saw her, didn’t you, before I burnt her? you saw her exactly as she
was: I was no match for her.” Clare thought that he could probably
say this without exaggeration, and that, had she herself met the
other woman, few words would have been necessary between them for the
understanding of Calladine. How deep was the confederacy of sex! she
had never thought of it before; she smiled at Calladine with a detached
pity. “I have no longer any past,” he went on, “only the present,
hourly more lovely. Shall we go out for a little and leave the dust of
the past to settle in this room?”
Clare was glad to go out, for the room was making upon her a sad and
cold impression, but she found little comfort in the exterior of the
house, ungarnished as it well could be. She began to talk to Calladine
again about the garden he must make, for not only was she really
distressed for his own sake by the bleakness of his dwelling, but
annoyed, almost, in a feminine way, by the man’s incompetence to deal
with his own existence, and not unflattered, either, by his submission
to her directions and the attentiveness with which he received every
word that came from her lips. She saw that he clung to her as his
salvation; she became more autocratic, with a pretty tyranny. She would
transform his patch of desert into an oasis; she, over at King’s Avon
would think of this Starvecrow as blooming into gaiety and colour by
her orders. Calladine watched her, and she knew that he watched. But
she never allowed him to speak of herself, keeping him rigorously
to the business of his new garden; her laughter rang out, and she
rallied him, awaking almost against his will the rare smile on his
melancholy lips. At moments he thought, as he followed her about, that
he must stretch out his hands and cry to her “Clare! Clare!” No one
ever treated him as Clare treated him; other people always took him at
the valuation he set upon himself, composed their faces to a becoming
sobriety as soon as they perceived his own, and quitted his grave
company with relief. He chose to construe their acquiescence into a
grim sort of flattery. But Clare was privileged; Clare might assume
whatever mood she would; he would endeavour to follow her, perhaps
clumsily, for he had lost,--or liked to think that he had lost,--the
habit of lightheartedness; still, she should teach it to him again and
he would renew his youth.
He had come to the age when the sense of passing days induced a panic.
Clare had youth, Clare had a reserve of youth on which he could draw
without impoverishing her; he felt that she gave him life as surely as
if he drank it at her breast.
She seemed, as she stood in the centre of the square she had designated
as his future garden, to be all the flowers which should blow there
presently at her command. He said this to her, in that courtly
artificial manner he had of saying such things, with so much froth of
emotion underneath. It was the first personal remark he had made to
her since they had come out of the house, and it gave him relief. But
she only laughed again, and this time he could have shaken her with
rough hands for her laughter, and for her holding off the words which
would stifle him if they remained unspoken. “Clare,” he said violently.
She glanced at him with that new self-possession; she was maddening
him, though not with the purpose he would have attributed to any other
woman. How she eluded him! how she would perpetually elude him! and so
hold him forever. He knew himself to be fastidious enough to esteem
only that which he had lost, or could never hope to seize. “Clare,” he
repeated, this time with a genuine despair.
They went back into the house, where tea had been made ready; she noted
his preparations, the honey, the girdle-cakes, the fruit and cream.
He deprecated them, “A bachelor’s house....” “What could be better?”
she replied; and had slipped from him once more. She ate heartily,
borrowing a handkerchief to wipe the cream from her lips, unaccountably
a child again, and a new bewilderment to him. He now felt that what
he might have said to the woman of whom he had had a glimpse, he
could not say to the child who trusted herself in his house, and he
thought with baffled anger, how ably she managed her alternative of
weapons. A spoonful of honey in one hand, and a cake in the other,
she leaned forward, talking to him, he more helpless than ever, and
she more completely in control. He dared not think of his house when
her presence should have gone out of it; he wondered whether he would
suffer least pain by returning to his sitting-room directly the gig had
driven away, by going for a walk on the Downs and returning only after
dusk, or by driving her himself back to the Manor House. The idea of
her going at all was intolerable; perhaps he had been unwise to ask her
to come; perhaps he had only been at his favourite trick of turning the
knife in the wound. But she was speaking, she was saying, “I shall come
again to see whether you have prepared our garden against the autumn.”
