong with him before; he had had wet seasons
instead of dry ones; but he had pulled through with an indefatigable
patience that had somehow contrived to find a smile.  But this
fight found him smileless.  He cursed, and endured.  He watched his
meadows turn brown, and his stunted root crops starving in the
baked fields, and the brook dwindling away, and Rushy Pool becoming
a sheet of cracked mud.  It looked like a piece of crocodile skin
stretched tight across the mouth of a huge round dish.  He had two
more cows sick with mamitis; the milk yield was falling off; he was
having to buy feed.

The nicely balanced internal economy of the farm had been
disturbed.  The hay crop had been a good one, but the fields from
which the crop had been taken had never greened up and given him
the expected pasture a month after the taking of the hay crop.
Also, if you had planned to grow three and a half tons of roots for
the winter keep of each cow, with hay and straw and bean meal, and
your whole root crop looked like averaging three tons to the acre
instead of twenty-five, you either had to sell some of your beasts
or buy in food.  Then, there were the sheep and the pigs.  He had
put down some acres of cabbage for spring feed for his small flock
during the lambing season, but a cruciferous crop asks for
moisture.  Moreover, caterpillars had riddled the leaves, and the
whole crop smelt of decay.  It was just a bad season, with the
balance of chances against you, whatever you might do or say or
think.  It meant the loss of good money and time; it was bad for
your stock and your temper; it might demand an inroad upon your
capital, if you had any capital, but other farmers were in like
case, and the bad ones more so.  It called for the philosophy of
the stiff back, and an obstinacy that plods and endures.

This critical season in the life of the farm coincided with one of
those grave changes in a man's outlook, and the drought and the
heat and the little disasters reinforced the change in Furze's
temper.  A man who lives much alone is in danger of developing what
may be described as a moral gruffness.  As an old Devon farmer had
put it one day to Furze at Carslake market--"We farmers are a
discontented lot.  Grumble.  Of course we grumble.  We are always
in trouble with some cussed thing or other."  The soil can martyr a
man, or twist him into a gnarled, awkward, stubborn creature, a
misanthrope, a complainer, a fanatic.  Unfortunate sequences of
impersonal phenomena may develop in him a personal cussedness.  You
may accuse a French peasant of avarice.  Furze was not avaricious,
but in his darkening and difficult moods he did grudge the money
spent upon the house to prepare it for that dream wife of his.  He
needed money now, and he needed it badly.  Gore Wood would have to
bear the brunt of the attack; it would stand thinned in the spring
like an English square at Waterloo.

He grudged the selling of those trees.

He was having to pump water for his beasts.  And how the poor
creatures seemed to swill it down.

He had ceased to sweat.  His skin felt dry and hot, and he was
conscious of an inward dryness, an inevitable and parched
discontent.  He got up tired, and slogged through the day with
savage surliness.  His attitude to men and things--and women--had
changed, yet he did not realize the change.  It was just that he
was worried and overworked and unhappy.  Other people noticed it,
Will, and Will's boy--who--caught pilfering a few lean apples in
the orchard--was given a strapping.  "Either you or I'll do it,
Will."--Will, staring blue-eyed had passed the privilege to the
master.  And Mrs. Sarah had squealed about it for hours--and
threatened a summons and told all her neighbours.  "Cut him about
cruel--he did, just for a few green apples.  What I says is--'Boys
will be boys.'  And I says to him I says--'My boy be'nt a beast to
be lathered,--and don't you forget it, Mister Furze.'  Yes,--I gave
him the edge of my tongue--I did.  'Don't you touch my boy again,'
I says, 'or I'll have the law of you.'"  Though--of course--she had
said nothing of the kind, being slimy and artful and a thief, and
Will had to listen to her scolding until his patience had given
out.  "Shut yer mouth, y'squealing fool.  The boy be mine as much
as yours.  I gave Furze leave to belt him."

These lesser disharmonies revolved about the central disharmony,
for a man and a boar have things in common.  Hard work can keep a
man's thoughts from women, and till the coming of Mary Viner Furze
had lived as he had lived during the war, with mind and body so
fully occupied that the sex in him had slept.  Going to bed
healthily tired and satisfied with the day's work he had been
content to sleep.  It is the townsman--the sitter upon stools--
whose thoughts are always round the corner chasing petticoats.  But
with the coming of Mary Viner the essential male in Furze had been
stirred to wakefulness.  He had desired her cleanly and
wholesomely, from the very deeps of him, with a devoted fineness,
and a strength that could be very tender.  He had been the big,
romantic creature seeking a mate.  His love had had finality, like
his love of his farm.

She had humiliated both his loves.  He had tried to put the thought
of her away, but all through those weeks of heat and dryness and
effort an open wound ran blood.  The very bitterness of the drought
and his many disappointments seemed to keep it open.  He brooded.
He would wander about at night, restless and overtired, thinking of
her and of the things that she had denied him.  She had let him go
so far, pressed the fruit to his very mouth before snatching it
away.  And he was thirsty.  The mere sensuous thrilling of body
against body, the clasping of hands--yes, he asked for more than
these.  He wanted sympathy.  How she could have helped him through
this difficult time!  Had he been able to come back to the house
and feel her presence and its meaning; had he been able to talk to
her about things, and to feel too that he was fighting them for
her!  He craved that spiritual and emotional contact that
transcends the mere physical relationship.  He was very lonely.

His loneliness turned fierce in him.  There was that stifling night
when the farmyard pump had refused suction, needing a new leather,
and he had had to carry all the water for the beasts from the
house.  He had worked like a man in a dull and smouldering rage.
He had come in to see that pink lustre tea-service neatly arranged
on the table in Mrs. Damaris' parlour.

He remembered that he had paid one pound fifteen shillings for that
tea service.

A sudden anger had possessed him.

He had taken the pink lustre piece by piece and thrown it through
the open window to smash against the garden wall.

And next morning, feeling a fool in the cool hush of the dawn, he
had been compelled to go out and pick up the pieces and bury them
in one of the flower-beds.  There were no flowers in the beds now.
They were dead.


3


During all these weeks Furze never touched that old toy of his--the
piano, for music could say things to him that he did not wish to
hear; also he was tired and his need was the sound of a human
voice.  He asked for two sympathetic ears to listen, and a voice to
give back a few words of understanding and encouragement.  He was
as starved as his fields.  He wanted to talk and he had no one to
whom he could talk, for he went very rarely now to "Green
Shutters," and in the other farms men had troubles of their own.

That loneliness should breed restlessness was inevitable.  He came
up against the mirror in Mrs. Damaris' parlour and saw himself with
a three days' beard on his face, no collar, an old shirt torn at
one shoulder and a pair of braces that lacked one of the leather
button loops.  He was shocked at his own slovenliness.  It was the
slovenliness of a man who had become the slave of the soil.  And
suddenly he rebelled.  Why grow like a dull beast?

Will was passing across the Doom Paddock, and Furze hailed him from
the window through which he had thrown the pink lustre tea-service.

"Will."

"Sssir--"

"You might do the milking and the watering.  I'm going up to
Carslake."

He went upstairs and shaved himself and put on a clean shirt and
collar and a brown tweed suit.  He even hunted out a coloured tie
and a pair of light blue and grey socks.  He dressed his
restlessness and his self esteem, and slipped a pound note and some
odd silver into his pockets.  He was going up to Carslake, but
without any definite idea upon the possibilities of Carslake, and
its dozen or so shops and its little stuffy cinema, and its "George
Inn."  Anyway he would be among his fellow-humans for an hour or
two, clean and decently clothed, and able to look a woman in the
face.

It was a hot evening, and in Carslake High Street a thirst asserted
itself.  He was looking into a tobacconist's, with no other solace
for his restlessness than the adventure of trying a new tobacco,
and reflected in the window he saw the red façade of the "George
Inn" with its white window-sashes and green curtains and window-
boxes.  The "George" was a good old inn well managed.  It was kept
by the Lavenders, a father and a bevy of pleasant daughters,
Rosemary, and Ivy and Violet.  Pretty creatures--too.  And old
Lavender had one of those cheerful English faces.

"Why not go in and dine at the 'George'?"

My God, how sick he was of salt bacon and corned beef, and plum
jam, and flat lettuces, and boiled eggs and tea, and soapy
potatoes!  And his slovenly, helter-skelter meals, with that
chipped white enamel tea-pot, and tarnished spoon stuck in a jam-
pot, and no cloth on the table, and the plates suggesting cold
water and smeary haste!  His gorge rose.  He smelt the flesh pots
of the "George," roast butcher's meat and good cheese and a glass
of ale, and a cup of coffee afterwards.

He crossed the road and went up the three well-whitened steps into
the "George."  A broad man, coatless, with a straw hat tilted well
back like a halo about a pleasant pink face, was standing by the
lounge door reading an evening paper.  It was old Lavender himself.

"Hallo, sir!  Haven't seen you for months."

"Haven't seen myself for months."

"Ah,--you have been having a rough time.  Paper says the weather
looks like changing."

"I wish to God it would," said Furze.  "Can I have some dinner
here?"

"Sure-ly!  Always glad to see you, sir."

The coffee-room was upstairs on the first floor, and as Furze went
up the stairs which were narrow and rather dark a young woman who
was coming down in a hurry with an empty tray nearly ran into him.

"Sorry, sir."

She smiled.  She had very white teeth, and very black prettily-
bobbed hair, and eyes that looked dark and large in a white and
broadish face.

Furze smiled back at her.

"My fault.  Can I have some dinner?"

"Of course, sir."

He drew aside to let her pass, and she went by as though she was
quite conscious of the man in him, and so made the man in him
conscious of her.

He saw the white tables and the silver, and the flowers in the
vases, blue and white asters and crimson gladioli, and the old red
houses of the High Street out of one window, and out of the other
the green oaks and tawny grass of Carslake park.  The girl was back
in the room.  He had not seen her at the "George" before; she was
not one of the Lavenders.  Her apron had a lace edge, and looked
very clean.

"Where shall I sit?"

"Where would you like to sit, sir?"

She had a pleasant voice that was almost Irish in its leisureliness.
It was like a lazy hand drawing its fingers across velvet.  She
smiled,--but without boldness.

"By that window?"

"Yes."

There were only three or four people in the room, motorists
spending the night, a hot-faced young man with a girl, a bald
curate, a hard-bitten woman in tweeds.  Furze sat down at his
table, and as his fingers touched the starched white napkin he felt
a little thrill of pleasure.

"I'll have a pint of draught ale."

"Yes, sir."

She brought him the menu card.  She was a big, strong girl with a
splendid throat and neck, but she moved lightly, and somehow she
made him think of a pleasant, softly breathing, large-eyed heifer.

"Thick soup, sir.  And roast beef or cold veal and ham pie?"

Her hands were large and white, with long soft fingers.  They were
very clean.  He noticed that the palms were pink, and that she was
wearing a gold signet ring.

"O,--roast beef.  And plum tart."

"And cream, sir?"

"Yes,--please."

She was a most efficient waitress, quiet in her movements, and with
a dark dignity of her own.

"Not quite so hot to-night."

"No, sir."

She studied him as she held a vegetable dish.  He was one of the
brownest men she had ever seen, a comely man, a gentleman farmer--
obviously.

"Haven't been here for a long time."

"No, sir."

His suggestion was that he had not seen her before, and she caught
it.

"Motoring, sir?"

"No.  I farm.  'Doomsday'; down the Melhurst road."

"I don't know much about the country, sir."

"Not been here long?"

"Two months."

That was about as far as they got during the dinner, but Furze's
eyes were following her half shyly about the room, and though she
met his eyes but once she was very well aware of them.  He was a
fine, big man, big without being too tall.  She liked his eyes and
his hands, and the way his hair grew, and the deep brown of his
face.

"May I have some coffee?"

"In the lounge, sir?"

"Please."

She brought him his coffee.  There was no one else in the lounge.
She poured out the coffee for him.

"Milk, sir?"

"Please."

"And sugar?"

"One lump."

She put it in and seemed about to go, but paused for an
imperceptible moment.  He was about to speak.

"If I come here again--may I have the same table?"

"Sure, sir."

"My--my name is Furze.  And may I have the bill?"

She brought him the bill, and took his tip in one of her big soft
hands, and gave him one intent glance, half smiling, half wise.
"Thank you, sir."

He did not find out her name that night, for he was a man of
reservations and she no trollop.



XVII


1


A week before her marriage Mary fell into one of her panic moods.
Everything that could be bought had been bought; she was ready to
the last tin of nail polish; she was sleek, plump and perfumed.
Nothing was left for her to do but to sit down and wait.

She realized that she was marrying a stranger.  The wheels of her
triumphal car wobbled and quivered, and her pretty self came down
in agitation at Clare's feet.

"I feel so responsible."

Her panic was obvious, and her sister's cool and world-wise hands
had to comfort her.  Mary had made no new discovery; you married a
stranger when you married a man, but in Mary's case the adventure
was nicely padded against shocks and alarums.

"Your man is kind, my dear.  He is not a cub in a hurry."

Mary was ready to agree that her grandee was kind, but she found it
difficult to describe his kindness.  It was rather like a wet sheet
or an ice-pack.  He was so completely the correct lover of mature
years; he would bend stiffly from the hips and kiss her hand; he
seemed better at kissing hands than kissing lips.  In fact there
were times when she had the feeling that he was afraid of her,
though what he could fear in her was beyond her comprehension.  Yet
his kisses were tentative and self-conscious, as though he were
thinking about the quality of his kissing even when he was in the
midst of it.

She was a little bewildered.  His breath never came more quickly
when he was near her.  She still thought of him as strong and
silent, and Spanish, and she had held her breath and waited for the
fire beneath to reveal itself.  She had been mesmerized by a
mystery, by a little god of her own making, but her deity continued
to be grandly inarticulate and benignantly silent.  It was a shy
and obscure god.

That she had fallen in love with his possessions, his atmosphere,
she would not allow.  No--no.  Val was dear.  He might be a little
difficult to understand, but surely all strong, deep men were not
easily fathomed?  And she had begun to feel so dependent on him;
she was the eternal vine, and he was the post to which it was her
fate to cling.  A post!  Just that.  But a post that could not put
out arms.

He seemed to have no arms, but two rigid appendages in sleeves.
Always she was conscious of his sleeves.

"O, Val,--I do want to make you happy."

She sought to cling, and he was as stiff as a post, a kind post, a
martyr's stake.  For the piece of wood that was Fream yearned to
become the young tree, and hoped that the miracle might happen, and
was afraid that it would not happen.  And the very fear inhibited
the transformation, and he continued to be the post.

"Of course--you will--my dear."

He tried to tell her that it was her happiness that mattered,
patting the middle of her back with a hand that was like a stuffed
kid glove.

"I hope I can give you everything you want?"

But could he?  And what exactly did she want?  And how much of it?
O, the pomp of the body, that fine flamboyant pride!  How little
did she know that he was in a greater panic than she was, a
shameful panic.  She could not see him sitting in his padded swivel
chair in the oak-panelled private room in his London offices, his
long legs tucked up stiffly, his face as blank as a sheet of
unruled foolscap.  What an adventure, what a gamble for a man who
had become little more than a calculating machine or a prospectus,
or a company report!  And yet she was a thing that he wanted to
possess, a live trophy, a beautiful breathing statue, for all the
statues that he had collected were lifeless things.  Stone Venuses,
marble nymphs.  He craved the live possession, and he sat in his
chair and was frightened.

How was she to know?

But Fream talked about his honeymoon.  He found self-expression
when dealing with values.  "Phoebus" would take them down to Dover.
He had reserved a cabin on the boat, and a sleeper for two, and a
suite at the "Cosmopolis" at Monte Carlo.  Certainly he could
overwhelm her with values, food, clothes, luxurious living.  If she
wished to shine before other women she could shine.  There was not
a liqueur, not a dress, not a precious stone that need be denied to
her.  He talked a great deal about Monte Carlo,--a great deal for
him; he clung to that beautiful, bastard town as though it were a
wise old procuress who could save him.  Yes, of course Mary must
have her flutter at the tables.  Later--if it pleased her grace,
this Cinderella of the Suburbs, they would go on to Rome and Naples
and Sorento, and back by Florence.  If Venice piqued her--well--
they would go to Venice.

And Mary would say--"Yes, Val, how lovely, how perfectly lovely!"
and would wonder why he was so impersonal and so courteous, for
your nymph, pretty creature though she may be, may have the warm
blood of a little country wench.  Her wound was not quite healed;
she still smelt the smell of new-mown hay.  Her heart cried out to
this other man--"O, love me, Val, love me hard.  Make me forget."
She wanted arms, not two paralysed appendages in sleeves.  She
wanted to surrender to the little god of her own contriving, to
feel his grand silence opening and enveloping her in a wonderful
mastery.  Having cheated one man she seemed in a fever to surrender
to the other.

So, the great day came, and with it her parents, old Hesketh in a
very much ironed and pathetic top-hat and a frock coat that had
lived on and off in camphor for the last thirty years.  Mrs.
Charlotte wore black satin.  Mary wept a little, but felt better
when she looked into her mirror and saw herself dressed.
Blackcurrants and whipped cream!  Downstairs that kind soul Leslie
had opened a bottle of champagne.  He insisted on her drinking two
glasses of it, while Clare pulled on her gloves and looked pale and
very wise.

Fream--too--went to the church on champagne.  He remembered that
other occasion when he had gone much more gaily to church to marry
a woman.  That had been in June, and the month was October, wet and
windy, and already the leaves were falling.  He felt in a deuce of
a funk, this poor desiccated lover, a piece of parchment, Mary's
marriage settlement tied up with pink tape.


2


The crossing proved a rough one.  Mary was very sick, and lay in
her cabin, and did not care how sick she was, or whether her
husband witnessed it or not.

He desired to be kind, but unfortunately he was nearly as sick as
she was, and was loving his basin, and hating the sea and his own
soul.

A bad beginning.

"O, Val, I daren't move."

He looked like chalk tinted with yellow ochre, and about a hundred
years old, but Calais harbour had soothed his qualms.  He had to
take charge.  He should have taken it and kept it, and all might
have been well had he been the man he wanted to be.

He was very kind to her.

"No hurry, dear.  Straight in to our wagon-lit.  Take my arm."

"O, Val--you haven't got a clean handkerchief, have you?"

He hadn't.  He had thought of everything but that.

They survived the dog-fight at the French customs examination, and
made for the train with a sweating and jabbering porter all hung
about them with hand baggage.  Their compartment was found in the
wagon-lits.  Fream wanted her to come to the buffet and have some
hot soup.

The nausea was still upon her.

"I couldn't, Val.  I'd rather lie down.  You go."

But he would not go without her.  He tucked her up in a rug and sat
down and watched her, though she was praying to be left alone for
half an hour.  She felt squalid.  She was sufficiently recovered to
be able to remember her appearance, and she yearned for a wash and
a chance to remember those little niceties that mean so much to a
woman.  He had not the sense to leave her alone, to go to the
buffet, or stand in the corridor.  He sat and stared, and every
five minutes asked her with great kindness how she was feeling.

And would she like some brandy?

"No, Val, thank you."

She turned her face to the cushions, while over the wide French
country--plough-lands and stubble--a grey sheet of rain drifted.


3


This was in October.  In August, casting back six weeks, there was
other rain, English rain.

The Press weather report had promised a continuance of the drought;
a ridge of high pressure was extending northwards from the Azores;
the wind would be from the north-west--the weather fair and warm.
So much for the experts.  In the afternoon of the same day the wind
veered to the west and became strong and gusty; masses of white
cloud began to sail the sky--and mixed with these great galleons
were little smudges of smoking vapour.  When Furze saw these
smudges an excitement stirred in him.  He could feel the coming
rain; it was there; if only the cloud canopy would form and break.

He was out of bed at five o'clock next morning, and standing at the
window.  There had been no rain in the night, but the sky was
overcast, completely grey and clouded, and the wind had dropped.
The stillness was supreme, an expectant stillness.

"It will rain, it--must rain," he thought.

And yet he doubted.  He had seen other skies clear after an hour's
miserable and useless drizzle, a little tantalizing moisture that
mocked the thirsty land.  Yes, this was no heat haze, but a cistern
of clouds ready to burst.

All through the morning the sky remained a dense grey sheet, but no
rain fell.  It was a sky of suspense, and Furze idled about,
waiting for the merciful rain, and unable to work.  He heard the
beasts lowing; that was a good sign; the swallows were flying low;
Tibby the cat sat on the doorstep and washed behind her ears.

Will was pumping water into the yard troughs.  The yard well was
holding out, but the water had fallen fifteen feet.

"It must rain, Will."

"Maybe it will, ssir, maybe it won't.  Any or'nary year I'd say it
was going to drown us."

Furze was very restless.  He wandered about the farm all the
morning, gloomily hopeful.  Well, if it did not rain he would go up
and dine at the "George" and see Rosa Hurley.  He knew her name
very well by now.  At noon not a drop had fallen out of that
looming, slatey sky, and he went in to his dinner, and ate some
bread and cheese, but could touch no meat, a wretched end of cold
mutton with a few cold boiled potatoes to garnish it.  He left the
food and plates lying there, and went out again, and wandered.  He
kept pulling out an old silver watch.  Two o'clock--three o'clock.

He was in the Maid's Croft where the footpath swung a brown loop
across the scorched grass when the first raindrops fell.  He stood
quite still, holding his breath.  They came singly, big drops; one
struck his hat, others pattered on the scorched grass.  And then,
suddenly, as though some great hand had torn a rent in the canopy
overhead, the rain came down in a grey sheet.  The dry grass seemed
to crackle and steam, and the cracks in the caked soil bubbled.
Furze took off his hat and let the rain run over his face; he
exulted; he drew deep breaths; he felt the wetness soaking his
shoulders and running down his back.

Someone was coming up the path from Bean Acres, a figure blurred by
the rain.  The upper part of it was yellow, the lower part black.
It was a girl, and Furze watched her, this rain maiden, this virgin
of the breaking clouds.  What the devil--?

And then he laughed for she came laughing towards him, her yellow
jumper drenched, and a fringe of pearls hanging to the brim of her
hat.  Her black hair was soaked, her face a happy pleasant wetness,
and the whole of her looking dewy and fresh, beneficent.

"What on earth are you doing here, Rose?"

"Getting wet."

"You are--!"

"And you.  Aren't you glad, Mr. Furze?"

"I am."

"My afternoon off.  Thought I would have a ramble.  My best hat and
jumper have brought down the rain for you."

And with laughter and more than laughter in their eyes they stood
and looked at each other, and to Furze she was the rain goddess, a
strong, comely, dark-eyed creature with white teeth and wet hair.
He saw a raindrop on her round white chin.  She seemed part of the
rain, cool and fresh and wholesome, a laughing, good-humoured, warm-
hearted thing.  The blood stirred in him.

"You'll have to come in and shelter."

"I'm wet through."

"We shall have to dry you.  You have brought me good luck, Rose,
the first good luck for months."

Her dark eyes held his for a moment.

"I'm glad."


4


There was no fire burning in the house, but Furze brought an armful
of dry wood in the living-room, and found Rose standing in her
stockinged feet, looking at dirty plates and the ragged end of
mutton on the table.  "Poor man," she had thought; "no wonder he
comes up to us sometimes."  Her wet feet had left marks upon the
red tiles.

Furze threw the wood on the hearth.

"I'll get some logs.  Soon have a blaze.  You must be soaked."

"Right through."

She smiled over it.  No word about spoilt clothes and a pulped hat.
Her stockinged feet pleased him--why, he did not know."

"I'll get those sticks alight while you fetch the logs."

"Will you.  You'll find paper and matches in that cupboard."

She was bending over the fire when he returned, her wet jumper
clinging to her body.  Yes, she was a fine, strong girl, no flat-
chested young city wench.  He felt too that she was good, if
goodness meant warm-heartedness and pleasant common sense.

"Splendid."

They soon had a blaze, and the shimmer of it was in her eyes and
upon her wet black hair.

"Feel cold, Rose?"

"Oh,--a little."

"Look here, girl--you must get those wet things off.  I can rig you
up with something or other while we dry all that."

"Can you?"

She sat on her heels and considered something.

"Yes.  You go in here and lock the door,--and I'll collect
something--and leave it outside."

She smiled up at him, and he opened the door of Mrs. Damaris'
parlour, and left her, and going upstairs began to search about for
clothes.  A tweed coat and an old white sweater.  Yes, but what the
devil--?  No,--not breeches.  All he could think of was a couple of
green linen curtains and a leather belt, and he carried the whole
collection down and knocked at the parlour door.

"Rose--"

"Yes."

"It is a bit of a puzzle,--the skirt,--I mean.  See what you can
make of all this.  I am going to get tea ready."

From the kitchen he heard the door open and close.  There was a
silence, and then her voice called him.

"Mr. Furze--"

"Hallo."

He went to the door.

"Have you any safety-pins?"

"Safety-pins!  I don't know.  I'll have a look."

He found one safety-pin, and two gold pins that he used with his
soft collars.

"All I can find.  On the floor."

He had the tea-tray filled when he heard the parlour door open, and
when he entered the living-room she was hanging her clothes on the
backs of two chairs in front of the fire.  She looked at him with a
laughing coyness.  She had made quite a nice job of the skirt,
looping the two curtains over the belt, and pinning them together.

"You forgot--stockings."

"Sorry."

He glanced at her bare feet; they were pretty feet, and few feet
are pretty uncovered, and they were very white.

"They look better as they are," he said, "much better than in a
pair of my socks.  But you'll find those tiles cold; I can rig you
up with some slippers."

"Oh,--I'm all right," she said, and looked at the tea-tray.  Had he
not anybody to do things for him, no woman about the place?

"Sorry--I've no cake.  If I'd known."

"I can do without cake--bought cake.  The only cake worth eating is
home made."

He seemed to consider that a very pregnant saying, and stood
looking for a moment at her feet, only to discover when he looked
at her face that there seemed to be more colour there.

"What about the kettle?" she asked.

"Rose, you are a woman of sense."

He went for the kettle, while she cleared away the debris of his
dinner, and spread the clean cloth he had brought in, and looked
both serious and happy.

"Who washes up for you, Mr. Furze?"

"Oh,--I have a woman in twice a week."

"And the other times?"

"I mess along somehow.  Farming's not all--violets."

"I know that," she said arranging the cups and plates.

"You do."

"My father has a small farm.  Shall I cut some bread and butter?"

"Do," he said, and fell into a sudden stare, and came out of it
with a smile of discovery.

"How do you like your tea, Rose?  Strong or weak?"

"Strong--I'm afraid."

"So do I."

The moist rush of the rain continued.  The orchard trees were
dripping.  The gutters and water-spouts murmured and gurgled.
Furze's face was all smoothed out, and his eyes had softened, and
sometimes he would look at the rain and sometimes at the face of
the girl.  A farmer's daughter was she!  He had been thinking of
her a good deal during the last two or three weeks, but now that
she was sitting there with her white feet tucked under her chair,
and her clothes drying by the fire, and pouring out his tea for
him, he felt her in the same way yet differently.  He felt her more
deeply, more intimately, not as the incidental woman to be kissed
and held for an hour or two, but more like the good rich soil, a
comely field.

"It's a hard life, Rose.  Was it too hard for you?"

She looked at him wisely.

"There were three of us, Mr. Furze, and three big girls are not
wanted on a forty-acre farm.  Oh,--I know."

"What do you know?"

His seriousness had a touch of fierceness.

"How many pennies go to the pound.  How much milk goes to a pound
of butter.  How many hours it takes to clear a dozen blackcurrant
bushes."

She was not afraid of him.  Her frank and handsome face had a half-
smiling serenity.

"Soft words won't bring rain.  No lying long in bed.  Up early.
Scrubbing brushes and milk cans.  That's one thing about the soil,
it does make you honest.  You have to face hard facts."

His eyes became gentle.

"Good girl.  I thought all women wanted silk stockings these days."

"Why shouldn't they?  If they work for them?"

"Ah,--there you are.  You have got it.  Eve has not quite sneaked
back into Paradise."

They laughed and there was a mutual desire in their laughter.  But
he was a man of the soil, and the dreamer in him had had his
lesson; there are facts to be faced when a man of the soil is for
kissing a woman.  Has she a pair of hands as well as a soft mouth,
and hands that are willing?

He filled a pipe, deliberately, thoughtfully.

"Milking to do.  If my fellow has not been drowned--he has fetched
the cows in."

"You do your own milking, Mr. Furze?"

"Mostly."

"I can milk," she said.

He got up, and with a match to the bowl of his pipe, stood half
turned to the window.

"I'll leave you to look after your clothes, Rose.  And look over
the house--if you like."

She nodded.

"I'll wash up.  This old place is lovely."

"Like it?"

"Not like a raw new place.  Been lived in--and loved a little."

He gave her a quick, deep glance.

"Thank you, my dear; you're wise."

He walked to the door and paused there.

"Mine--you know.  But I am still having a devil of a fight to make
ends meet--and this summer will hit me rather hard."

"For richer or poorer, Mr. Furze.  That's a farm."


5


When he came back she had been all over the house with a sleek look
on her pleasant face.  Her dark eyes had a consenting softness.
She had seen things that had stirred the woman in her.  "He's a man
and a good one."  She had warmed to the way he had treated her.  No
innuendoes, no advantages taken.  He was a good man who could be
gentle and clean with a woman.

Furze found her dressed, her black hair all crisped after its
soaking.

"Sure those things are dry, Rose?"

She looked him straight in the eyes.

"Dry enough, Mr. Furze."

She had cleared the table, and it seemed to him that the room had
been tidied up.  The clothes and stuff that he had lent her lay
folded on the sofa.

"Been over the house?"

"Yes."

"Like it?"

She nodded.

He looked out of the window.  It was still raining hard.

"I haven't such a thing as an umbrella, dear.  But I can rig you
up.  And I'll see you as far as--Carslake."

An old trench coat that he still used in bad weather hung from a
peg on the kitchen door.  He took it down, and helped her on with
it, and buttoned her up.

"What about your hat?"

"I can carry it--under the coat."

"Clever girl."

"But what about you?"

"A sack,--my dear--if you'll allow it."

Her eyes lit up.  "I'd allow you anything--my man," they said, and
he stood and met the light in them.

"Now then--"

But under the dripping hood of the porch the same impulse took them
both.  They held each other close and kissed, and went up the wet
lane hand in hand.



XVIII


1


Mr. and Mrs. Percival Fream arrived at the "Cosmopolis" Hotel in
Monte Carlo about half-past three in the afternoon.

Mary was very tired.  Moreover, it was raining and the southern sea
draped under a grey veil looked strange and unwelcoming.  A gilded
lift took them up to the second floor, and a polite bureau clerk in
black threw open the door of their suite, and waited attentively
upon the Englishman's face of ice.

"Like it,--dear?"

She said that it was lovely, and felt suddenly and absurdly
homesick in the midst of all this pink velvet and white enamel and
gilding.  The bureau-clerk had departed after assuring Fream that
the luggage should be sent up at once and Mary stood at a window
looking at the sea and the harbour of Monaco, while her man
remained in the middle of the room austerely and awkwardly holding
his hat.

"Sorry it's raining--my dear."

She could have wept--for she was so tired, and with a strange
tiredness that she did not understand.  And here was Monte Carlo,
and he was apologizing to her for the rain.  Also, as a woman she
knew that much was expected of her, thrills, sighs, ecstasies, all
the mysteries of the unveiling, and somehow she felt as flat as
that grey sea.

"Do you think I could lie down, Val?"

"Of course, my dear."

They explored the suite.  It consisted of a sitting-room, a bedroom
with two beds, a dressing-room and a bathroom, all in white and
rose and gold.  She wanted to be left alone, and he came and stood
beside her in the bedroom and put a flat and expressionless hand
between her shoulder blades.  He was trying to say something.  She
wished he would go away.

"Tired--my dear--?"

"Yes, Val."

She felt his hand thumping her gently.

"Of course.  Luggage coming up.  Lie down.  I'll ring for some tea.
Lie down till dinner."

"Yes--Val."

"Feel better--after dinner.  A little wine--you know."

Yes, he was very kind, but how was it that she found his kindness
so very dreary, rather like a wet handkerchief on your forehead
when you had a headache?  And life had promised to be so
triumphant!  O, she was tired; both of them were tired.  Tea
arrived in a metal teapot, with toast and rolls and butter, and a
plate of cakes, chocolate eclairs, and creamy things and sugary
things.  The tea seemed to be very tasteless, and Fream sat and
drank it solemnly as though he had just buried himself.  Afterwards
she lay down on one of the beds, and two politely detached porters
bustled the luggage in and unstrapped it.  Fream was smoking a
cigar in the sitting-room; she could smell the cigar smoke, and
presently she heard him go out.  She got up and bolted the door,
and lay down again, and tried to sleep, but found herself staring
at the ceiling.

About seven o'clock Mary heard him return.  She jumped up and
unbolted the door.  She had duties to perform, and she felt lonely.

"O, Val--I ought to dress."

"Yes," said he with a queer, stiff smile.

"What shall I wear?"

His face expressed inward effort.

"Something pink--rosy--"

She put on her rose and silver brocade, and heard him busy in his
dressing-room, but even the sounds he made were restrained and
careful and correct.  She had a curious wish to hear him whistle,
or drop something, and say "Confound it."  She realized, while she
was considering herself in her mirror, that she had never seen him
in action, walking fast, or playing a game, or laughing, or talking
as though he could not help it.  She had never seen him let himself
go.

The strong and silent were becoming a little too enigmatic, and she
felt lonely, and a little conscious of another occasion when a man
had loved her to the point of roughness.  And yet it had been with
a gentle roughness.

She brooded for three minutes, and looked at the two beds.  Yes, it
took two to make a marriage, and also an impulsive sense of
nearness.  But--if always--there was a gap, something unexpressed
and unfulfilled?

They dined notably, for Fream had rung for a waiter and had had the
menu brought up to his suite by the maître d'hotel, and so they
dined à la carte, with a very polite maître d'hotel presiding over
the little pomps and ceremonies of the meal.  Dishes were brought
and presented; the champagne--Roederer 1914--arrived in a pail of
ice.  An orchestra played.  Fream should have had every cause to be
proud of his wife.  She was beautifully gowned; she showed a
languor that might have enveloped the most admirable and
experienced of worldlings; she was quite the prettiest creature in
a crowded room.  And yet that little pagan love-feast was without a
soul.

They were frightened of each other, of that other shadowy, watchful
self.

"A little more champagne, dear?"

"No, really--Val, thank you."

"It will do you good."

Certainly it made her a little more talkative, but her vivacity was
pantomimic.


2


In the morning she heard Fream moving, but she lay very still,
pretending to be asleep, until the door of his dressing-room
closed.

She was conscious of a feeling of humiliation, and of pitiful
bewilderment.  She sat on the edge of the bed, with a vacant face,
pondering upon a shameful pity that seemed to well up out of the
deeps.  Such pity!  She could see that the sun was shining, and she
went and opened the shutters, and saw the sea as blue as lapis
lazuli, and felt the stir of that southern coast.  Three old men,
bent and black, with guitar, violin, and mandoline, struck up some
Italian love-song in the garden below.  They looked up at her
window.  One, the oldest and most bent of the three, began to sing
in a harsh and metallic voice, and at the end of each stanza he
broke into an absurd little shuffling dance.

What a serenade!  Old age cackling and posturing down there in the
sunlight.


3


During the days that followed she fell to a level of languid
resignation.  Never had she felt so tired, inwardly tired.  Her
bubble mystery had burst.

It could not be helped.  She suspected him of being the victim of a
humiliation far more final than was hers.  He had gone about with
the face of a man sick unto death; he had avoided her eyes; yet
never had he been so talkative.

And such talking, disjointed, spasmodic, and yet continuous, like
blood spurting perpetually from a wound.  He looked bleached.
Sometimes he broke into a stammer.

She felt desolated, submerged beneath his misery, yet without fully
understanding it and its final significance.  She was immensely
repelled; and also helplessly compassionate.  Never had she
experienced such loneliness, and crying out in the silence for
comfort she was kind to him because she felt that they were lost in
the same wilderness.

She did not know that her kindness humiliated him to the deeps.
They wandered about together like strangers, she a little
bewildered and appealing, he with a sick, bleached face, and a
mouth that emitted sounds like the mouth of a ventriloquist's
dummy.  He had discovered his own death, that he was not a live
man, but just that which he had suspected himself to be, a
manipulator of figures.


4


They went everywhere and did everything.  An equal feverishness
seemed to possess them both.  Yet, all the while, she was seeing
him vividly as she had never seen him before, as one seems to see
the still and naked soul of a man lying in his coffin.  She noticed
that when he talked his conversation dealt solely with material
things, objects and their value.  He was all surface, façade, a
human diagram, a piece of arithmetic.  He did not seem capable of
expressing any sentiment, or of seeing beauty, or of appreciating
the innumerable movements of the great shadow-show.  Æsthetically
he was colour blind,--and in his feelings--such as they were--
fatally dumb.  He had lost the language of normal manhood.

It shocked her.  So did his renewed lavishness.  He poured out
money, and there was something in her that began to be pitifully
offended by this lavishness.  Could he not express himself in any
other way?  He sent her into shops and made her buy things,
dresses, hats, jewellery, articles de luxe, useless things,
extravagant superfluities.  Once or twice she tried to protest--
"Val,--I don't want it," and almost he seemed angry--"Suppose I can
give you what I want," but the real anger was against himself.

She touched pathos.  She was astonished to find that she was not
enjoying the strawberry-bed as she had expected to enjoy it, and
that her poor, pretty, fruit-stained fingers hesitated over the
fruit.  Too much of it!  Having worn all her dresses and her pretty
pretties and shown them off before the other women at the
"Cosmopolis," before French women and Italians and Central
Europeans, and South Americans, yellow women and brown women, she
began to repeat the programme and found it less exciting.  Fream
never remarked upon her dresses.  He had the air of looking at
fruit which it was beyond his power to digest.