By her movement he saw that she was about to take her leave; he leapt
out of his own chair and stood over her, saying wildly, “Don’t go,
Clare, don’t; how can I bear your going? don’t leave me again, stay
with me a little longer, I can’t face the loneliness without you,” and
a stream of incoherent ejaculations flooded from his lips, while his
hands fumbled towards her, yet with a remnant of soberness he strove to
restrain them. Clare looked at him calmly, with wondering eyes. “But I
must go home if my father is not to be kept waiting for his dinner,”
she said.
Calladine stepped back instantly and released her. “I am sorry,” he
said. “The loneliness, perhaps, gets a little on my nerves.” He passed
his hand across his eyes. “You are the first visitor I have welcomed
here for many years, and your presence threw me off my balance.” He
tried to speak lightly. “Come, I will take you to the gig,” but still
he lingered, looking to see whether she had left anything behind,
in a last attempt to delay her. “Shall I drive you home?” he asked
desperately.
“No,” she said, not wanting his company at all, “stay here and begin to
dig the garden.” She smiled. She was anxious to get away. Not until she
was out in the lanes would she again breathe freely. She went without
any appearance of hurry, thanking Calladine, who tore from his solitary
rose-bush all the branches he could crowd into her arms, and climbed
back into the gig as she had come. He saw her go, despair and joy and
anguish rending him.
The strain and anxiety of being with Calladine drove her, as always,
towards the wish to be with Lovel. “Brother,” she could have called
him, from the ease of his companionship. She could have put her hand
into his, simply for the trust she had in him. But she knew too well
that the indifference of his greeting would repulse instantly any
such movement of confidence on her part; he would glance at her, when
they met, and his glance would take her back into the assurance of
their old intimacy, but there would be no softening of sentiment in
it. Never that; a challenge and a bracing, but never compassion or a
caress. Could she ever go with a trouble to Lovel? Her instinct leapt
up into an affirmative; he would listen gravely, would understand
without commiserating, would counsel quietly, and would fortify her
with a sense of his reliance in her trustworthiness. He would trust
her to behave always as he would expect that she should behave. She
would endure anything rather than disappoint Lovel. More: even in his
absence, even though he should know nothing of it, she kept herself
constantly up to the level of his standards. She winced at any thought
of his possible disapproval. She had not for him, nor could she imagine
herself having, the indulgent and,--school herself to reverence as
she would,--contemptuous pity she had for Calladine; what had she
told Calladine to do? to grow lupin and iris, tulips and honesty,
sweet sultan and snapdragons, in a walled patch of what had once been
Down-land! to _wall_ the Down? was it possible that she had told him to
wall in the Down? what gulf she must divine between him and herself,
between him and the Down-country in which he had elected to live, if
she could tell him to wall in the Down. Yes, even a square, a stray
square of Down, forgotten between a lane and Starvecrow’s farm-house.
What would Lovel say, if she told him that? True, Lovel himself was
sometimes set on to plough the Down, and willingly proceeded with the
task; but that was different: that was the old struggle between man
and the soil from which he wrested his daily bread; Lovel would tame
the Down to grow barley for man or roots for his cattle,--a poor crop
at best, extorted from the recalcitrant soil, like charity from an
irreconcilable spirit, a poor crop, flaunting red poppies for its last
flag of insubordination,--Lovel would plough the Down for that purpose,
and relish the tussle, meeting in mutual understanding an adversary as
stubborn as he himself; but for his mere pleasure he would not wall in
a square to grow the effeminate flowers of decoration. They would blow
and curtsey, Calladine’s flowers, until a wind swept over them from the
angry Downs and laid them low,--but stay, what had she said?--“The wall
will protect them against the wind.” Yes, and protect Calladine too: he
could not stand up against the winds from the Downs. So, in her heart,
she pitied Calladine and was disposed to see him protected? What had
he done to deserve from her the insult of that charity? She had seen
Lovel go out into a snowstorm on the heights and had not feared for his
discomfort or his danger, any more than he feared for hers. Calladine
she would have prevented with kind, firm words on the threshold of the
door.