He hired a car, a most luxurious car.  They drove to Sospel and
Grasse and Vence, and up to Gourdon, and over the frontier to San
Remo.  They lunched at the most expensive hotels, and in a little
while she thought the food very ordinary.

They went almost nightly to the casino, and it was here that she
began to suspect and to know the real Fream.  At first he just
stood and watched the game, and indulged in an occasional and
desultory stake; two days later he slipped into the chair left by a
departing player.  He spoke to her over his shoulder.

"Care to watch me--I am going to have a little flutter."

She stood there an hour.  The air of the place made her head ache.
She thought that she had never seen such a collection of
unwholesome faces, faces that were dead to everything save the one
obsession, drugged faces.  Fream was winning.  She realized
suddenly that he had forgotten her.

She slipped away and out into the clean air, and walked a while
above the harbour before turning into the "Cosmopolis."  She went
to bed.  Fream came in about mid-night.  He looked both apologetic
and self-pleased.  Almost he suggested a slight swagger, a touch of
arrogance.

"Sorry to be late.  When did you go?"

She answered brightly.

"Oh,--I just slipped away, Val.  You were winning,--so I thought--"

His flat face had a sleek pallor.

"I won--Ten thousand francs or so.  That's my job, you know.  Got a
flair for it."

She had never seen him so animated; he seemed to have recovered
some of his self-respect.  If blood did not circulate--money did.

"Rather piques me--you know, doing the bank down with the chances
loaded against you."

Imperceptibly he drifted more and more to the casino, and she let
him go, and almost encouraged him to go.  It gave her solitude, and
she was astonished to find how she craved for solitude, as though
being eternally with one voiceless man was like being eternally
with a meaningless crowd.  She would find him in the sitting-room
after breakfast, scribbling figures and smoking a very strong
cigar.  She noticed that his correspondence increased, that bulky
envelopes came out to him registered, and that he received
telegrams.  She had a very vivid impression of him sitting stiffly
at the table, with his flat white face, the brown cigar projecting
from it, and one large white hand jotting down figures.  The
extreme tension of their mutual discomfort seemed to relax a
little.  She made one or two acquaintances in the hotel, went for
drives alone or picked up a protégé.  She even advanced to the self-
confidence of giving a luncheon party to three or four people, and
Fream attended it, and looked as though he were doing figures in
his head.

He went regularly to the casino.  Occasionally she went with him.
He won more often than he lost.  His knack of annexing money rather
frightened her; it was uncanny, just a little inhuman,--like
himself.


5


At the end of October they reached Rome, and put up at the
"Excelsior."  They had agreed to come on to Rome because both of
them had begun to suffer from concealed restlessness, and had
agreed brightly and like the very best of friends that Rome
attracted them.  Most certainly it attracted Mary.  She wanted to
see it and to be able to talk about it, St. Peter's, the Vatican,
the Forum, the Spanish Steps, Keats' grave, Tivoli, for she had a
passion to see things, to efface her rustic insularity.  The wife
of Mr. Percival Fream needed to be a woman of the world.

It was in Rome that she began to discover her husband's profound
ignorance.  That he should have but little French and no Italian
was of no moment, and quite English, and "quanto costa" carried him
as far as the contents of his pocket-book, but that he should be
under the impression that St. Peter's had been built by a Roman
emperor was something of a shock to her.  For, standing in the
piazza, he had looked with his flat eyes at the mass of stone.

"These Roman chaps could build."

She was so astonished that she was tempted to believe that Imperial
Rome must have produced St. Peter's.  Also, she had been ready to
suppose that he would be interested in pictures, since he possessed
two or three "old masters," but he was quite unable to distinguish
a Raphael from a Michelangelo.  She did know, having read it in the
guide book, that the window of Keats' room had overlooked the
Spanish Steps, and pausing to discover it she was questioned by
him.

"What are you looking for, my dear?"

He "my deared" her solemnly like a Victorian.

"Keats' window."

"No shops here."

"Keats the poet, Val."

"O, yes."

She was made to feel that he had never heard of Keats, and when she
took him to the Protestant Cemetery to see Keats' grave and the
resting-place of Shelley's heart, he wandered with her among the
cypresses and looked bored.  "No use for these poet chaps."  He did
not say so, but she divined it as his opinion.  But he had heard of
Romulus and Remus and the wolf, and of Garibaldi as a sort of
filibustering fellow in a red shirt.  They went to see the Coliseum
by moonlight, and he stood beside her with an air of meditation.

"Think of the ghosts, Val."

"Ghosts!"

He lacked both fancifulness and a sense of humour.

"Wonder how much money their box-office took on a full night?"

After that she despaired of his æsthetics.  She noticed that he
much preferred wandering along the Via Nazionale, and that he
wanted to find the "Bourse."  And always he would pause outside a
bank, and look it up and down as though estimating its solidity.
He allowed that these Italian fellows could build, but he thought
that the new Regent Street knocked them endways.  He was absurdly
interested in the rate of exchange, and played a little daily game
of his own with the lira, and wanted her to be interested in it,
and if he happened to be five lire on the right side he appeared
quite pleased.  They hired a car and drove to Tivoli and Frascati,
and he asked her--quite solemnly--whether she had ever had a meal
at "Frascati's."  But at the end of ten days she estimated his
boredom to be as profound as was his ignorance.  She went alone up
to S. Pietro in Montorio, and to the terrace of the Pincio, and
looked over Rome and wondered and felt sad.

For Mary and her husband had in the course of three or four short
weeks agreed--tacitly--to shut the door upon the physical phenomena
of marriage.  Emotionally it had been a fiasco, a humiliating
incident in the lives of both.  It was not discussed.  They locked
it up like a room in which some tragic event had happened.  After
all--there was all the rest of the house.

The band was playing in the gardens, and she stood and looked
towards St. Peter's.  Yes, there was all the rest of the house,
many things to enjoy, rooms which had not yet been opened or lived
in.  Her man might exist for money, but he was not mean about
money.  He was allowing her a thousand a year for dress and casual
personal expenses; and she was to have a little car of her own.

"It need not be so bad," she thought, and was shocked at her own
acceptance of life's relativity.  How quickly had she come down
from her peak to the levels of compromise and compensations!  Well,--
well!  She had not arrived at that degree of emotional persuasion
when a woman begins to ask questions, and to wonder whether
judgments are formulated and put into action.  Her grandee had
fallen out of his frame; he was a queer, inarticulate, kind,
ignorant, money-hunting man.  No, not quite a man.

She felt herself flushing.

"O, no,--I don't want to think--"

She put a bright face upon her misery, and returning to the
"Excelsior" found him in the lounge reading a financial paper.  He
looked pleased about something.  He told her that he had just
bought a couple of statues, marble--you know.  They would look
rather well on the terrace of Hill House.

A little, chilly sensation ran through her.  She sat down.

"Wouldn't you like to go home, Val?"

His glasses glimmered at her over the top of the paper.

"Just as you please, my dear."

"I think--I--Won't it be the wrong time of year for Naples and
Sorrento?"

His face had for her the same colour as the paper he had been
reading.

"Excellent idea,--personally.  Matter of fact--I'm rather badly
wanted in town."

"Let's go home," she repeated, but the word "home" had for her a
sound of unimaginable dreariness.


6


Clare Biddulph had her first sight of Mary the day after their
return to Hill House.

She came down to "Caradoc" in "Phoebus," wearing a musquash coat
that Fream had bought her in Paris.  She looked older, and quite
extraordinarily self-contained.  She drawled slightly when she
spoke.

Clare, unemotional creature that she was, yet felt a numbness.

"Well,--here you are.  Had a good time?  But of course you have."

"Perfectly lovely."

Mary did not look at Clare, but out of the window, and her
composure was like a white veil.  And she was daring Clare to lift
it, defying her to lift it.

"A perfectly lovely time.  Val had to come back on business.  We
had two days in Paris.  He bought me these furs."



XIX


1


In September "Doomsday" washed its face in the dew and knew a
second greenness.  With the last fortnight of August as wet as you
please, the resting soil,--refreshed and eager,--seemed to rush
into a second growth.  Furze had never seen anything quite like it.
The Long Meadow that a month ago had been a stretch of cracked
brownness had lushed up into a young hay crop.  The country shook
off the dust and the heat, and was glad.  Old garden flowers took
heart of grace and set out to bloom a second time.  The
blackberries, little hard red points, swelled into a lustrous
blackness.  September dews were heavy, and the sunlight like a
yellow wine, and in the dawns Furze saw a world of gold and of
silver, with Rushy mist-hung, and the oaks of Gore Wood catching
the early sunlight.

"A second spring,--a second summer," he thought, but the man in him
watched and considered.

Up at Carslake, girls, twittering under the old red roof of the
"George" before blowing out their candles, spoke of the eternal
adventure.

"Rose has a man--a lover."

Furze of "Doomsday," a gentleman lover!  She was teased and she was
envied, and she went about her work with the air of a girl who was
wise and who had seen reason to be happy.  She was not a great
talker.  She had a dignity of her own, and did not know it, but she
did know that fools abound, the men who ask for a whisky or a
bottle of beer as though they were asking for other things.
"Hallo, Rose dear."  Someone's arm round your waist on the stairs,
the most unexpected of arms!  No, she was a girl who had seen a
little of life and had remained clean, because she knew that when
her heart did let itself go the affair would be serious, and she
wanted a man who would be serious.  She was a big, gracious,
lovable creature.  She seemed to grow more silent and more grave
when the man came to her in the person of Arnold Furze.

"Hallo, Rosie."

"Good evening, Mr. So-and-so."

She put such bright "gentlemen" in their places, and did it quite
gently and with good temper, as though they were exuberant small
boys who had forgotten their manners.  They said to themselves that
Rose Hurley had a handsome and swollen head just because a farmer
fellow was supposed to be a little sweet on her.  Vulgar minds and
vulgar language.  The vulgarians were not maggots in the heart of
the rose.  Women have a knack of surprising men, and will always
surprise them, for it is good for a man that he should sometimes
fall on his knees and look upwards.  The Mother of God and of Man
is immortal.

Furze came up from Bean Acres where he had left the wheel plough
under a hedge.  The two grey horses came with him, following like a
couple of dogs, sensible beasts who waited for the man and master
to open and shut gates.  Meanwhile the man in Furze was opening and
shutting gates.  He was considering more things than the needs of
his body, and the slipshod activities of Mrs. Sarah.  Woman, what
was she?  A broken reed or a distaff, a honey-pot or a cradle?

He stabled the horses, unharnessed, watered, and fed them.  It was
not yet tea time, and four o'clock on that particular afternoon
when a young woman put off her black dress and her laced apron, and
became--Yes, just what did she become?  He paused in the stable
doorway, and became aware of an unusual sound, a sound as of
castigation.  And before him at that moment appeared Will, a Will
who hid a smile, and looked as solemn as an owl.

"What's that noise, Will?"

"Couldn't say, ssir."

"Your wife's not at work to-day?"

"She be not, ssir."

Furze went up to the house and into it.  He saw a woman's hat on
the sofa.  Also, the table had been laid for tea, and there was a
cake on a dish, a real, live homemade plum cake.  He caught a
glimpse through the open doorway of the floor of Mrs. Damaris'
parlour, and he realized that it was carpetless, and that the
boards had been scrubbed.  What the devil--!

He walked into the parlour, but there was no spider there.  The
furniture stood ranged neatly round the walls, and the window was
wide open, and through it he had a vision of a young woman, bare
headed and with her sleeves rolled up, folding up a carpet on the
grass.  A hazel rod lay near at hand.  The sound as of castigation
was explained.

He stood and watched her for a moment.  She picked up the folded
carpet as though it was no heavier than a tablecloth, shook her
black hair back, saw him, and stood at gaze.  Her smile came
slowly.  She had not expected him back so soon.

"Do you call this a holiday, Rose?"

He climbed out of the window and jumped, and would have taken the
carpet from her, but she stood back, and somehow gave him to
understand that it was not to be touched.

"You are back too soon."

"How's that?"

"I wanted the floor dry and this carpet down."

Almost she was austere with him, and he wondered why.  Was it that
she had not meant him to find her at work?  But why should she
mind?  It was unexpected and gracious of her to give him the labour
of her hands when she might have been on Hastings beach in a muslin
frock on the look-out for "pick ups."

"I don't say my prayers in public," said she.  "You can help me
down with this carpet.  That woman of yours is a slut."

He was obedient and thoughtful, but she seemed intent upon her job,
not looking at him, as though like a man he had arrived very much
at the wrong moment, and had put her in the wrong.  She began to
rearrange the furniture; he helped her, and she accepted his help,
but without acknowledging it.

When the last chair was in its place his right arm slipped round
her and found her rigid.

"What is it--my dear?"

"What?"

"Something has hurt you."

He held her, but her arms hung stiffly.

"O,--has it?"

"Yes.  Tell."

But she would not tell him.  She slipped away from his arm and into
the living-room, and said that the kettle should be boiling, and
that as she was a bold-faced jig she might as well make his tea.
And at that he grew deliberate and gently determined, and got her
beside him again, and spoke with his mouth close to her hair.

"You can tell me, Rose."

"No,--I can't."

They stood talking, and all that he could think of was that she had
not wished him to know that she was working in his house.  And why?
Did it look too much like a studied effect, Arabella's dimple that
deceived poor Jude?

"I think I know," he said, "and thank you, my dear."

She looked very grave.

"If you do know--well--you are not like most men.  What about that
kettle?"

He held her.

"Rose, no secrets between man and wife."

"I'm not that--yet," she said.

"You may be.  I want you."

Her eyes were as dark as night.

"How much?  No, I'm not a nasty, sly little bit of a girl.  If I
thought--"

"If you thought--?"

"I'd never see you again."

"But you will.  Because I know--"

"Oh,--you think you know!"

"I do know."

And he kissed her.


2


At tea he talked like a farmer, but a farmer who was also her
lover.

"Things are turning out better than I thought.  There will be more
keep for the sheep on the ten acre than looked possible three weeks
ago."

"I'm glad," she said, and he knew that she was glad.  He went on to
talk of the farm, intimately, as to one who was wise and concerned
and who understood and sympathized.  The attack of mammitis among
the cows had died away, and there was only one cow with any
induration of the udder.  The roots were a thin crop, and he would
have to buy winter feed, but things would not be quite as bad as he
had feared.  He thought of selling half a dozen cows, and buying in
again next year, and what did she think about it?  He had done
fairly well with his big black pigs and sheep.  Yes, plenty of
stock enriched your land, and saved you from having to spend too
much money on artificials.

"Of course--a man can do much more when he has the money.  Money
and time,--that's what the ordinary man lacks."

"And a fair show," said she; "the farmer does not get a fair show.
He is sacrificed for the cheap people in the towns.  They may find
it out some day."

She wanted to know about his chickens and ducks.  Did he do much
with them?  No, he had not the time.  She nodded.  Of course he
hadn't,--but a woman might have the time.

He smiled at her.

"There would be plenty of work."

"So there would."

"By the way--where did the cake come from, Rose?"

"I had it made at home by one of my sisters.  The real thing; not
your cake-powder stuff."

"Yes," said he, "so much of modern life is just cake-powder."

Will had been left to begin the milking, and when Furze went out to
the cow-house she cleared away the tea things and washed up.  When
the milking was done they were going over the farm together, and
having finished her work she went down to the cow-house.  There
were still two cows to be milked, and she made Furze give her his
white milking-coat, and she took the stool and the pail, and showed
him that her hands had not lost their cunning.  With her dark head
pressed against a brown flank she emptied the udder, while Furze
smoked a pipe and looked on.  She carried two of the pails to the
dairy, and in the cool gloom of the brick-floored, white-washed
room, her skin looked as white as the milk.

"You have a separator?"

"Not a very good one.  I bought it second-hand.  I want a new one.
I began with cream-pans."

She nodded.

"Nothing looked nicer my old grandmother used to say--than a row of
cream-pans in a clean dairy,--but machinery saves time.  I suppose
you have thought of buying a tractor?"

"Yes.  Can't afford it at present."

"Something to work for.  O, lots of things to work for.  That makes
life good."

In the cool of the September evening they wandered over the farm
together.  She was rather silent, but her eyes saw things,
including the rabbits feeding under the edge of Gore Wood.  They
were standing under the old thorn edge of the "Gore," and Furze's
eyes were on the oaks yellow-domed in the evening sunlight.  Many
of them would have to fall that winter, and he was sorry not only
for the loss of the trees, but because it meant more men about the
place, and wheel tracks across the Gore, and the lane cut to pieces
by the wheels of the heavy timber-tugs.

He told Rose that some of the oaks were marked for the sawmill.
She looked grave.

"A pity to sell timber."

"It's necessity, my dear.  I had a lot of things done to the house,--
and the money is needed."

She stood mute and thoughtful for some moments.

"How much are you counting on?"

"Oh,--I suppose a clear hundred or so would set things straight."

She said very little as they went down to Gore Wood, and came back
by way of the Long Meadow and the Doom paddock as the dusk and the
dew came down together.  Her face had a comely, dreaming
tranquillity; her big and gentle eyes were very wise.

"It's a sweet farm," she said as they turned into the orchard where
the trees were growing very black, and the roof and chimneys of the
house made an equal blackness.

"It's my life, my dear.  Come and share it--for better or for
worse, for richer or for poorer."

She gave herself to the hollow of his arm.


3


Locked away in a drawer in her bedroom at the "George Inn" Rose
Hurley kept a little fibre case in which she stored her letters,
a few pieces of jewellery, her money, and a gold watch.  Rose was
eight and twenty, and she had been working for five years, and
coming of the country stock she had saved money.  Yes, quite a
pretty sum thanks to her tips which had not been lessened by a
pleasant voice, dark eyes, and clean hands.

In this case she kept her Post Office book, and her Savings
Certificates.  She knew to a penny what she had, but that night she
sat on the edge of her bed, and by candlelight considered her
fortune.

Seventy-five pounds in Savings Certificates.  Forty-three pounds,
seven shillings and ninepence in the Post Office.  In all £118 7s.
9d.  Not so bad for a working girl!  And she sat there in her
nightdress and looked happy.  She had something to take to
"Doomsday" besides herself.

"No need to fell timber."

It was her next surprise for him, dearly conceived, and carried out
on her next visit to the farm.  She appeared to him in a pink and
white muslin frock, with white shoes and stockings, and a shady
hat.  Little hats were said to be going out, but the littled heads
would remain.  She sat on Arnold's sofa, and smiled at him.  A
brocade vanity-bag lay in her lap.  And he thought that he had
never seen anything more comely and cool and pleasant, with that
dark gentleness of hers, and the broad and clear wisdom of her
face.  She had come between him and his Cinderella love.  He had
come to love her too, a little differently, with less passion
perhaps, but with a more confident tenderness.  She would be so
good to live and to sleep with, a strong yet restful creature who
had some knowledge of what life could and could not be.

She smiled up at him.

"Open your hands and shut your eyes, Jack."

She had chosen to call him Jack.  Arnold was all very well, but
Jack came more plainly and gently off the tongue.

"What's this?  More cake?"

"Shut your eyes."

He humoured her.  He felt something unexpected placed in his hands.

"Open."

A blue-grey envelope and a red-brown-covered book surprised him.

"What's this?"

"My savings, Jack.  Take them--for both of us.  No need to sell
those oak trees."

He was more touched than she knew, though she could tell by his
eyes that her surprise had not miscarried.

"Rose,--my dear,--you mustn't--"

"And why not?  For richer or poorer, dear man.  It's not very much,
not quite a hundred and twenty pounds."

He bent over her.

"You dear thing.  Well, it's your farm--anyway--if anything should
happen to me."

She held him fast.



XX


1


If to be happy is to be comfortable Mrs. Mary Fream had nothing to
complain of, for Hill House in winter was even more comfortable
than Hill House in summer.  Yet the winter began with one week of
extreme discomfort, an indescribable week when her grandee mounted
his horse and made one last charge upon stubborn nature.  It proved
to be a forlorn hope and a failure, and between them arose a
conspiracy of silence, a bargain arranged and sealed without a word
being uttered.  Tacitly he offered her certain advantages, and she
accepted them.  It was a silent compact.  She was to be the most
decorative and live of his possessions, and though they occupied
rooms with a door that communicated, who was to know that her
grandee was not man enough to command that door.

Self-pity may suggest a more universal pity, and the realization of
the human fact that we all of us suffer, and Fream was very kind to
his wife, but inarticulately kind.  The relationship became rather
like that between a self-conscious and awkward father and a spoiled
child.  After that last and disastrous excursion into romance he
seemed to age very rapidly.  He tried to redress himself in the
habits of the last ten years, and he was at least ten years older.
It was a very humiliating experience, and depressing, because he
discovered that the destruction of a man's male self-confidence may
show its effects elsewhere; in his work.  He had gone back to his
work as though to hide himself in it, to find a solace and a new
self-respect, but his work was not quite the same; nor was he.
Undoubtedly he had a flair for figures, and the curiously cold and
long-sighted eyes of a money-maker.  He had combined a careful
shrewdness with intuition.  Always, he had taken great care to
reconnoitre the field of action; but the final movement had been
guided by that intuitive something within himself.  He had had
audacity.

Two months after his marriage an enterprising gentleman sold him a
pup.  In vulgar parlance that was what happened,--but there may be
more in such a happening than the mere loss of money.  The picking
of a pocket is less unpleasant than the feeling that you have been
fooled, or that you were not so sharp as you imagined you were.  It
was the first financial mistake that Percival Fream had made for a
very long time.  It shocked him, and possibly it frightened him a
little, just as one of those unpleasant sensations about the heart
frighten a man and make him wonder whether his body is all that it
should be.  The loss of two or three thousand pounds was nothing;
the first sagging of a man's confidence may be everything, and it
may be that the crumbling of Fream's self-confidence began during
those days after his marriage.  It was a very slow affair, like the
natural erosion of a cliff, or the hardening of a man's arteries.

Fatal Cinderella!  How was she to know that Furze had thought of
her in the end as a woman who brought a man bad luck.

"You want your cushion, my dear, and that's fatal.  Cushions should
be for the people who have finished with life."

She had her cushion, and a very large and comfortable cushion it
was.  She did not say to herself now--"Val is a dear"; she said:
"Val is so kind."  But what a white death of a kindness!  Her whole
day was a cushion.  At eight o'clock she was brought early tea with
two frail slices of bread and butter; at half-past eight she put on
a dressing-gown, and went to the rose marble bathroom, and came out
of it pink and glowing.  She was down in time to assist her grandee
through his toast and marmalade, and to pour out his second cup of
coffee.  A fire blazed; chafing dishes kept things hot; there were
two picture-papers, and all the weekly magazines on their
respective weekly birthdays.  Her Val went off at 9.30; Phoebus
carried him away to catch the 9.43.  With meticulous kindness he
would kiss the middle of her forehead.

"Enjoy your day, my dear."

She did enjoy it.  Her nursery was still full of toys.  One
Saturday morning early in December a little cerise and black coupe
had arrived outside the portico, her toy car.

"O, Val, how lovely!"

She had climbed into it and settled herself in the deeply cushioned
seat, and tried the pedals and the gear-lever, and examined the
many gadgets.  It was a beautiful little car, as exquisitely
finished as an enamel trinket box.  You pressed a button on the
dash-board, and a little cabinet opened, and offered you face-
powder and a mirror, and orange sticks, and nail-cream, and a
choice of scents.  Another minute cupboard held a little brocade-
covered blotter, postcards, note-paper, a fountain-pen and pencils,
a notebook bound in blue vellum.  You had your clock, calendar, a
letter-box.  She had insisted on her husband getting into the car
with her, and she had driven carefully up and down the drive.

"I shall call her 'Cherry,'--Val."

And she had kissed him on one flat white cheek.

"You are a dear to me."

Yes, she could enjoy her day.  It was pleasant to drive down to
Weyfleet in "Cherry" and to know that no other woman in the place
had quite so exquisite a car.  She liked shopping.  It was pleasant
to go into the grocer's and the butcher's, and to know by the quick
politeness of the tradespeople that she was Mrs. Fream of Hill
House.  Buying things still thrilled her, especially the little
luxuries that are only for the few,--the best grapes, the best
peaches, perfumes that other women could not afford, flowers,
sweets.  She had joined the Weyfleet Golf Club and was taking
lessons from the local professional.  Two or three times a week she
went up to town, and "Cherry" was parked in St. James's Square,
while my lady took a dancing lesson and shopped and had tea at the
"Ermine Club."  Weyfleet played much "bridge," but Mary found
herself such a brown bunny at the game and lost so much fur to the
old soldiers that she had to ask Clare to coach her.  Clare lost
very little to anyone.  Then there were the weekly dances at the
Hills Club.  You could be as smart as your husband pleased, and
thanks to Clare's taste Mary was very smart.  Val did not dance,
but the buoyant Leslie was an expert,--and there were other
experts, young stockbrokers and business men.  Mrs. Fream became a
partner to be desired.  Other women began to say carefully unkind
things about her.

What did it matter?  She did not hear what was said.  She held her
cake in both hands.  Her husband came to the dances, and sat or
stood with a perfectly expressionless face, and paid for champagne,
and retreated at times to the card-room.  The youth of the young
men jostled him.  He would stand stiffly in corners, and try to
smile at Mary's partners, and appear the complaisant fellow.  He
could not express himself even to himself.  Anyway, no other woman
was more exquisitely gowned than his woman.  He liked to collect a
supper party and order them most expensive champagne.  He wished
there were other ways in which his money could be made to express
itself.  Yes, to dominate the world, and dazzle a poor little
Cinderella who was more of a Delilah than she knew.  Her
inarticulate Samson had not much hair to lose.

At dinner one evening he made a suggestion.

"We ought to give a dance."

"Val,--I'd love it."

"A real swagger dance.  Show these people something.  What!"

"Here, or at the club."

"O,--here.  More scope--you know.  Something original.  What about
New Year's Eve?"

"Splendid.  Couldn't we make it a bal masque?"

"What's that?"

"We all wear masks, you know."

They were wearing them already, and did not know it.


2


Meanwhile, Clare Biddulph kept three cool fingers on the pulse of
her sister's marriage.  That the marriage was not an emotional
success seemed to her fairly obvious.  Mary was a warm-hearted
creature, and not a little impulsive, but too warm a heart may
prove disastrous.  Moreover it is not wise to deliver homilies to a
young woman who happens to be very much in love with herself, and
very full of her house and her wardrobe and her jewellery and her
car.  Mary had a very pretty swollen head; she was Mrs. Fream of
Hill House; her smartness was growing.

Clare touched the relationship coolly.  There were certain things
that she wished to say to Mary, but she doubted the ripeness of the
soil.  Platitudes are truths that are always being rediscovered,
but there are certain platitudes with which a married woman of
experience is familiar, but which cannot be breathed over to dear
friends.  A woman may write of such things in her diary, but she
will keep that diary under lock and key.

Clare wanted to say to Mary--"When you are very young--my dear--you
may suffer from that zymotic disease called idealism.  You think
that butterflies' wings matter, and kisses, and moonlight, and
Tennyson--and all that; but the one thing that matters is money.
Materialism, my dear, intelligent materialism.  For unless you
happen to be one of those curious creatures called artists there is
no beauty for you without money.  It is the lining of your nest,
the fire in your life's house, the nice perfume in your wardrobe.
Without money life is a sweaty business; it does not smell nice; it
loses its figure; its breasts flop and its tummy protrudes; its
feet are flat; it is apt to run to red noses and to little twists
of hair stuck on like a blob at the back of your head.  Its ankles
thicken.  It travels third class, and is always in a crowd; and it
carries pulpy vegetables home in a basket, and drinks too much tea,
and sits in the sixpenny seats at the picture-house.  A frowsy
baggage, my dear, good and hard-working--and all that--but--ye gods--
how ugly.  Without money--no space--no pleasant aloofness--neither
room nor leisure to be yourself.  Don't be a sentimentalist.
Cherish your money--my dear--and the man who makes it."

It was her husband--however--who suggested sisterly intervention.

"She ought to be told not to dance quite so much--"

"With young Pagan?"

"O, Pagan and other chaps."

Clare knew that it was young Dick Pagan who had sinned against
Leslie's kindly code.  Pagan was a good-looking but wooden-faced
young man with a rather insolent blue eye, a very erect head and
neatly squared shoulders.  His unpopularity with most of the older
men was quite extraordinary.

"A pup--you know,--but with the cheek of the devil.  A young cad
too.  Been talking in the train."

"O?"

"Sanders told me.  O,--well never mind what he said.  Perhaps you
can guess."

Clare could guess.  She knew the Pagan type.  It was good at games;
it was full of fleshly assurance, and quite ruthless in taking what
it wanted.  Clare divided the adventurous males into two classes;
she called them the silk-merchants and the butchers.  Leslie was a
silk-merchant, a kindly, good-natured trader who would never push a
bargain to its inevitable conclusion.  The butchers were different,
though your complete and consistent butcher was not often met with,
the young man who cut the throat of a woman's desire, dabbled his
hands in the blood of it, and left the carcase lying derelict.

She agreed with Leslie.  Mary ought to be warned against young
butchers.

"You could imagine the chap in a blue coat, cutting up joints with
a cleaver.  Even his face--"

"Hard and brown--and rather red.  No playee--with the butcherly
boyee--"

She set about it delicately.  Her lamb was a very holy lamb, and it
carried a little flag.  You had to remember the flag and the
inscription upon it--"I am Mrs. Percival Fream of Hill House."
Yes, Mary was taking herself very seriously, and this very
seriousness could be starched against all young Pagans.

Clare knew that it is not wise to tell another woman to snub a
particular man.  The result may be obtained more nicely by snubbing
him yourself in her presence.  She may ask you the question:  "Why
did you snub the poor boy like that?"  Then the wise woman can get
in her bodkin thrust, and these thrusts may save souls.  "O,--that--
young cat's-meat merchant!"  You drawled the words with casual
serenity.  "No, my dear, that sort of young man bores me."

Perhaps you wrapped it up a little more delicately in silver paper.
The important thing was that you should show no animus, but only
show up the butcher.

So, it happened just as Clare had intended it should happen at one
of the Hills Club dances a week or so before Christmas.  And after
it had happened, young Pagan, with a nasty look in his blue eyes,
and his wooden face in the air like the face of a ship's figure-
head, supposed to Mary when she danced with him that Mrs. Biddulph
did not like him.

"Told me off, didn't she."

Mary looked sympathetic.

"Perhaps your steps don't match."

"She doesn't like me."

He was quite truculent about it, and then grew rather sulky and
silent, and came up half an hour later with the obvious purpose of
extracting the lamb from under Mrs. Clare's protecting petticoats.
Yes, and be damned to her!

But the lamb proved shy.  There had been an adjournment to the
ladies' room and a powdering of noses.  "Why did you snub Mr.
Pagan?"  Clare had aimed at a quick impression.  She had smiled at
herself in the glass.  "Me no dancee with butcher-boyee."--"My
dear!"--"Well it bores me.  Pups are boring enough--but bad pups!--
No--thankee."  An impression swiftly conveyed from woman to woman,
and registered for future use.

Hence Mrs. Fream had a dignified headache, and young Pagan went
off, damning Mrs. Clare for a jealous cat.  Of course Pompous
Percival's wife was fair game.  She had married the chap for his
money.  If he--Pagan--did not get her into his meat-tray some other
butcher-boy would.

Mary's headache was productive.  It flowed in the card-room where
her husband was losing money at "bridge," and wondering at the
abominable hands he held.

"Val--I have such a headache--"

"My dear, would you like to go home?"

"Please."

"I'll have the car sent round."

Mrs. Fream went out on her husband's arm.


3


The Hill House dance was to be a very swagger affair.  Black silk
masks were to be worn, but Mrs. Fream would supply the masks.
There would be boxes of them in the cloak-room, and you took a mask
just as you took a programme.  It was suggested that each lady and
gentleman should choose a letter, Mr. A,--or Miss Z.

"But of course," said Clare; "half the men will want to be Mr. X.
Still, let it go."

Dick Danvers' Jazz Band was coming down from town.  Bunter's were
to do the supper.  The billiard-room and the hall were to be
cleared for dancing.

Mr. Fream was full of ideas.

At midnight a huge bowl of rum-punch would be placed in the middle
of the dancing-floor, and Mary, dressed as the new year, would with
a ladle of silver fill the guests' glasses.  He suggested that the
old year should be represented by a couple of stout lads
functioning as the fore-legs and hind-legs of an ass, and that the
ass should draw a coster's barrow full of presents for the ladies.
"Real turnips and carrots and cabbages, you know, with presents
inside them."  Mary thought it a lovely idea.  And who would
distribute the presents?  Fream smirked.  He would.  Twenty years
ago he had fancied himself as a coster; he had the clothes, he had
gone to fancy dress dances in them.  Pearly buttons--you know.  But
he had another idea which he kept to himself.  Among other things
he had collected coins; he had a couple of dozen English sovereigns
of various dates; these should be sown on his coat in place of the
pearly buttons.

Mary was full of her dance.  She and Val would show Weyfleet just
what Hill House could do.  She invited about a hundred people, and
when Clare pointed out that the letters of the alphabet would not
go round, Mary said that some of her guests could wear numbers,
those who came late.

"As though they had escaped from the cloak-room!"

During the supper dance there was to be a joyous rag, with toy
balloons and serpentines and flowers and confetti.  Then the
champagne would flow.

"What are you going to wear, my dear?"

Mary told him that she had a special frock coming down from
"Isabeaus."

"Afraid I've been a bit extravagant, Val."

"Make the other chaps' wives look shabby," said he, "that's the
spice and the pepper."


4


Mary sent Christmas presents to "Green Shutters," a box of cigars
for her father, a fur wrap for Mrs. Charlotte, and a pink jumper
for Cousin Nellie.

Her mother's Christmas letter contained a piece of news that
affected her unpleasantly.  Almost it destroyed her appetite for
her New Year's festa.

"Mr. Furze has married a girl who was a waitress at 'The George' at
Carslake.  We all think it rather a pity."

Just that!  And Mary was angry and contemptuous and peeved.  Poor
Arnold!  A common waitress, a girl with red hands, who would giggle
and say "Oo-er!"  How very sordid of him!

And yet--perhaps--she herself was a little to blame.  No doubt he
had married his waitress out of pique.

She felt sorry and she felt insulted.

Also, she could still smell that hay-cock in spite of Rimmell and
Coty.


5


On that New Year's Eve, from the warm firelit hollow of the Hill
House library Mary saw the sun set over the park.  It vanished as a
redness in a mass of amethyst cloud, outlining for a space the
figure of the dancing faun, and giving a golden bloom to the grass.
A bluish gloom flowed in, and the figure of the faun grew dim.  She
sat in front of the fire and felt regal.  Even the sunset had
coloured the day for her, and added to the distinction of the
scenery.  A pleasant activity made itself felt in the house.  Val
was coming down by the five o'clock train.  In an hour or so she
would go up to dress.

Yes, that is how she would have described her mood of the moment;
she felt regal.  Success shone upon her forehead.  She saw herself
the centre of a gay crowd, exquisitely gowned, receiving homage,
conscious of envy.  She alone among all the women would wear no
mask, for a hostess could not be masked when she ascended her
little social throne and looked brightly round.  In the mirror of
her own self-consciousness she was essentially Mrs. Percival Fream
of Hill House.  The night and the occasion were hers; she was a
little dazzled by herself, in love with herself.

Meanwhile, she rang for Jessup.  It was very pleasant to exercise
authority.

"O,--Jessup,--I want to see Bunter's man."

"Yes, madam."

She saw him.  He came and stood deferentially before her, big and
flabby and fair.  She questioned him closely.  She hoped that he
understood that there was to be no sparing of the champagne.  He
assured her that the arrangements were perfect; there would be no
hitch,--there could be no hitch.  His bland deference made her feel
still more regal.

Half an hour later Jessup came to say that Mr. Danvers had arrived
with his band, and that he wished to see the lady of the house.
Certainly; she wished to see Mr. Danvers.  Fream had returned, and
had gone up to dress so that he should be ready to inspect all the
arrangements.  He and Mary were dining in the library.

Mr. Danvers was introduced, a little, dark, alert man, rather too
well dressed, and with too much silk handkerchief protruding from
his sleeve.

"I understand you are using both the billiard-room and the hall."

He did not address her as madam, and she took to herself some of
Clare's manner.

"Certainly.  We are having fifty couples.  You will place your band
where the music can be heard in both rooms."

He bowed very stiffly.

"About the programme--you are to cut out a waltz in each half.  I
expect there will be a number of extras."

"There usually are."

She allowed him to see a cool profile.

"By the way--there are five--performers--"

"Musicians, madam."

"How many saxophones?"

"Two saxophones, a piano, a violin, a cello."

"Cut out one of the saxophones.  Can he play anything else?"

"A violin."

"Let him play a violin.  The saxophone is overdone."

She felt still more regal when she had disposed of Mr. Richard
Danvers.

At six o'clock she went up to dress, assisted by Pollock her maid.
She looked a pretty creature, but it was her ambition to be more
than pretty.  She sat in front of the glass while Pollock, who was
a trained coiffeuse, attended to her hair.  She looked at herself
in the mirror and thought of poor Furze.  She rather wished that
Arnold could see her to-night before going back to his waitress.
He would be able to appreciate differences.  She would like to
picture him looking in at a window and watching her dancing or
playing the charming hostess.  Poor Arnold!  But how very sordid of
him!  To give his broken heart into a pair of red hands.  Did his
waitress giggle and say "Oo-er" when he kissed her?

Impossible people, rustics!

Pollock was asking her what scent she would use.

"O, Jasmin de Corse--I think, Pollock."

"Yes, madam."


6


Even the fastidious Clare allowed that the Fream dance was very
well done.  The Freams and the Biddulphs were allies, and the shine
of the one was the shine of the other.  Leslie, that Sun in Taurus,
was joyous and emphatic.  "Top-hole show.  Good floor, good band,
rattling good supper, plenty of first-class fizz.  And atmosphere,
old thing, atmosphere."