And it so happened, at her first meeting with Lovel after her visit to
Starvecrow, that she, riding, sighted him in the distance following
a plough-team over a curve of hill. He was not at work in one of the
folds of the lower reaches, the favourite position for the rare stains
of cultivation. He and his team were in outline against the sky,
following the slow and classical progression of the furrow over the
curve; the hempen reins looped slackly from the horses’ heads to his
hand; the man, the horses, and the plough pursued their way, disengaged
from all but the essentials of their labour, with the old inevitable
simplicity. Clare rode towards the brown patch and, reaching Lovel,
rode at a walk beside him up and down the freshly-turned furrows.
The bright share cut cleanly into the sod, turning it over. They
both watched it, as it slid through the sod, with a professional and
satisfied criticism. “Poor soil,” Lovel said once; otherwise they had
not spoken. She liked to watch him plough, appreciating his dexterity,
and the jump of the plough-shaft under his hand; she liked his voice
ringing out to the horses at the turn. The slow rhythm soothed her.
“Who are you ploughing for?” she asked. “Morland,” he said briefly.
“Shall you be finished by six?” she asked, looking across at the
westering sun; and he nodded. “I’ll wait,” she said, and getting off
her pony, she slipped the reins over her arm and stood watching Lovel
without impatience.
At six he unhitched his team and came across to her, the horses
slouching along behind him. “An ungrateful job,” he remarked, staring
resentfully at the stony furrows; “they never put me on to the loam;
always the chalk for me.” “I wish you had a bit of land of your own,”
she said. “Ay, I’d get the better of it,” he replied, suddenly eager.
His team stood patient, heavy and shining compared to her small pony.
The curious light of sunset began to creep over the Downs, turning
their tan to a rosy orange. “Fine weather,” nodded Lovel. He turned
to his horses, and began to adjust a bit. The rooks were settling on
the patch that he had ploughed. He stooped down, and picking up a lump
of earth, crumbled it between his fingers. Clare, observing his fine,
bony, downward-bent face, knew that he was reflecting. Sure enough, he
raised it to say, “How would you bring them up, if you had children?”
“Have you been thinking about children?” she asked, amused.
“It’s thinking about children,” he replied seriously, “that shows
you the things we base life on. There’s money, there’s humbug, and
there’s death. What do we say over and over again to children? ‘Don’t
touch that, you’ll break it, it’ll cost money to replace.’ ‘Be
polite,’--that’s humbug. ‘Don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself,’--that’s
death, really, or at any rate the fear of injury. A child doesn’t see
much difference between being alive or being dead. As for money, or
for time, which is the same thing, it takes him years to get his brain
round those two things. It’s a fine and careful system we’ve got,
haven’t we? While I was following the plough, I was having an imaginary
conversation with a child. ‘If I was dead,’ said he, ‘I shouldn’t know
that I was dead, so what would it matter?’ And I couldn’t find an
answer in my head.”
“But if you had children of your own,” said Clare, “you would find
yourself bringing them up in the same way.”
“Oh, perforce,” he replied, “but that’s the end of all theories. We’re
chained by necessity; it’s the wire across the path that brings the
horse down in mid-gallop. We’ve got to teach our children caution,--the
fear of death,--merely to keep them alive until they grow up. And all
that we should enjoy teaching them is obscured by the don’ts and the
shoutings-out to keep their limbs whole and our crockery unbroken.”
“Well,--and humbug?” she said.
“That’s civilisation. ‘What’s polite,’ asks the child, and ‘what’s a
lie?’”
“Would you like to have children of your own?” asked Clare.
“Yes,” replied Lovel briefly, and changed the subject. “I have to bring
a handful of sheep home for Mr. Morland from the fair at Marlborough on
Tuesday. Will you be going to the fair? Horses, mostly.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Clare in delight, clapping her hands.
“Better meet me there, as ’twere by chance,” said Lovel, suddenly a
little grim. “‘Miss Warrener taking up with gipsies,’--I can hear them
talk. No, meet me there, make out you’re interested in a pony, and
fetch me to have a look at him.”
“But we can ride home together?” said Clare crestfallen.
“We’ll meet outside the town and come home over the Downs. I don’t want
all the gig-wheels in amongst my sheep.”
She laughed suddenly, seeing how practical he was, and liking it.