He was right.  The Hill House dance had an atmosphere.  It glowed
pleasantly from the first fox-trot, and when it reached the supper-
dance it radiated a gentle brilliancy that suffused itself into the
champagne.  People warmed to each other.  "Really, what a charming
crowd!  And a charming house, and a charming hostess.  And--by Jove--
some frock on her."  Fream's donkey and coster's cart set the
world rolling; the donkey frisked; Fream distributed carrots and
cabbages and turnips from which were extracted pretty powder-boxes,
and bottles of choice scent, and jade and amber pendants.  Even
Fream's gold buttons were forgiven him.  He wore his sovereigns,
and his wife felt more and more regal.  The dutiful ass provided a
climax.  When Mary had served rum-punch to everybody, and they had
made a circle about her and sung Auld Lang Syne, the ass made an
effort to kneel before her, but becoming unbalanced in its
interior, rolled over and lay as though expiring.

The men cheered.  Masks had been taken on long ago, but there
continued to be about ten Mr. X's who insisted on remaining
vizored.  The ass was assisted to its feet.  Its hinder portion
contained a certain lad who should not have been at the party, but
who had been smuggled in the place of a disappointing husband.
Fream, calling for two volunteers in the cloak-room, had in his
egregious innocence had this young spark fastened upon him.  It was
Mr. Richard Pagan who went into the hind-quarters of the ass.

Later, he provided a climax of his own, a purely personal climax.
Still masked, despite champagne and his adventures in donkeydom, he
danced twice with his hostess.  The lad had had his hair dyed
black.  Even Clare did not detect him.

"Done you, Mrs. Biddulph!"

Irresponsible butcher-boy!

"I say, Mrs. Fream,--this show of yours is it.  And you don't know
me from Adam."

She did not.  No Pagan had been invited; no such young barbarian.

"I say, let's sit out this one.  Sure you must be tired.  Don't
look it--of course."

"I can't sit out with a Mr. X."

"O, yes, you can; come along."

She was feeling a little less consciously regal, and wholly
triumphant.  She allowed him to take her to a corner of the
conservatory that was dimly lit by red Japanese lanterns.  He found
a sofa for two behind palms and a young mimosa.  And there, with a
sort of insolent and appreciative deliberation, he put a sudden arm
round her--and kissed her neck.

He was surprised at her fury.

"You cad--!  Who are you?"

He took off his mask.

"It's me.  Don't cut up so rough--and pretend--"

She stood up, trembling, outraged, she the great young Lady of Hill
House, his hostess, Mrs. Percival Fream, perhaps Lady Fream, caught
and mouthed on a sofa by a blackguard boy!  And her neck too!

"You will leave the house.  At once please--"

Her breath came quickly.

He stood up, sulky and savage.

"Humbug.  Everybody knows--my dear.  If a woman marries a cheque-
book in trousers."

"Leave the house," she said; "how dare you say such things."


7


The night's triumph was tarnished.  She went to bed at some
impossible hour in the morning, very tired, yet not too tired to be
conscious of a horrible feeling of insecurity.

That a man should have dared to treat her like that in her own
house and on such a night, and to blurt out the exact truth!  Young
beast that he was, and yet so brutally right, and more honest in
the face of his lust than she was in the face of her pride.

But how absurd to be made to feel so insecure by such an incident!
And why?  And ought she to tell her husband, or Clare?  No, insults
were best kept hidden.

She got to sleep after an hour of agitation, and of weariness, and
she did not wake till Pollock brought her her morning tea.

"A happy new year, madam."

She was half awake and a little bewildered.  The new year?  O, yes.
And of course it was going to be happy.  Her dance had been a
delightful success, but why had that blackguard boy kissed her?



PART III

DOOMSDAY



XXI


1


It was a September night, and a moon was shining, and Arnold Furze
went out into the orchard, though why he went there he did not
know.  Perhaps he went because the shadows drew him, and the
obscure solitudes under the old trees, and perhaps because he would
be so very much alone there with his own terrible loneliness.

It was seven days since her death, seven days of a numb sort of
bewilderment and of an inexpressible anguish, of things dimly
realized in the midst of the day's inevitable work.  Beasts have to
be looked to and cows milked even when a woman is lying dead.  He
had gone dully through the familiar routine, and yet finding in it
a poignant strangeness, an almost meaningless futility.  And only a
week ago she had helped him to milk those cows.

After supper on this September night the full realization of all
that her death meant to him seemed to break like that rain cloud on
the day when she had come to him wet and laughing through Bean
Acres.  And what a death, so wanton and so preventible!  A half-
intoxicated road-hog week-ending along the Hastings road on a
Saturday evening, and Rose, cycling back from Carslake and caught
where the Melhurst and Rotherbridge roads met.  She had died the
same night, died in her man's arms, after two years or so of happy
comradeship.  And Furze!  Furze had looked at her lying dead, and
then--with a perfectly white face--had hunted out his old service-
revolver and loaded it.  He had gone out of the house and half-way
up the road to Carslake with the intention of shooting the drunken
swine who had killed his wife.  The fellow, who had put up at "The
George", and was drinking hard, had assured everybody that the
smash had been no fault of his.  But half-way up the road Furze had
faltered and turned back.  It was as though his dead wife had
called him.  "Don't touch the poor sot, Jack; life is not worth
it."  He had sat down in a dry ditch and had played with the
pistol.  No--not, that!  No cowardliness of that sort.  She had
never shown any cowardice.

Now--he was alone.  He found himself leaning against an old apple
tree whose trunk forked about four feet from the ground, and in
this fork his body came to rest.  He hung there, staring at the
moon through the foliage.  He faced his loneliness as he faced the
moon.  It came to him in splintered patches like the light through
the foliage, little--broken spasms of consciousness, separate yet
part of the same aliveness.  The presence of her had passed.  When
he went back to the house there would be no one to whom he could
cry "Girl."  And if he called there would be no answer.  One of his
shirts that she had been mending still lay neatly folded on the
sofa, and he had left it there.  And gone were all these other
intimate breathings, the warmth and the softness and the sweet
smell of her, and the way she would draw his head down on to her
shoulder.

Damn it,--he could not sleep.

And when he did sleep he woke up like a little, lonely boy crying
for his mother.  O, and more than that.  Like a man whose body had
been torn open.  The heart of him had gone, or had turned to water.

He felt desolate, bitter, rather helpless.

In those two years they had gone through so much together.  She had
saved his pride in his job, his good temper, those trees in Gore
Wood.  He had re-christened it "Rose Wood," and Rose Wood it would
remain.  Moreover she had saved his money, those precious pounds
wrung from the soil, and had cheered him and worked with him
through a bad year.  Brave, gracious, practical Rose.  He felt now
that she had gone--that he could not sow his winter corn.  Let the
seed stay in the bin.  And it hurt him to milk the cows whose
udders had been emptied by her hands.

But what a tragedy,--his tragedy!

The year had been a good one; they had bought a new bedroom carpet,
a new seed drill and other machinery; the living-room and Mrs.
Damaris' parlour had been papered and painted.  And they had
decided to have a child.  Their child had been conceived two months
ago.  The sot in the car had killed that also.

Furze felt bitter, though bitterness salves no wound, and he knew
it.  But he wanted to feel bitter, because--somehow--he wanted to
get back at fate, at the thing--whatever it was--behind the
phenomenon of consciousness--that had struck at him.  He wanted to
strike back, to throw his bomb back at circumstance or God or the
Devil, just as in the war he had thrown his shells at the Germans.
Childish--perhaps, but at times there is a relief in childishness.
Without it a man may go mad or become religious.

Cinderella a pale dream, Bobbo dead, Rose dead!  What had he left
but the farm, "Doomsday"?  By God, "Doomsday" was a good name for
it.  Why not make it his doom, a battlefield upon which to fight
the god of all cussedness and interference?  Man's eternal fight.
To succeed, to get goods and money, to be able to toss a bad
halfpenny in Nature's face, and cock his head and mock at her.  "Ha--
you She-dog, back to your kennel.  I'm master; the man is master."

It seemed to him that it was necessary for a tiller of the soil to
be hard.  He knew that he was going to be very lonely.  While Rose
was with him he had never felt hard.

"O,--my dear," he thought, and hung in the fork of the apple tree
like a man on a cross.

Christ's cross.  And Christ had forgiven.  Yes, but Golgotha had
been something of a stage.  Old Peter--now!  Ready to strike with a
sword.  And circumstance had sent a lying, swinish sot in the
chariot of progress to drive over his love and his happiness.  Ha,
in the old British days he would have driven a spear through the
charioteer's belly.  But these were not the old British days, but
days of sensibility and formal snivellings.

Furze felt weary.  Grief may be a gentle weariness, but bitterness
exhausts like a scorching sun.

He raised himself from the fork of the tree.  He would go to bed.

But that bed,--her bed.

He slept on the sofa, with the shirt, that she had mended, under
his head.


2


The work on a farm goes on.  Beasts have to be fed and watered,
cows milked, the fields ploughed, roots pulled and clamped.  The
orchard was full of apples, and Rose had had her eyes upon those
apples.  She had meant to gather most of them herself and to store
the best keepers in one of the attics so that they should fetch a
better price towards Christmas.  So Furze got up before dawn, and
added apple gathering to the sorrowful heaviness of the day, for
Rose would have picked those apples, and he would pick them for
her.

In the dusk--at the end of a long day--he would hear apples falling
in the orchard, with an occasional soft thud upon the grass.  It
was like a blow struck upon his heart.  He would go on gathering
fruit until he could not see.  What did it matter?  He could not
sleep as he had slept beside his wife.

The ragwort was all gold; the bracken stood shoulder high, and in
the hedges the brambles were studded with black fruit.  O, these
September days, and the early days of October, still and golden,
with mist in the mornings and the grass and hedgerows all grey with
dew.  Beautiful sweet moisture,--and in his heart was a sound of
wailing.  And Will's wife came up to the house wearing that same
old cap, with her sly eyes and her red-tipped nose.  Her activities
mocked him.  He felt that he could not touch the food that her
nasty little shiny red hands had fingered; nor could he bear her to
touch what Rose had touched.  He sent her away.  He would go back
to the old days of three years ago, and rub along like a
backwoodsman, eating any sort of food, sleeping between blankets,
shaving twice a week.  What did it matter?  The sweetness had gone
out of his life.  He was nothing but a fighter, sweaty and hot and
grim, with his hand on Nature's throat while her claws tore at his
belly.

There were happenings that made him laugh strange laughter.  To him
one day when he was up an apple tree came a precise and snuffy
little old man in a grey suit.  The little man stood under the
apple trees, and looked up at Furze with eyes as blue and as cold
as a seagull's.

Furze listened to him, an apple in his hand.

The road-hog had been censured at the inquest.  Yes, certainly.
The police should have taken up the case.  Manslaughter--obviously.
But had not Mr. Furze considered the question of a civil action.

"How so?" asked the man in the tree.

"I presume, sir,--that your wife--the wife of a working farmer--"

"You mean--she was of use to me?"

"Quite so.  You have been deprived--most cruelly deprived of the
services of your wife."

"True.  She helped with the milking, and made butter, and did the
housework."

"Obviously a case for damages, most ample compensation.  A
certainty, sir."

"You mean--that I am to get damages from a drunken cad--for the
death of my wife?"

The little man tilted his head and looked prim.

"Sentiment apart, a most gross case.  The fellow is a man of some
substance.  In fact--we might not have to take the matter into
court.  A little pressure--"

The man in the tree was silent.  His silence lasted a quarter of a
minute.  Then the apple in his hand smashed itself on the ground at
the little man's feet.

Sometimes in the evening Furze would open his piano and try to play
it, but there were some of Rose's songs on the top of the piano,
and he would end by sitting hunched up and silent on the chair.
Music,--sweet sounds,--her voice!  A night came--when in a moment
of savage pain--he brought a fist down upon the keys, and things
broke.  Music and rhythm indeed, and a voice that sang in his
dreams!  He went out into Mrs. Damaris' garden and wept.

People talked about him.  Mrs. Sarah started the gossip, because he
had turned her out of the house.

"I wouldn't go nigh the place,--no, not if he were to go down on
his knees to me.  It's my belief he's gone queer in his head."

Other people noticed the change in him, though Will spoke up for
his master.

"Powerful fond of her he was.  And she were a good wife.  No
terrifyin' tongue.  Maybe a man may be allowed to grieve--"

He shut his wife up.

"You ain't no sense.  Mrs. Furze was a woman as a man would miss.
You shut that b--y mouth o' yourn."

Tradesmen at Carslake would see Furze come into their shops on
Saturday evenings, carrying an old haversack, and looking as though
he had lost something and would thank no one for trying to find it
for him.  He had lost his smartness.  It was obvious that he did
not bother because he did not care.  What the use of a new clean
collar when there was no one to see it, at least no one who
mattered?

Now and again old Hesketh Viner came to the farm.  He was growing
very feeble, and Furze was gentle to old Viner.  They had not much
to say to each other, but would sit in a couple of chairs before
the fire--if there was a fire--and smoke and drop occasional
remarks to each other.  Their silences were pregnant.

"Life's a funny business, my dear fellow."

Furze's face suggested that it was a very grim one.

"It seems a damned silly business at times, sir.  One wonders why
it was in the war one was afraid of dying."

Now and again he gathered little fragments of news of Cinderella.
She came once or twice a year to Cinder Town, drove her car down,
but stopped only two or three days.  It appeared that Mrs. Fream
was a very busy young woman, though what she was busy about Arnold
could not imagine.  No, she had no children, but a house full of
servants.  Wealthy--yes--very.  Old Hesketh supposed that Mary had
many social duties; both his daughters appeared to have many social
duties.  Leslie Biddulph, one of his sons-in-law, was nursing a
suburban constituency, and Clare was assisting with the bottle.
Yes, he and Mrs. Charlotte had been to stay with the Freams, but
had not enjoyed the visit.  Old Viner did not say so, but Furze
gathered that the Fream household had not suited Mary's father.  It
had been altogether too busy and big for him; too full of
meaningless activities.

But it seemed that Mary had everything that should make her happy.

Furze thought of her sometimes, especially if he happened to be
near Rose Wood.  And he would think of her just a little
scornfully, and bow his head in memory of the other woman.

Strangely enough Furze was more in Mary's thoughts than she was in
his.  She had a curious grudge against him, a little--sore--tender
spot under her new smart serenity.  She had heard that poor Arnold
had lost his waitress.  What an unlucky fellow he was!  Or should
she consider it fortunate?  And there had been no children.

She would allow herself to wonder what the man of the hay-cock was
making of life.  Did he still love the farm, and that deplorably
picturesque old house?

For it had a picturesqueness, something that haunted her, something
that was a little frightening.  It sat there among its woods and
fields, and watched and waited, like a blind-eyed old woman who
could cast a spell.


3


Then the winter came, and Furze seemed to grow thinner and more
hard.  He went about his work with a deliberate and silent
sombreness, like a beast coming out and going in, shaggy looking,
austere, stodging through the mud and the muck of the byres, with
rain upon his face, and the north wind in his eyes.

When the darkness shut him in, and the beasts had been milked and
fed, and there was nothing more for him to do, he sat and thought
many thoughts before the fire.  Too much loneliness may mean too
much thinking.  Also,--his working bench had come back into the
living-room, and he would patch boots and mend harness, and sharpen
tools, and do some desultory carpentering.  Or he would go out into
the wood lodge and hang up a lantern and saw wood, laying log after
log upon the sawing-stool, his head bent, his moving arm opening
and shutting a patch of light upon the lodge wall.  Sometimes a
restlessness would possess him, and he would wander along the wet
dark roads,--but there were motors here, rushing past in the
darkness, splashing up mud, with the blinding arrogance of their
great eyes.  Once, when one of these cars drove him nearly into a
ditch, he picked up a stone from a heap of road metal and threw it.
He could not hear a car without feeling a dull anger glowing in
him.

Every day was much like every other day, save that one was more wet
than another, or more windy, or there seemed more mud about.  It
was a wet winter, with one short spell of frost before Christmas,
and the sun invisible for days on end.  A grey sky, pressing low,
seemed to rest on the tops of the beeches of Beech Ho.  The farm
tracks were rutty quagmires; the brook overflowed the Long Meadow,
and in the marshes below Rotherbridge the floods were out.

Furze's heavy boots were caked with clay.  He dried them in front
of the fire at night, and cleaned and greased them once a week.
Days passed without his getting out of his working clothes into one
of the suits that his wife used to fold and put away in the
camphored chest of drawers.  He went about the farm in the wet
weather with a sack over his shoulders.  The house seemed likely to
become the house of a sloven, or rather--the home of a man who had
cared too much and who now could not bother to care at all, save
that Mrs. Damaris's parlour was left to the dust, and that the big
bedroom above it was never used by him.  He kept it locked.  It
remained just as she had left it, with the same sheets on the bed,
and her clothes hanging in the cupboard, and her shoes ranged under
the dressing-table.  A lace cap hung on the mirror; her ebony
hairbrushes and comb lay on the table, and hanging from a hook on
the door--and half hidden by a rose-coloured dressing-jacket--was
the yellow jumper she had worn that day when she had come to him
through the rain.  Pathetic patch of colour, a little faded now,
and frayed at the cuffs, for she had used it at her work, but vivid
as ever as a piece of emotional colour.

Furze entered this room once a week,--on a Sunday, and using an old
silk handkerchief, brushed the dust from her shoes, and from the
brushes and mirror, and looked at her clothes, and laid a hand
gently upon her pillow.  There was no doubt about his being in
danger of becoming an eccentric sort of person, a man of one idea,
and of one set mood that was like the winter sky, and of the same
quality of sombre greyness.  He had nothing in his life but work,
and he asked for nothing else but work.  Occasionally he attended
Carslake market, or drove a wagon to the station.  He smoked many
pipes, but drank no liquor.  The labour of the farm sufficed him,
the daily round, the stodging through the mud, the carting out of
muck and the carting in of fuel, contact with his beasts.  He did
not raise his eyes above the level of his work, for there seemed
nothing else to which he could raise them.  He asked to come in
tired at night and to be able to sleep.

Sometimes when he was shaving he would look at himself a little
curiously in the mirror.  Was this the man who had hoped so much,
and who had been so happy?  Yes, and without realizing the full and
pleasant flavour of his happiness.  He had a few grey hairs over
his temples; he looked shaggy; the barber up at Carslake saw him
perhaps once in two months.  And there were times when his face
seemed to be the face of another man, of a stranger.

How old was he?  How long was life going on?  But why ask such a
question?  His life was the farm, and farms went on for ever and
ever, and like Time with a scythe, man bent to the toil till his
teeth fell from him, and his back became bowed and rigid.  Years
hence he might be an old man, mumping through the mud, and pushing
a hoe in the same field, and looking at trees and grass that had
not changed.

Life, the life of the soil went on, and man was carried with it
like a piece of clay on a wheel.



XXII


1


The garden was full of moths, and the uses of moths are various.
They provide men with nice similes; they lay eggs in his clothes,
and breed caterpillars for his fruit trees, and they flutter at
night in at his windows, or dance in the glare of his headlights.

Mrs. Fream had ordained a moth-party.  It happened on a warm night
in September.  Electricians had run wires about the Hill House
garden, and little lights glowed among the bushes and the trees,
and outlined the paths, so that the lawns were dark spaces where
the human moths fluttered up and down.  The dancing faun had a
silver star on his forehead.  The fountain playing above the lily
pool had lights ingeniously arranged about it, so that it threw
drops of liquid silver and gold.  Between the dances people
wandered out, the men strangely dim and part of the darkness, the
women like ghosts, moths, or moving flowers, just as it pleased
your fancy.

Said someone to a friend--"These shows must cost Fream a pretty
penny."

"His wife--you know.  Charming extravagance."

"And poor Percival pays."

"My dear, he likes it.  It is that sort of man's only hobby."

Chairs placed à deux gave rise to many conversations but the
darkness was elusive and might be treacherous.  Clare Biddulph had
a venerable young person in tow, one of those men of affairs who
could be of great use to Leslie, and she intended to use him, and
the venerable person--having a quick understanding and a nice sense
of humour--knew that he was to be used.  When a pretty woman dances
with you twice, and you are sixty-five!  Well--why not?  Politics
was a great game; he had manipulated people, and had suffered
manipulation.

"I dare say that I can get Newbury to speak for your husband--"

"Really delightful of you."

"O, not at all.  I shall see Newbury to-morrow.  By the way,--there
is a certain little phenomenon that piques me.  Wonder if you have
noticed it?"

Clare's alert and graceful head showed against a hanging light.

"Physical or otherwise?"

"Up there, in a line with that cypress.  If we go straight on we
shall pass close to it."

Below the terrace wall ran a broad herbaceous border and a grass
path, and as the two approached the end of the path the Venerable
extended a shadowy hand.

"Up there."  She saw a little red dot in the darkness, slightly to
one side of the black spire of a cypress, and glowing in the centre
of a something that was more substantial than the September sky.
They surveyed it, and turned and walked a little way in silence.

"What children!  But what did you make of it, dear lady?"

"The red end of a cigar."

"Exactly.  With the ash knocked off it.  Isn't there some sort of
pepper-pot or garden house--?"

"A brick belvedere with a window.  One each end of the terrace, you
know."

The venerable person looked at the stars.

"A man--all alone--smoking a cigar--and leaning out of the window
of a brick pepper-pot.  I have taken this walk with three different
partners, and each time I have seen that red dot up there.  Once--
not quite so bright; half an inch of ash on the cigar.  Now--why
should one be curious?"

"Mischievously curious?"

"Exactly.  In one's old age--my dear lady--one grows more cunning,
and also more mischievous.  A phase of second childhood,--what!"

"It means that you will always be young."

"Very charming of you.  But--curiosity--"

"Asks to be satisfied--"

"But I hear the band."

"My next partner can remain unsatisfied."

"Is that fair?"

"It is--my husband."

"O,--well--!  So we go up to the terrace?"

"And along it to the belvedere."

"All--to discover--who a man is--all alone--smoking cigars--for
quite two hours.  It may be a chauffeur."

"Do chauffeurs smoke cigars?  Even in these days--!"

"Everything is possible to progress."

They went, ascending a flight of steps and moving over the velvet
pile of a grass path, they came to the little brick pepper-pot, and
paused, with the scent of a cigar drifting to them.  The doorway of
the belvedere was opposite the narrow window, and something
obscured the grey panel.

"I suppose," said the venerable person with a voice that addressed
both Mrs. Biddulph and the September night, "there must be a fine
view from there.  The park--and the Surrey hills in the distance."

"Yes, the view is really quite good--on a clear day."

"Nice idea--that--framing a view in a window.  So that one does not
see too much."

"Life--consists--of not seeing too much."

"Shall we say--seeing what you want to see.  That gazebo,--and the
stars over the park trees.  It intrigues me."

He made a mischievous movement towards the doorway of the
belvedere, and a man came out.  The height and the narrowness of
him were distinctive.  A little red dot glowed in the lower third
of the dim flatness of his face.

"Sorry, sir," said the venerable person.

The darkness hid a little pucker of speculation on Clare's
forehead.

"It's you, Val!"

He stood there in silence, half turned towards the venerable
person.

"Lots of stars to-night."

"The celestial electricians.  It is my host--I think?"

"That's so," said Fream in a voice that was curiously dead.


2


The lady of Hill House danced, but she took care to see that all
her guests had partners.  She was an admirable hostess, beautifully
gowned, moving with an air of languid serenity, pleasantly sure of
herself.  She had grown more like her sister, and it is possible
that she had found in Clare social features that were of value and
worthy of imitation.  But she was dusky and a little mysterious
where Clare was all pale gold and calmly vivid.  Even when she
employed sarcasm--and she had learnt to employ it--it suggested a
red damask rose exuding a cold drop of dew from its petals.  Her
air of languor gave her time to set herself in a proper aspect to
meet all happenings, yet a part of her languor was physical as well
as mental.  She had grown a little bored with life, but would not
allow it, and to prove the fallaciousness of the feeling she
created new extravagances.

Yet competition in Weyfleet had ceased, the kind of competition
that the Freams provoked.  Easily they were supreme in the matter
of motor-cars and parties, and in all the pleasant pomps of the
dinner-table, and the ballroom.  Mary wore more dresses than any
other woman in the place, and wore them more convincingly.  All her
details were worthy of consideration.  When she went to Ranelagh,
or Epsom, or Goodwood, other women gave her those quick, instant
glances, and any enmity that was in them fell back baffled.  Even
at Ascot she was a noticeable woman.  She had done her duty to her
grandee.

Naturally she had inspired tenderness.  A succession of men had
made love to her, but had found Mrs. Fream disappointingly careful.
Almost she behaved like a prude.  She had put the woman in herself
to sleep, and was at great pains to make sure that the obstreperous
infant should not wake up and squeal for the moon.  A comfortable
cushion on the earth was worth many moons.  She cherished her
security, and wore it as a girdle of chastity.  Her grandee--poor
fellow--had nothing to complain of.  She looked the male world in
the face, and did not blink an eyelid.

Clare praised her.

"She has nous.  She is not going to be fooled off her perch."

Leslie--the sentimentalist--wondered what Fream got out of it.  A
rose without a perfume--what!

"Silly.  She transmutes his money into Coty.  He pours in the crude
stuff and she is like Grasse.  Is there any other place that smells
like Grasse?"

Leslie, with a stare at the butter dish, remarked that Fream was
not making quite so much money these days.

"Touched one or two slippery things."

"He can afford it.  The pile is there."

Biddulph glanced at the clock.

"Damn them, they are always messing these trains about.  O, the
pile--yes.  May be made of cannon-balls.  All right if you don't
start picking balls out of the bottom of the pile.  Financial
stability is rather like that.  Ta-ta, old thing; I must scoot."

That night Mrs. Fream wore rose and silver brocade; she carried a
fan--a white plumy thing--and used it, which was remembered against
her as a piece of affectation.  The days of fans were dead.  Your
emancipated woman has no need of fans and their tricksies.  But
Mrs. Fream made play with her fan, and did it very prettily, and
the languor of its movements made one young man angry and another
adoring.

"Look at her--!  You'd think--"

"Not a bit of it.  With such a woman you don't think,--you feel."

"Try it,--my dear chap.  She looks like a rose--and isn't."

The adoring one was an artist.  He was overjoyed with the way she
had posed herself in the hall, with an old oak armoire for a
background, and that clouding fan moving with a white languor
against the rose and silver of her dress.

"I'd like to paint her--just there," he thought.

He waited until he could go and tell her so, and she smiled, and
looked at him with a dark and virginal tranquillity.

"Really."

Her voice ran slowly like honey.  She was the finished product, and
many worker bees had made her what she was.

"I'm serious," said he.  "You would go into the Academy like a
conqueress.  Of course it is a conventional show."

"I love conventional shows.  They soothe me."

"Well,--may I paint you?"

Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for somebody.

"I should love it.  I will ask my husband."

"Damn your husband," was the painter man's inward response.

Mr. Percival Fream and his affairs were talked of in the train.  It
was said by those who claimed the superior knowledge of secret
authority that Fream and Gaiter had joined forces.  Everybody in
the city knew Samuel Gaiter with his face like the face of a sandy-
coloured cat, and his smile and his reputation, and his daily lunch
at a particular hotel with a fair young woman on Mondays and
Wednesdays, and a dark one on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  With these
two financial luminaries combining to form a double star new
exploitations were to be expected.  Gaiter was one of the little
gods of oil, though he would exploit anything from a new typewriter
to asphalt, and flutter country parsonages and credulous maiden
ladies.  But his reputation was very sound, as far as it went.  He
served on hospital boards, and financed a convalescent home for
children.

Fream financed a wife.  Mary was as ignorant of his affairs as he
was of anything outside the money market; she drew cheques and she
could do that very nicely.  Val's ignorance had ceased to astonish
her, as had his various ineptitudes.  They were part of the man;
they threw the positive part of him into high relief; there was not
a single game that he could play without looking awkward.  His
dancing was impossible.  Imagine a lamp post fox-trotting!  So long
as he remained still, and did nothing and said nothing he had a
rigid impressiveness.  He drove a car very badly; he had a library
full of books and never looked inside them; his garden had
exquisite features and he thought that standard roses just grew
like that.  Sometimes he would wander round his rock garden and
look at the alpines and read the labels, but he found many of the
names quite unpronounceable.  He knew an oak and elm when he saw
them, but he called poplars willows--and willows poplars.  His head-
gardener had the most extraordinary contempt for him.  There were
men who allowed themselves to play golf with Fream because they
were very sure of winning a five-pound note.

In his big office they called him the Sphinx.  He was very
punctual.  The lift carried him up to the first floor at much the
same hour each morning; he walked along the spacious corridor with
its mosaic floor and its marble veneered walls, and entered his
private room and found his secretary waiting.  Tyson was a bright
lad, very polite to Fream in his presence, but wholly irreverent
behind his back.  He called Fream "sir," and was careful to take
his hat and coat, and to behave like a lackey, but like a lackey's
his loyalty ceased on the other side of the door.

Fream may have suspected this.  He was a more intelligent creature
when he breathed in that big and solidly furnished room, and sat in
his padded chair; and for the last three months he had been opening
his own letters.  Tyson was a little annoyed about it.  "The boss
is getting fussy."  At all events there were many letters the
interior of which remained unknown to Harold Tyson.  Also he was
allowed to be less vicariously conversational over the telephone,
and Fream wrote some of his own letters without dictating them to
his secretary.

Always inarticulate and monosyllable he grew more so.  He smoked
incessantly; his room reeked of stale cigar-smoke.  Also, there
were days when he showed a funny temper.  Tyson was both peeved and
anxious.  You may dislike a man, and miswish his financial schemes,
and at the same time have no desire to lose a comfortable billet.
Fream's irritability worried his secretary.  It was not a
reassuring symptom.

In the evening he appeared at dinner, all black and white, and
meticulously starched.  Even his manner appeared to be more stiffly
starched.  He and Mary had reduced the carrying of long silences to
a fine art, and his silences grew longer.  He could talk
interestedly of nothing but money, and the things that his money
provided, and even a woman cannot talk for ever of her purchases.
She noticed that he spent more of the evening alone in the library;
he smoked there, and she supposed that he read his papers, while
she sat in the drawing-room with a novel and the illustrated
magazines.  She was a woman who never had a needle in her hand, and
why should she when she had Pollock to do everything.  She yawned a
good deal, and went to bed at ten, unless she had a bridge party or
was going out to one.

But one night she surprised herself in surprising him.  She had
come in late after an evening with the Biddulphs, and thinking that
Fream had gone to bed she turned into the library to get a book.
The lights were off, but the fire was burning.  She saw him sitting
all hunched up before the fire with his hands over his face.

A sudden, vague compunction stirred in her.  Also she was surprised
that he had not heard her open the door.  Perhaps he was asleep?

"Val, is anything the matter?"

He gave a sort of jerk and dropped his hands.

"Hallo--"

"You are not ill--?"

He seemed to straighten himself from the waist.

"No,--just doing a bit of thinking.  Enjoyed yourself?"

She stood beside him for a moment.

"Val, you would tell me if you were ill?"

"Of course, my dear--"

She had the feeling that he was waiting for her to go, and that she
had interrupted some complex piece of cerebration connected with
the mysteries of finance.

"Clare has had a letter from 'Green Shutters.'"

"O."

"Father is not very well.  Bronchitis or something."

"Sorry.  Perhaps you will want to go down there.  Take 'Phoebus' and
the man."

"I might.  Thank you, Val.  Goodnight."

"Good night."

She had a last glimpse of him sitting stiffly there before the
fire.


4


How was she to guess that she had put the shears to the head of her
poor Samson?

Or--rather---it was he who had put the shears into the hands of her
youth.  He was blind, though this blindness had come slowly like a
creeping paralysis, and gradually he had been made to realize that
he could not see things as he had been accustomed to see them.
Simply because a little artery had burst, and the oozing blood had
forced its way among the fibres of his self-confidence and was
destroying it, the confidence that had enabled him to take risks
successfully.  He had lost his intuitive touch.

That--to him--had been the beginning of it, moods of vacillation,
an inability to make up his mind, a desire to play for safety.  Yet
vanity urges a man on.  He had made himself take risks, rush into
speculative industrial schemes, and had found himself floundering.
He had been frightened.

Fear is humiliating.  He had reacted against it.  Moreover, the
making of money was his life, his one method of self-expression,
and for him to allow that the craft and the cunning had gone from
him was to accept dumbness.  He had a dread of being completely
despised by his wife, and the trophies won in the stadium of
finance had--it seemed to him--saved him from complete contempt.
He was fond of Mary, and was unable to express his fondness; he
could not let himself go, because of his fatal incapacity and its
shame.  He was stiff and self-conscious with her.  But to surrender
his place in the money market?  That would mean that the last shred
of his vanity had fallen from him.

His passion to acquire and to possess was as strong as ever though
the vision that had guided it was failing.  It had made him
generous to his wife, and yet curiously grudging as to the larger
issue.  He had made no settlement in her favour, and did not wish
to make one, for by retaining everything in his own name he
retained a feeling of control.  The ship was his, and she sailed in
it luxuriously.

Each quarter he drew a cheque and paid it into her private account.
He gave her presents, but he was careful not to give her financial
independence.  There was no need for it.  He wished to remain the
emperor, the god on Olympus showering gold, though he had not the
power to appear before his Leda as a man.

His association with the venerable yet sandy-headed Gaiter was his
campaign of Athens against Syracuse, but like the Athenians he did
not foresee the fatal quarries.  Or to put it in Elizabethan
language, he was fitting out his Armada, and packing into it the
last of his self-confidence.  It was to be the greatest of his
expeditions.  Afraid of taking risks?  Not he.  He had set sail to
conquer or to reconquer his faith in himself, a sombre grandee, an
admiral of Spain driving his galleons into the grey northern seas.



XXIII


1


Old Hesketh Viner lay dying.

Like Charles II he had been an unconscionable time about it, and
had said as much to the little old comrade who sat beside his bed
and kept alight the very small fire in the very small grate.

"Sorry to give you all this trouble, my dear."

"Trouble--Hesketh!"

Mrs. Charlotte loved him as she had never loved him before, the
poor grey stubble on his poor old chin, his hands with their blue
and swollen veins, his grey and untidy head, his panting mouth.
She was not an emotional woman.  She sat there in that little
stuffy and overheated room, while the waters of death mounted
slowly to her comrade's chin, and his breathing grew more tragic
and ineffectual.  The end was inevitable and she knew it, and she
knew that so far as she was concerned it was the end of everything.

The lamp was turned low and she sat in the shadow-land like a
little old child on the edge of unknown darknesses.  How strangely
things happened!  What did life mean?  Children; years of quiet
dullness and of self-denial; that long, thin figure propped against
the pillows?  She had moments of bewilderment.  It was the figure
on the bed that mattered.  Children might hurt you, desert you,
fail you at critical moments,--but that was life, and this was
death.

She leaned forward and laid a hand on one of his.

"They promised to be back to-morrow."

His hurried and shallow breathing ceased for a moment.

"Would you like me to send a telegram?"

His fingers closed on hers.

"Don't bother.  Won't spoil pleasure.--Just you and I--Carrie--you
know."

So they sat, holding hands, she content that it should be so, and
that no one should matter to him as she did.  She felt an
exultation that overflowed all bitterness and sorrow; he was going
and very soon she would follow after him; he had been very kind to
her--always.

His fingers were moving.  He had her wedding-ring between his thumb
and first finger; it was worn very thin now.

"Same ring.  What a long time--Remember--?"

She bent her head.

"Yes, nearly fifty years, Hesketh."

"All in white--You looked lovely, my dear.  See it all again.
Remember--the white satin slipper old John tied to the handle of
the carriage?"

"I remember."

"Great days," he said, and sighed.  "Been very happy."

Somewhere in the house below them a bell burred softly.  She drew
her hand from his with a slow and caressing movement, and rose.

"It must be--I'll go."

She went to the head of the stairs and called.

"Nellie,--is that--the children?"

A voice answered her.

"No,--dear; Mr. Furze."

She returned to the room and to her chair, and placed her hand
again in his, and felt mortified and proud and jealous for him.

"Mr. Furze came to inquire."

"A good fellow.  Pity--Mary--hadn't the heart, my dear.--Still--
still--"

"Youth goes its way," said she.  "One doesn't understand--what one
was--till one grows old,--Hesketh."

He drew a deeper breath.

"No consequence--You--here--Always strangers--everybody--but one or
two."

Below, under the porch, Furze and Cousin Nellie were talking.  He
had brought up a can of the evening's milk.  "Thought he might need
it."  The night was frosty, and there was rime on the grass, and
behind and above Furze's head the sky was full of stars.  To the
little woman looking up at him he seemed surrounded by stars.

"It won't be long now."

He was turning away.

"They are here--I suppose."

"No.  Went back for two nights,--a dance.  Just time to crowd it
in, you know."

She spoke without bitterness, as though she neither accused nor
explained, but stated facts; or as though she were playing
"patience" and taking cards from the pack of life and laying them
upon the table.

"A dance--!"

"He wanted them to go.  Things seemed different with him yesterday.
You know how wood ashes glow and grow grey.--The wind up the
chimney.  He began to grow very grey when they had gone."

"He did not think they would go."

"Perhaps."

"Children--!" said he, and she saw his big shoulders make a
movement of scorn.

"But they come back to-morrow--"

"O,--yes--to-morrow!  With some people it is always to-morrow.  And
to-morrow can only be what you have made to-day.--Good night, Miss
Nellie."

"Good night."


2


When the Freams' car pulled up outside "Green Shutters" the
curtains were drawn, for Captain Viner had been dead some hours.
The two women in the saloon, wrapped up in furs, and each with a
foot-warmer under her feet, waited for the chauffeur to open the
door.  The man's ears were blue.

Clare looked steadily at the curtained windows, but Mary, having
glanced at them once, did not look again.

"It must have happened--"

"O,--my dear--!"

"But the doctor man was so positive."