He slipped the reins of his team from off the gate-post where he had
hitched them, and hoisted himself, sitting side-ways, on to one of the
great elephantine backs. He sat there, slack and swaying to the horse’s
tread, in the manner of all carters, and the other two horses lumbered
after him, their hoofs going plop-plop in the thick dust of the road,
and the hair round their fetlocks flopping as on spaniels’ paws. Clare
followed him, light on her pony. They did not become him well, she
thought, those great horses; he demanded the slimmer, swifter animals
of creation, hares, Arabs, or deer. But it amused him to play the
plough-boy. How indifferent he seemed, she thought,--scarcely looking
at her, riding on with his gaze held towards the sunset; how different
from Mr. Calladine’s eagerness to propitiate her; and a tiny sore of
feminine vanity was pricked. Then she laughed at herself, immediately;
what was she expecting from Lovel, her Lovel? expecting him to be
different from himself? she would not like it if he were. And she knew
that he was content to have her there, even though he never troubled to
look around.
Lovel set off in a practical mood for Marlborough fair. He was thinking
of the sheep he had to buy and bring home for Farmer Morland; in a way
the farmer’s trust provoked in him a sort of contemptuous pride, and,
poacher and free-lance though he was, he would have scorned to make
a penny’s profit for himself out of the transaction. The commission
was given him to execute; the farmer relied upon his honesty and his
knowledge; the thing was simple: that was a trust of which he would not
take advantage. On his lawless expeditions, he was betraying no man’s
confidence; the keepers all knew him, and, meeting him unprofessionally
in the lanes, would exchange with him a grin and even a wink of
understanding. They stood for the law, and he for the skill that would
defeat the law; they knew it, and he knew that they knew it; that was
a frank challenge, with sport in it on either side; but as for Farmer
Morland’s sheep, a mere matter of money, he would never demean himself
to a bargain with the middle-man, and the farmer’s interests, for the
moment, were his own. He might next week be snaring the same farmer’s
ditches; that was a separate matter.
At the back of his mind, as he rode ambling along on the strip of grass
at the roadside towards Marlborough, he retained the knowledge that he
had arranged with Clare a meeting at the fair. The knowledge lay there,
like a warm patch in his consciousness, and he enjoyed keeping it just
out of sight, while he directed his thoughts on to the sheep, and noted
the farmers, shepherds, and cattle-men who streamed along the road in
the same direction that he himself was taking, some on horseback going
at a quick trot, some in their high spanking gigs, and some crawling
in farm-carts with pigs and calves bundled up under a net. All the
pastoral population of the district seemed to be streaming towards
Marlborough along the great arterial road, and Lovel had no doubt that
they were streaming equally towards it along the road on the further
side of the town, and not along the main road only, but converging
upon Marlborough by all the lanes and lesser roads, from Devizes and
Savernake, from Ogbourne St. George and Ogbourne St. Andrew, from the
Winterbournes and the Hintons. He surveyed them as they passed him;
they were known to him for the most part, solid men and honest enough,
their faces as broad and open as the country which had bred them;
and the shepherds, who with their slow, limited movements seemed to
resemble the animals committed to their care, contented in not having
a preoccupation beyond the recurrent business of the animal year,
with its breeding, shearing, and dipping; and the old wiseacres, who,
although they no longer bought or sold, made a practice of attending
all the local fairs where their fat cobs would carry them, there to
criticise and shake their heads over the methods of their juniors.
Lovel watched them all go by, feeling himself slightly alien, as
though he had been all the while conscious of his darkness beside their
ruddiness.
Gig-wheels rattled and hoofs spanked crisply along the ringing road,
and Lovel watched them go by, the stream, like life itself, hurrying
past him. That old road had known the traffic of the past and present,
and,--although there was not much to tempt his reflectiveness in
the wide airiness of the light-coloured summer morning,--he said
to himself, addressing his thoughts to the rubicund pre-occupied
agriculturists, that after all the hair-splitting and tangle introduced
by love, malice, envy, ambition, or their kindred, were cleared aside
and done with, the main business of life was nothing more than the
maintenance of life, else why all this buying and selling, this labour
and breeding, this system which produced tilled fields and stout
farmers trotting to market, cattle-pens in Marlborough market-place,
and booths with headstalls and shovels? so that nine-tenths of the
population were so taken up with the business of living that it was
time to die before they had ever had leisure to take a look at life at
all. Lovel, thinking thus, looked at them in his detached way with a
little envy, a good deal of sarcasm, and a complex wistfulness, failing
to find any meaning in the conclusions his logic had led him to. A lot
of pother, just to keep alive; and for what purpose?