Their mother was waiting for them in the sitting-room.  She sat in
front of the fire, wearing the black dress that she wore on
Sundays; she did not rise.  Her face was both triumphant and
austere; the little figure had a dignity; she received these two
women who were her daughters and made them feel that they had never
known what their mother knew, and that in some way she greatly
despised them.

Clare said nothing, but sat down and unfastened her fur coat.  It
was Mary who faltered, and who would have kissed Mrs. Charlotte.

"O,--mother--"

But she did not kiss her, for Mrs. Viner remained sitting very
straight, with her hands in her lap, and her eyes very bright in
her birdlike face.  She suggested immense serenity, and little old
lady enthroned, very wise, very sad, and yet very happy.  These
unwise virgins were at her feet; she was without envy or anger.

"Your father died very peacefully in the night.  I was with him.
It was as it should be."

She looked at them both.

"You had better take off your coats."

They took them off like a couple of children.

"Perhaps--you would like to go upstairs.  He looks so very
peaceful.  I will ask Cousin Nellie to send your car and the
luggage up to the 'George' at Carslake.  They will have rooms
there."

Clare and Mary went up to look at Captain Viner lying dead in his
bed, while their mother remained by the fire.  Old Viner had a
faint smile on his thin face.  His chin was all grey stubble.

Clare stood at the foot of the bed.

"I suppose they will shave him."

Mary gave a queer cry, and was on her knees, with her face against
the sheet that covered her father.

"O--don't--!"

"My dear, it looked rather selfish of us.--I'm sorry.--But that
fool of a doctor--"

"It was selfish.--Beastly selfish.--Let's be honest."


3


Furze had a load of logs to deliver at "Simla."  Oak, and ash, and
chestnut, he sawed them at night during the long winter evenings;
it gave him something to do; it helped him to sleep; it earned him
a little money.  If Rose had been alive he would not have been
sawing wood at ten o'clock after a day's work, but he seemed to
have no heart in him to grow tired.  It went on beating with the
same dogged, deliberate, sombre rhythm; it had nothing to quicken
it, or to bid it pause.  He was made of iron.  His head and face
were the colour of old plough chains.  He felt stronger than he had
ever been, fatally and tragically strong with the dull strength of
a man who is lonely, and who hopes for nothing.  His day was like
the day of a slow and plodding beast.

He had one of the grey horses between the shafts.  Even before
starting the wheels of the cart had been caked with dry and yellow
mud, and in the farm lane they gathered more mud, for the ground
was rotten after sudden thaw.  Furze's boots were all mud, wet
below, dry and hard above.  He walked beside the grey horse,
lacking a collar, wearing an old army jerkin over his coat, his
worn breeches spotted with clay and grease, his leggings much the
same colour as his boots.  He walked heavily, but with a suggestion
of power.  When he came to the turning into the main road he
checked the grey horse to let a car go by.

The car slowed up two hundred yards down the road, and swung to the
right up the black ramp of the cinder track.  It was waiting
outside "Green Shutters" when Furze came along with his cart.  He
knew to whom the car belonged, and why it was there.  It had
brought Mrs. Fream down to Carslake.  She had been over half the
country in search of white flowers, those posthumous tributes to
her father for which her husband paid.  She had gone into "Green
Shutters" with an armful of lilies and narcissi and white
carnations and had laid them on the table by the window, and the
smell of them had filled the over-heated little room.

Mrs. Charlotte was mending a pair of black gloves.  She saw Mrs.
Fream sit down at the table, and begin to sort out the flowers on a
spread newspaper.  Mary's whim was to arrange them herself.
Captain Viner was to be buried in Carslake cemetery on the
afternoon of to-morrow.  Clare Biddulph had returned to Weyfleet by
train, but she was coming down with Leslie for the funeral.

Mrs. Charlotte noticed that Mary had paused in her arranging of the
flowers.  She was looking out of the window, holding five white
carnations in her left hand, and a single flower in her right.
Furze and his wood-cart were passing on their way to Colonel Sykes;
she saw the familiar figure walking at the horse's head; she
thought that it looked shabbier and shaggier, but much the same as
she remembered it.  She went on with the arranging of her flowers,
but the man and his cart had come between her and her work, and her
glances kept wandering in the direction of Colonel Sykes' fence.
Furze had opened the gate, and was preparing to back the cart into
the entry and to shoot the logs into the drive.  Colonel Sykes
objected to the tearing up of his gravel, and a handy man with a
wheelbarrow would clear the pile of logs into the shed at the back
of the bungalow.

Mary put down her spray of flowers.

"May I stay to tea, mother?"

"Of course, my dear."

"There is no need to keep Randall waiting.  I will send him back;
he can bring the car down later."

She rose, and at the back of the impulse that moved her lay a whole
shadow-world of impending self-consciousness.  She said to herself
that it was quite unnecessary to keep the chauffeur waiting out
there in the cold.  The rawness of the day made it allowable for
her to put on her musquash coat even to go as far as the gate and
give Randall his orders.  The coincidence was not fortuitous.  Her
self-love was in control, though had she been challenged with it
she would have denied it hotly.  She was Mrs. Fream of Hill House,
very much a young woman of the world in a two hundred guinea coat.
Your great lady has every right to appear magnanimous.

The big car moved off just as Furze was righting his cart.  He drew
clear of the gate, went to shut it, and returning to his horse's
head, saw Mary standing at that other gate.  Her difference was as
apparent to him as a coat of new paint on a wagon.

He had to pass her.  It was not that he minded the passing of her,
but there was a part of him that resented her being there.  He had
a flair for the significance of that nice posture of hers.
Loneliness and suffering may dull a man, but they may also make him
amazingly sensitive and quick to sense an atmosphere.  He felt
fierce.  He divined the self-love waiting at that other gate.

But all calculated situations are relative and apt to be altered by
the incalculable human factor.  She did speak to him, but her voice
was not the voice she had expected to hear.

"Mr. Furze--"

He stopped his horse, and came across to her.  He did not take off
his hat.  His eyes looked very steady and dark under the brim of
it.  They watched her.

"You have been so good to my father--"

He had nothing to say.  He looked at her and was silent.  Then his
eyes went to the upper window where the curtains were drawn.  He
took off his hat deliberately, and just as deliberately replaced
it.

And she?  She was trembling.  All that nice and expensive
worldliness, the perfect sheath of her material smartness was no
better than an apron of beads.  She felt the quivering of them
about her loins.  Mrs. Fream of Hill House, with her Weyfleet voice
and her experienced languor and her furs and her shingled head!
She was most poignantly conscious of him the man, the very
elemental rudeness of him, that tanned throat, the mouth that had
grown harder, the fierce strangeness of the eyes, the two new
furrows between his eyebrows.  He looked rougher.  He had not
shaved; his older leather jerkin lacked a button; his breeches were
stained, his boots filthy.

"I'm sorry," was all that he said.

He went back to his horse and cart as though she did not matter to
him, because it was quite impossible for him to matter to her.  The
peasant and the fine lady!  He had given her a glance of sombre
insolence.  The muddy wheels revolved.  His figure looked stubborn
and large beside the grey horse.  They disappeared down the cinder
track.

"How he hates me!" she thought.

She went in and took off her fur coat, and stood in the little hall
for a moment, with her dark eyes in a stare.

She understood that his hatred could not hurt her.  He might hate
her as much as he pleased, for hatred is homage, but to be despised
by him would be different.  It would be impertinent and stupid of
him to despise her, Mrs. Fream of Hill House, a very complete young
woman of the world.

She rejoined her mother.

"I saw Mr. Furze for a moment."

Her voice had recovered its drawling leisureliness.  Mrs. Charlotte
said nothing.

"I thanked him for his kindness to father."

"Your father and he--had something in common."

Mary picked up a white carnation and held it to her nostrils.

"Looks--rather--as though he had gone to seed.  I don't like to see
a man such a sloven--I suppose that marriage of his--"

"It was a very happy marriage," said her mother, "I suppose that is
why he doesn't care."


4


The provocation of Mrs. Fream's delicate voluptuousness went with
Furze down the muddy lane.  Its effect astonished him.  It had
folded itself in the sumptuous suggestiveness of that fur coat of
hers.  The barbarian, the man in a bear skin, that was Arnold
Furze, the tall, Teuton or the Gaul lounging long-limbed in a
decadent, southern town, and seeing some dusky and scented Voluptas
with reddened lips and sleepy and insolent eyes carried by in a
litter by four slaves.

This sleek, shingled, befurred city madam with her soft white face
and casual eyes!  This complete and pretty trifler!  This delicate,
scented thing all wrapped up in lace and silk!

By God--!

The impetus in him was barbaric.  It was to pick her up and carry
her off,--voluptuous spoil, Greek plunder.  Yes, and to throw her
down in the mud of the lane.  To tear that fur coat from her.  To
gather her up, shocked and screaming and scared, and carry her
where he pleased up the "Doomsday" stairs, and to throw her on a
bed and have his will of her.  Yes, just that!  And then to let her
go, subdued, possessed, with frightened yet voluptuous eyes,
pulling her clothes over her bosom, shamed yet secretly satisfied,
this dark-flowered parasite--

He was aware of the grey horse stopping, and of the cart wheels
squelching in the mud.

They had reached the farm gate at the end of the lane while the
heart of him had been full of other things.


5


But Furze was seen next day at Captain Viner's funeral.  He had
shaved; he had put on a black tie and a dark blue suit.  A raw wind
was blowing, but having no overcoat that was fit for such a
function he went without one.  He was accustomed to the wind, and
hardly noticed it, though Fream and Biddulph, coming warm from a
big lunch at the "George" and wearing heavy coats, looked pinched
and anxious.

"Reg'lar death traps--these cemeteries."

"Yes, you'd think they meant to keep their corpses in cold
storage."

Such flippances crop up at funerals, human nature being what it is
and wishing not to appear too serious.  Carslake cemetery was on
the slope of Windmill Hill, facing north-east, a bleak spot where
the trees huddled themselves with their backs to the wind.  The
soil was clay.  You saw a sample of it beside the grave, a pile of
sticky, yellow cubes lying as it had left the spade.  Everybody
looked morose and cold and unhappy, and the only happy face was
that of Mrs. Charlotte.  She stood there looking like a little
bright-eyed bird, a patch of bright colour on each cheek, for she
had nothing to regret.  Mary wept a little and carried a
handkerchief, and Furze, who kept very much in the background,
would not let himself look at her.  But he looked at her husband,
and wondered what marriage meant to him and what he got out of it.
Of course the occasion was not a festive one, and it was a beast of
a day, and everything was grey, but Furze thought that Fream looked
a very miserable man, cold through and through.  Yes,--and
frightened.  But of what?  Of the suggestiveness of that slit in
the clay into which old Viner had to be lowered, and beside which
Mrs. Charlotte stood proud and undaunted?

When the ceremony was over Furze put on his hat and moved away.  He
had a last glimpse of Mrs. Charlotte standing looking down into the
grave with a bright-eyed and bird-like tenderness.  Mrs. Fream was
dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.  Poor old Viner!  These
posthumous manifestations of regret!  And sighs of relief, and
little hot drinks at the "George," and then--"Home--my dear,--and
dinner."

Furze passed out under the two yews at the gate.

"I don't suppose the little old lady will last long without him,"
he thought; "I don't suppose she wants to."



XXIV


1


"Val,--do you think we can help my mother?"

She had come to the library after dinner, and had found her husband
writing letters.

"Of course."

Drawing a chair to the fire she sat and spread her hands to the
blaze, and the light ran up her bare arms into her bosom.

"Father had his pension.  They are only allowing mother seventy-
five pounds a year.  She has the house, and a little money from
investments."

"How much?"

"O,--about twenty pounds--I think."

"Would a hundred a year do?"

"O, yes,--I think so.  It is very good of you, Val."

But she did not turn to thank him, or even look at him, and sitting
there with his elbows on the desk he observed her unseeing back and
her imperturbable white shoulders.  A lamp with a red shade stood
on the desk, and the rest of the room was shadowing, lined with
those dim books that were never read.  It had become a very silent
room; its very toys had grown mute; the pianola had not been
touched for weeks, and 2LO might call and no one cared to listen.

"Glad to be of use."

His face seemed to have grown flatter and more colourless.  He took
off his glasses, and pressed a finger and thumb over closed
eyelids, and then looked at her again with short-sighted
wistfulness.  He smiled faintly, and the smile gave to his face an
expression of futile vacancy, like a white wall cracking.  He
picked up his glasses, and tapped gently with them on the blotting-
pad.

"Glad to be of use," he repeated.

Her white shoulders warmed themselves unmoved.  They did not feel
the breath of a dumb appeal.  He sat there behind her in silence,
and she took his silence for granted.  She took everything for
granted--now, and he did not blame her, for he had come to know
himself as a money-machine, a sort of patient automaton that sat in
chairs and signed its name.  There were times now when he felt
rather ghastly about it, and she might have seen that ghastliness
on his face.  But she did not see it.  He was the same long white
inarticulate post of a man, like a sign-post on a familiar road
along which she passed every day.  She simply was not conscious of
him as a live man, as a frightened man, or a lonely one about whom
a fog of worry was thickening.  He might sit there muffled in his
own fog, self-paralysed, dumbly bitter, vaguely unaware of an
immense irony.

"Money's useful," he said, with a grin that was both futile and
sardonic.

"Yes, Val, very."

He replaced his glasses.  She was staring at the fire.  What did
she see in the fire?  Did it never occur to her that some day there
might be no fuel for the fire?  No, why should it occur to her?  He
had wrapped her up in cotton-wool.  He was a mere machine, as
unfamiliar to her as a text-book on Political Economy by Ricardo or
Mill or Jevons.  She did not appear to suspect that a machine might
get out of order or break down.  She expected him to go on in the
same relentlessly efficient way, day in, day out, like a perfect
automobile.  She rode in it, wrapped in her furs, serenely
careless, going to her dances and her parties and her theatres and
her shoppings.  She would be surprised at a mere puncture, or at
half a minute's mechanical trouble.  "Dear me, Val, what is the
matter?"  Yes, just a flicker of languid and dark-eyed surprise,
and perhaps a touch of annoyance.

Should he tell her?  What would be the use?  She would be shocked,
terribly frightened; and it might not be necessary to frighten her.
She had evolved such a nice air of social self-sufficiency; she was
so sleek and casual.

He resumed his letter writing, and presently she rose, and patted
back a yawn and went towards the door.

"Thanks so much, Val."

She did not look at him.

"Glad to be of use."

She opened the door, went out, and closed it softly after her.

He finished his letter and sat staring.  How damnably worrying
things were, and then she just came and asked him for money!
Worries, problems, the Tanooga Railway, the Universal Insurance
Co.; hypothetical oil in Mexico, the sandy cat-like face of Mr.
Samuel Gaiter, other faces vaguely hostile and suspicious, that
last general meeting of "Crust and Co." when he had stood up as
chairman and tried to make a speech and had made a stuttering fool
of himself.  Strange how his luck had been out since his marriage!
But was it luck?  Had he not felt that the Midas touch had left
him?  A cutthroat game!  He had cut other men's throats, and he had
never thought about their wives.  It was possible that someone
would cut his throat, and Mary's hands were not the hands to hold a
basin.

Poor little Mary!  She had been his last and most expensive
purchase, a live doll, a mannequin.  Well,--well--!  She would be
in the soup with him if the soup it was to be.  Swimming about like
a couple of flies!

A year ago he could have settled a considerable sum on his wife,
but he had been prejudiced against surrendering the one key that
life had left him.  Now, it was too late.  He was too tied up, all
in--as the saying goes.  And that phrase of Gaiter's.  "My dear
chap, either we are great men or scoundrels.  We are going to be
great men."  Gaiter had the coolness of a cat.  Was it that he had
lost his nerve, left it behind him in that Monte Carlo hotel?

But in the matter of the supplementing of Mrs. Charlotte's income
Fream was not called upon to be of use.  Cheerfully, and with a
certain air of triumph she developed pneumonia a month after her
husband's death, and sat propped up in bed with a flushed face and
eyes that seemed to see over the edge of the world.

"I shall be with my dear love in a week, Nellie."

Cousin Nellie was shocked, for her cousin spoke the voice of
conviction.

"I'll wire to Weyfleet."

"O, the girls!  They are always so very busy.  We will wait a day
or two.  Poor Hesketh's trouble and then mine.  We will wait a day
or two, Nellie."

Cousin Nellie waylaid the doctor.

"She says she is going to die."

"Does she?"

"She wants to die.  She's quite excited about it."

"Then--she will die.  Yes, you had better wire, unless--of course--"

Cousin Nellie wired, and the telegram went to Mary, for in Cousin
Nellie's estimation Mary had chances of salvation if someone would
take the trouble to hang her on a cross.  Clare was beyond hope of
redemption.  No one would ever get Clare suspended upon so crude a
piece of timber.


2


Said Mrs. Charlotte, propped up and panting, but with eyes of
triumphant eagerness--"I want to see Mr. Furze."

Cousin Nellie was troubled, for she had been expecting the Fream
car, and it was six o'clock and no car had arrived.

"Yes, my dear.--You must not tire yourself."

She spoke soothingly, but Mrs. Charlotte was not needing a linctus.

"No consequence.  I want to see Mr. Furze."

"You want me to send for him?"

Mrs. Charlotte nodded.

So the good Coode was called to his door and sent to "Doomsday."
He came back with Furze under the February stars, and stood at his
gate and felt that life was a sad business, while Furze went up to
Mrs. Charlotte's room.  Furze wondered what she could have to say
to him, but when he heard what she had to say, his face grew soft
and sombre.  He looked at the fire.

"You have nothing to regret, Mrs. Viner.  O, yes, I promise."

The engine of a car made itself heard as he rose and took leave of
her, and at the top of the stairs he paused.  A door had opened; a
current of cold air and voices came up to him.

"How is she?"

"Expecting you, Mary."

"I came by train; that's why I am so late.  I'm staying.  Here's my
purse; will you see to the taxi?  I'm going up."

"Mr. Furze is with your mother."

"Mr. Furze--!"

"She asked for him."

The only light came from the lamp in the hall, and it left the
upper half of the flight of stairs in darkness.  Furze was part of
that darkness.  And she was looking up; she had taken the first
three steps before she had heard that he was with her mother, and
she had paused as though dismayed.  He saw her white face close to
the wall as she leaned against it--hesitating.  He spoke; he had to
speak.

"I have just left your mother.  Please come up."

For some seconds she remained quite motionless, and then she
came up and past him with a little rush, and a suggestion of
breathlessness.  He caught a sidelong gleam of her eyes.  She smelt
of some perfume.  He was aware of her as a soft, dusky sweet-
scented thing with a pale face, passing him quickly like a swift
bird eluding a hand.  She went into her mother's room and closed
the door, and Furze descended the stairs.

Cousin Nellie was paying the taxi driver who had brought Mary from
Carslake station.  Furze met her at the gate.

"I am glad she has come."

"O--yes--"

She slipped some coins back into Mary's purse, and looked vaguely
past Furze at a lighted window.

"The new and the old, the new and the old.  Good night, Mr.
Arnold," and snapping the catch of the purse she went back to the
house.

Coode was leaning over his gate like a man in pain; he let Furze go
by and then spoke after him in the darkness.

"She's come."

"Yes."

Furze turned back a step.  Here was another man who had been a
lover, and who could still hang over a gate and imagine the
presence of her as a soft breathing and a perfume in the cold bosom
of a raw February night.

"Mrs. Viner is going to die," said Furze.

Coode's head jerked upwards, but he said nothing.

He left Coode hanging on the gate like a dead crow in a
gamekeeper's larder, and went back to his farm, but he did not
enter the house.  A great restlessness was upon him.  He stood by
the pond and looked at the cold spread of the dark water, and it
put words into his head.  "Stoop down, stoop down to the water,
Melisande."--And then he heard a little bleating sound coming to
him out of the night, the voice of one of his ewes big with lamb,
and penned under the shelter of Rose's Wood.  A strange pity
stirred in him.  How pitiful life was and how strange!  He climbed
over the gate and went slowly down across the "Gore," and the
moisture from the fodder crop of winter green soaked his boots.  A
poor beast--big with child--crying in the night!  Was it an
allegory, a prophetic cry?  A woman without a child, a woman who
had shirked the bearing of children, and yet whose sleek, soft,
sweet-smelling body provoked the embrace that begets children!  He
felt a fierce and fanatical urge in him.  A clinging, dark-eyed
parasite!  She should be made to cling for other reasons, and to
feel a babe biting at her breast.  Pain, travail, labour, such was
life; and life would overtake her and bring her down in order that
she might rise again and grapple with life.  Men brought to women
pain and childbirth and all that was inevitable and deep.

He leaned upon one of the hurdles of the pen, and from a dark
shelter came that whimpering, plaintive cry.

"Patience," he said, "that ram does God's work, old lady.  And the
lamb shall nose your belly."

He smiled in the darkness.

"The people who would escape--!  She--!  Drawing a nice skin of
furs about her, and daintily shirking.--'Life's so coarse.  Be
careful.  I will not be soiled.'"

He laughed aloud.

"Ah,--my lady!  Perhaps life will catch you.  It will take its
revenge.  I wonder?"

He looked at the stars and thought of Rose; and his heart felt big
again.

"Ah, beloved, you had courage.  You were big and strong and comely
and good.  You gave, and in the giving won what you desired.
Something for nothing?  No, not on the land.  These people who are
shy of life should learn from the soil.  By the sweat of the brow
and the bloody sweat of the soul."


3


Mrs. Charlotte lay beside her man in Carslake cemetery, and Cousin
Nellie had gone back to her old lady, and "Green Shutters" was
empty, and Furze was in the thick of the lambing season.  March
days.  And Mary wore black, and looked very well in it, rather like
a dark pansy.  "Poor Mrs. Fream, her father and mother dead within
five weeks of each other."  Poor Mrs. Fream indeed!  No one spoke
of Clare as "Poor Mrs. Biddulph."  People grow old and pass, and
elections come and go, and skirts are lengthened a little, and you
wear your hat a little less like an inverted flower-pot perched on
a dahlia stake to catch earwigs.

But something had happened to Mary.  She was two selves in one
body, and looking more like she used to look, poignant and vaguely
plaintive, all swimming dark eyes and clotted cream.  A chiffon
overskirt--the superficial smartness--and the more solid and
emotional underskirt beneath!  Yes, suddenly she had rediscovered
her emotions, and emotions are problematical possessions when you
are mated to a signpost that points you nowhere, not even towards
maternity.  Mary was having a little religious revival of her own,
and was going down on her silk-hosed knees, and feeling reproached
by all manner of reflections.  She had become full of sentimental
contritions and self-confessions.  She had not been a good
daughter; she had made men suffer.--Poor dear things!  For the last
year she had been feeling very empty, and this emotional mood was
quite pleasantly filling.  It made her feel a serious person, and
rather mysterious and romantic, a sort of little Diana of the
Crossways--you know.  A wistful look in your mirror, and an air of
tristful languor in public, and a sense of being deeper than you
thought you were, if you ever thought about it at all.  A woman may
grow chocolate-sick, and take to drinking vinegar for the sake of
her figure.  Diet, emotional and otherwise, has a distinct reaction
upon the inward attitude toward the ordinary phenomena of life.
Yet, did she confess to herself that behind the pale shades of her
dead parents loomed that brown-throated, shaggy sloven of a farmer?
"Doomsday"!

One day in March, it was a Sunday and she had been to Weyfleet
church in the morning, she broke a sentimental whim under the eyes
of her grandee.

"Val,--I want to speak to you about 'Green Shutters.'"

That his pallor had a tinge of green in it these days had not been
observed by her.

"Yes, my dear."

He looked at her a little anxiously, with inward self-depreciation.

"You know--the house was left to Clare and me.  Of course Leslie
suggested that it should be sold.  I don't want it to be sold."

"No."

He did not ask for her reasons.

"I wondered if you could buy me--Clare's share.  I should like to
own the house--feel it mine."

He took off his pince-nez and polished them, and then replaced them
with both hands--elbows raised--a pose that always made him look a
little fatuous.

"Might be managed.  Your property--you mean?"

"Yes, Val.  Sentimental reasons."

"You would let it,--I suppose?"

She looked vague and poignant.

"I might.--But only to--certain people.  Associations are queer.  I
might like to go down there--now and again--"

He examined his finger-nails with an air of solemn intentness.  How
was she to divine what was passing in his mind?  Yes, he would buy
her Clare's share of the house.  In case of shipwreck she would
have a little rock upon which she could find a foothold.

"I'll see Biddulph about it."

She looked pleased, touched.

"Val, you are good to me."

And she kissed him.


4


For the sum of six hundred pounds Clare parted with her half-share
of "Green Shutters" and the furniture therein and when Mr. Biddulph
had obtained probate and produced his statement of accounts, Mary
found herself the mistress of "Green Shutters" and its furniture,
and of £230 0s. 0d. invested in 5 per cent. War Loan--1929-47.  The
title deed was sent to her husband and he handed it over to her one
morning at breakfast.

"There you are,--woman of property."

"What do I do with it, Val?"

"Deposit it with your lawyers or at your bank,--the bank for choice--
By the way I have to go down to Gaiter's place in the country for
the week-end; business--you know; not a house party."

So her opportunity came to her, and with it the inspiration of an
April morning.  She felt adventurous, and the blue of the sky was
without a cloud.  Should she take Pollock with her?  No, she would
go alone, with a luncheon basket, and a suitcase and a box of
flowers in the dickey of her cherry-coloured car.  Yes, it was
quite an adventure, a sentimental pilgrimage, a setting to music of
the little laments that her conscience had been uttering.



XXV


1


Mary came to the old country by way of Melhurst village, and she
drove through Melhurst Park.  Her cherry-coloured car overtook the
memory of the blue wagon and the two grey horses moving slowly over
the green billows of the park.  The same trees were there, the same
deer, the same brown beech leaves of another year flickering hither
and thither as the wind stirred them.  She pulled up and got out,
and sat on the grass verge, with the hood-cover between her and the
damp turf, and in renewing a memory she opened an inward door.  How
that man hated her!  And did he also despise her?  And if so--why
should she mind?  What did it matter to Mrs. Fream of Hill House,
the admirably appointed Mrs. Fream who was showing a nice sentiment
in the matter of "Green Shutters."  She had presented to herself
the house of her parents as a public memorial to her conscience.
She was about to visit it, and spend an hour or two in it with a
dutiful duster, and an appreciation of her own sensibilities.  She
would drive up to Carslake cemetery and place flowers on the
graves.

She was a woman of the world.  For the space of nearly three years
she had been insisting upon herself as a woman of the world, and
she believed in herself as Mrs. Fream of Hill House.  She had
developed tact.  She had distinguished herself as a hostess.  She
knew exactly how things should be done, how servants should be
treated, the right voice in which to give orders to a chauffeur,
how to cast a pleasant atmosphere over a tea-table on the terrace
of the Hills Club.  Her personal appointments were exquisite.  She
came soft and rosy from her bath each morning.  Pollock dressed her
hair and her person, and manicured her finger-nails.  She was very
complete, and was convinced of her own completeness.  If she gave
way to sensibility--well--a woman of the world might be allowed to
know how to feel.

She re-entered her car, pressed the toe of a black glacé shoe on
the button of the self-starter, and working neatly through her
gears, took the undulations of the park road at a swinging speed.
She drove well, as a woman of the world might be expected to drive,
but half-way up the long hill before the junction with the Carslake
road "Cherry's" engine developed a sudden and rather fearsome
"knock."  Mary slowed up, and glanced at the oil dial on the
dashboard.  It was registering what she had been taught to regard
as the proper pressure.

Most unfortunate of complications, and yet in sympathy with that
suitcase packed in the dickey.  "Have it put in, Pollock.  I might
have to stay the night at the 'George.'"  Gently she brought the
complaining "Cherry" into the Carslake road, and fifty yards before
she reached the cinder track she sighted an A.A. scout on his
bicycle.

She pulled up and waved to the man, and he dismounted, and saluting
her, stood beside the car.

"There is something wrong with my engine.  I am going to the
Sandihurst Estate.  I wonder if you could have a man sent down from
one of the Carslake garages."

"Certainly, madam."

"The engine is knocking badly.  The car may have to go up to
Carslake."

"I expect so,--madam--"

"Oh,--and the house is 'Green Shutters.'  But the Andrews people
know me,--Mrs. Fream."

"Very good, madam."

He saluted, mounted, and rode off, and she coaxed "Cherry" up the
cinder track, and pulled up in front of "Green Shutters."  Someone--
a girl--waved to her, but she did not wave back.  She had come to
see things, not people; she did not feel friendly to all the
Vachetts and the Twists and the Perrivales.  The horrible Jamiesons
had left, but poor Coode still starved among his hens.

She got out of the car and went quickly up the path.  It was
sprouting grass and weeds, and the curtains drawn across the
windows made the little house look more deserted.  She was
conscious of a feeling of breathlessness.  She had a duplicate key
with her, and she unlocked the door, and hastily closing it after
her, relocked it.  What a queer feeling of guilt, of hiding from
something!  She stood there in the passage, with her hands hanging
limply, her eyes fixed on the stairs.  Everything was just the
same.  Her father's old sun-browned panama hat on a peg!  But the
silence, a suggestion of dampness, deadness, pathos?  She was
conscious of a thickness in her throat.  Poor little flimsy house,
hers, full of memories, voices, restlessness, disharmonies,
kindnesses.  It reproached her, and she had not expected to be
reproached.  But why?

Surely she ought to know!  And suddenly the purpose of her
pilgrimage ceased to be whimsical, and became real.  This was the
first real thing that she had done for the best part of three
years.  Vaguely she was aware of herself as bringing succour to
something that was more than mere tile and brick and timber.  She
was touching the hands of her old self, that distressed,
rebellious, bewildered self, crying for escape and freedom.  She
had escaped.  She was back here as a woman of the world, a woman of
affairs.

She went into the sitting-room and sat down.  What a queer feeling!
No one in the house, and the furniture just the same, and the
identical darn in the identical hearth-rug, and her mother's chair,
and one of her father's pipes on the mantelpiece!  O,--heavens!
And dust, weeks of dust, though she had arranged for a woman to
come in.  They had passed away--those old people--a little less
than two months ago; years seemed to have passed,--and hours.  What
strange stirrings in her!  Tears!  How very sentimental!  She stood
up.

A voice in her was saying--"No, I'll not go to the 'George.'  I'll
stay here--and picnic.  I wonder if there is any coal."

She passed through the familiar kitchen, and in the little brick
coal-hole off the scullery she found both coal and wood.  She took
off her hat, and then heard someone knocking.

"Bother.--One of the--people."

But it was a mechanic from the Carslake garage.  He and a mate had
come down in a car.

She stared at him and found her voice.

"Oh,--I think you had better take my car up to Carslake.  I think
there is something very wrong with the engine.  I shall want it to-
morrow--if possible."

"To-morrow's Sunday, Miss," said the man.

She agreed that to-morrow was Sunday.

"Do the best you can.  And would you mind carrying in my suit-case
and the luncheon basket--and a box.  They are in the dickey."

They were carried in; "Cherry" was taken away; she relocked the
door.


2


Mary found an old apron hanging behind the kitchen door, and she
put it on over her black dress and got to work.  She laid a fire in
the kitchen range, and having persuaded it to burn after a second
supply of wood and paper, she brought down blankets and sheets from
the linen cupboard on the landing, and hung them to air on the
backs of chairs.  She was very busy, and all the while she was
conscious of a queer secret feeling; she left the curtains drawn;
she wanted to be undisturbed.

People came and knocked.  She let them knock.  One of the visitors
was poor Coode; she was sure of it, divining his identity by the
self-effacing and deprecating little rat-tat that he gave.  She
could imagine him saying very earnestly--"Can I be of any use,--
Mrs. Fream?"  About four o'clock she heard a voice calling--"Mrs.
Fream, Mrs. Fream!"  It was the voice of Phyllis Perrivale, and she
left it unanswered.

She felt full of mystery, a creature of fanciful elfishness.  She
changed her mind as to the flowers that were to have been laid upon
the grave, and she chose instead to place them in vases about the
house as flowers of memory.  She dusted the rooms, resuming her
recollections of those days when she had cooked and cleaned and
washed, and had loathed it all, but on this April day she was Mrs.
Fream playing a little mysterious and sacramental game and playing
it rather like a child.  She unpacked her luncheon basket.  She had
given very complete orders as to its contents, and very complete it
was, a tea basket as well as a luncheon basket.  She had chicken
and bread and pastries, and some galantine, and butter, and a
little cream cheese, and tea and sugar, and a bottle of milk, and
two half-bottles of white wine, and some fancy cakes.  She arranged
her provisions in the larder, and made herself tea.

Afterwards she lit a cigarette and dreamed a little.  She was
feeling life as she had not felt it for a very long while; it had a
freshness, a sensitiveness, a newness.  Yes, undoubtedly she had
been very bored, and stagnant as to her emotions.  She took old
Hesketh's pipe down from the mantelpiece and held it in her soft
hands, and looked poignant, and almost like a woman discovering the
mystery of herself.  The quickness and the fluidity of her emotions
surprised her; she felt touched to tears by the most commonplace
objects.

Again someone knocked, and she left the knock unanswered.  Why did
people bother her when she was like a child deep in a mysterious
game?  Curiosity,--kindness?

Of course anyone could see the chimney smoking.  A certain person
did see it, and from a considerable distance, Arnold Furze walking
at the head of a horse that was pulling a roller to and fro across
the Ridge Fields.  He stopped the horse and stood at gaze for quite
half a minute, watching the trail of smoke from that particular
chimney.  To him it had become a dead house, but obviously it was
alive again.

"Let--I suppose."

And he went on rolling his field, with the westering sun striking
under the brim of his hat and giving to his eyes a hollow
intentness.  His face had hardened a good deal; it had a
sombreness, a suggestion of lean fanaticism in the stern lines of
the jaw and mouth.  He rolled his field, and the iron crushed the
clods as he went to and fro, horse and man lonely and inevitable
against the sky-line.

At "Green Shutters" a woman had drawn a curtain gently to one side,
and she saw April, an evening of plaintive blueness, and hills
ready to darken against a sky of pale gold.  There lay the garden,
old Hesketh's garden neglected and strange, with last year's pea-
sticks still in the ground, the grass shaggy and yellow, the soil
puddled by the winter's rains.  It seemed to cry to her for help,
but what could she do to help it?  Her hands were soft and
unwilling.

"I must arrange for a man to see to it," she thought.

But April drew her, the sky, and the blue green glooms, and the
singing of a bird.  She desired to wander, but not to be seen, and
putting on her hat and locking the door after her she walked down
the garden to the fence on the top of the bank above the road.  She
was able to make an unconventional escape, after peering over the
top of the fence to make sure that the road was empty.  The same
loose pale was there in the fence, and she had the same slimness,
and could slip through.  She swooped diagonally down the grass bank
and found herself in the road.

It was a mile to Carslake cemetery, and she reached it by a side-
road that skirted the old abbey wall.  Windmill Hill rose like a
great bald forehead above the landscape, and its wind-blown trees
were like ragged tufts of hair.  She did not stay long in the
cemetery, for the sun was setting, and the place chilled her, for
though she was near to reality she did not yet react to it as such.
Sentiment had thrown a spangled cloak over reality; she was at
play; her emotions amused themselves; her feet were too near
the yellow clay in Carslake cemetery, and she preferred to
sentimentalize over the sunset.  For escape was still her
privilege.  She could play her game, knowing that a little pleasure-
car would carry her back to Hill House and its marble bathroom, and
Pollock, and dances, and lawns and shops.

She had brought two white roses with her, and she left them with
her dead.  That was her attitude towards reality.  Her sentiments
were feeling sleekly satisfied, and if her dead were dead--what
more was there for her to do than to leave flowers with them?  She
eschewed the clay, the essential grimness of things that flowers
hide, muck and worms, and bacteria, and toil.  She still played on
the surface of life.

She entered Carslake, and Carslake was busy with its Saturday
evening shopping.  Turning into Andrews' garage, she found "Cherry"
very much in deshabille, and an oily man and a boy busy removing
gudgeon pins.  A bearing had gone.

"Monday at the earliest, madam."

"Can you promise to have her ready by twelve o'clock on Monday?"

Mr. Andrews thought that he could.

"If you will have her driven down to 'Green Shutters.'  And let me
have the bill at Weyfleet.--Hill House, Weyfleet."

She remembered that she had only three cigarettes left in her case,
and she bought a box of fifty at the tobacconist's opposite the
"George" Inn.  She was walking out of the shop when Furze appeared
in the doorway, a haversack slung over one shoulder, and his eyes
expecting no figure such as hers.

She was startled, but she did not show it.  In fact to Furze she
appeared very much mistress of herself.  She gave him a slight
smile.

"I am down here--for a few hours."

"Are you?"

She thought that he looked very tired.  He--too--was part of her
sentimental evening, a man moving on the surface of life.  She
waited outside the shop; she wanted him to know where she had been
and what she had been doing.  She owed that to herself.

When he came out she was there in her black dress and hat, an
anomalous figure, and yet with eyes that were smooth and casual.

"I have been to the graves.  Yes,--I am staying for the week-end."

He glanced at the "George."

"Over there?"

"No, at 'Green Shutters.'  It belongs to me now.  I feel--
responsible for it."

He stared at her, and the quality of his gaze was beyond her.  She
had no understanding of his intensity, of the real man who stood in
the footwalk and stared at her.  She kept her poise.

"I had trouble with my car.  I had to leave it at Andrews.  Oh,--I
must not forget to buy a few candles.  No lights down there."

"Are you walking?"

"Yes."

Had she known what lay behind that casual question she might have
avoided her old lover.


3


But avoidance was not part of the play.  She was like a spoilt
child in a menagerie coquetting with a lion that was safely caged.
All her animals were caged, and you could throw buns to them, and
say--"Pretty, pretty," and remark to your nurse that the lion
looked cross.  It did not occur to her that she might be an offence
and provocation to some wild beast behind the bars, and that man
may be a very dangerous wild beast, more especially so when he has
been teased and thwarted by fate, and has in him the makings of a
fanatic.  And man is a reaso