All over the civilised world, on which Marlborough was a speck, they
were doing it; but they would not understand Lovel if he told them so,
and he knew better than to diminish his reputation of being a practical
man.
And now in spite of all his thoughts which bore him away on absences
of speculation, his horse, which had been carrying him more soberly
along, brought him in sight of Marlborough, and he saw the concourse of
gigs, from which the horses had been unharnessed and led away, standing
parked with the shafts stuck upright in the air, and beyond them the
lime-whitened hurdles which penned up the tossing sheep; he saw the
gaitered legs moving among the open spaces; he heard the barking of
sheep-dogs as they rushed excitedly round, he heard the cries of the
vendors and the lowing of the puzzled cattle. A cattle-market and horse
fair was to him no novelty; he got off his horse, and, not thinking any
more now of the cumbersome system of civilisation which had gathered
all those men and beasts together from their homes to the same spot at
the same hour, he walked round surveying with as shrewd an eye as any
farmer there the merits and demerits of the goods and livestock offered
for sale. The principal business of the sale was not yet begun, but
a good deal of private bartering and haggling was going on, and the
sellers at the opening of their booths were crying their wares, whether
wooden baskets, hay-rakes, tarred twine, leggings, hedging gloves,
chaff-cutters, milking-stools, scythes, sickles, carters’ whips,
churns, shears, or in fact any of the smaller articles necessary to
pastoral or agricultural existence. The whips hung up in heaves made
gay with scarlet braid; the wooden goods were displayed along the front
of the booths, clean and newly-planed, showing the honest grain of
the wood and smelling fresh of sawn edges and rosin; and on some of
the booths, fluttering like flags, were hung coloured petticoats and
shawls to tempt the men to bring home a remembrance to their women.
There were tinkers too, selling shining saucepans, and gipsies with
bead necklaces; a dancing bear ambling along on a leash; hokey-pokey
carts, and a hurdy-gurdy; and outside the town, in a field, was
encamped a travelling circus, with a roundabout and a set of swings,
that awoke in its progress shrieks of terror and ecstasy all over
rural England. Among the various attractions, Lovel moved quietly and
alone, his two dogs at his heels, as self-contained as their master.
Several strangers threw curious glances at him, for his quiet step,
which they thought stealthy, and the darkness and leanness of his air,
which so differentiated him from the fair sturdy weight of the crowd
of countrymen. Interrogation by these strangers evoked a glance and a
reply, contemptuous in intention, yet respectful in its immediate hint
of mystery, “Egyptian, they do say ... queer tales.” But Lovel, if he
noticed these rare enquiries, paid no attention; he was accustomed to
feel himself shunned and dreaded, and his dogs seemed to share his
loneliness, for they never crossed the road to nose another dog, but
kept to Lovel’s heels, and woke to interest only when there were sheep
or steers to be shepherded, in the same way as the man was scornful
and kept himself aloof, but spoke keenly and with authority when any
question arose relating to his various professions.
Amongst the cries and distractions of the market Lovel tried to keep
his mind fixed upon the sheep business which had brought him there,
until that should be despatched, but there was another business which
kept his eyes straying round, and that was the hope of perceiving
Clare, a small and merry figure, with her pony’s rein slung over her
arm. He did not shirk, in his own mind, the desire he had to catch
sight of her, or the sudden relief and satisfaction that sight would
bring him. So long as she was there, Heaven might pour and thunder;
but all would still be well. So long as he had not seen her, the sun
might shine; there would still be a darkness at his heart. Lovel long
since had faced this truth with resolution and a complete despair; but
with no attempt to delude himself or to minimise. It lay quietly at
the bottom of his heart, a quiet patch of certainty, which shouts and
jostlings and an alert scrutiny of the frightened herds were powerless
to disturb. It was there, like a thing he must put out of sight for the
moment, but to which he would have to turn presently, when his business
was finished; he would have to turn to it,--not reluctantly, but in
due course, like returning home,--he would have to attend to it,
grapple with it, decide what was to be done.