1
Autumn came, and gradually the farm-work slackened. The Bucksteep
acres were cut, not much the worse for the storm—the hops were
picked, and showed a fair crop of fuggles, though the goldings had
not done so well. Harry sowed catch crops of trifolium and Italian
rye grass, and started his autumn ploughings. Certain reactions
had seized him after the harvest, and he had gone off wandering in
the fields, away to villages where he had not strayed for months
except to market. But the lapse had been short, for the adventure of
Worge’s acres was not dead—his imagination had now its headquarters
and sanctuary in the fields where he worked; he had no need to seek
dreams and beauty far away, for they grew at his barndoor, and he
strawed them in the furrows with his grain.
Tom’s dwindling zeal was reawakened by the account of the harvest
which Harry scrawled to France—“Nine quarters we got from the
Volunteer Field and five from the Sunk and six from Forges. Hops and
roots did middling. All the potash fields were valiant. Maybe next
year Father will buy a reaper-and-binder. The Reverend Mr. Sumption
was proper at the harvest.” His brother wrote back a letter of which
“Well done, young ’un” was the refrain. “Queer,” he wrote, “but
there’s a Forges Wood out here—they say the 5th Sussex named it and
it was called something French before. It is not like Forges, for it
is narrow like a dibble and the trees have no branches, being knocked
off by crumps and nothing grows there becos of the gas. There are
dead horses in it.”
Tom had seen plenty of fighting that autumn in Paschendaele, but
was so far well and unhurt. He sent Thyrza home a bit of shell
which had knocked off his tin hat and “shocked him all of a swum.”
Everyone, he wrote, had laughed fit to bust at it—Thyrza thought that
they laughed at queer things in the trenches. She fretted a little
during those autumn days, for her hope was now almost a torment ...
suppose Tom should never see the child their love had made. Every
day in the paper there were long casualty lists, every day telegraph
boys and girls went peddling to happy homes and blasted them with a
slip of paper. They had knocked at doors in the country of the Four
Roads—the eldest Pix had been killed early in October; then there
had been the butcher’s son at Bodle Street, and the lawyer’s son at
Hailsham, and poor Mus’ Piper’s boy had lost both legs.... The world
looked suddenly very grey and treacherous to Thyrza; she dared not
hope, lest hope should betray her, and her few moments of peaceful
mother-happiness were riddled with doubts. Oh, if only God would let
her have Tom back somehow, no matter how maimed, how helpless, how
dependent on her.... Then she would suddenly react from her desire,
shrink back in horror at the thought of Tom wounded, his strong sweet
body all sick and disfigured.... “Better dead,” she would groan—and
yet, a dead father for her child.... She found war a very tar’ble
thing.
During the earlier years she had, in company with most people in the
country of the Four Roads, passed lightly under its yoke. Even her
widowhood had not brought it down upon her—Sam had so often left
her, might so easily have come to grief in other ways. Except for
those who were actually and poignantly bereaved, the War made little
difference to a large multitude for whom it existed only in France
and in the newspapers. For a big section of England it did not begin
till 1916, for it was not till then that it actually set foot on
English soil. In 1916 the Conscription Act, the food scarcity, and
War Agricultural Committees dumped it down on the doorsteps of Sussex
folk who up till then had ignored it as a furrin business. Thyrza
had not thought about it much—she had read the newspapers, and given
little bits of help to war charities that appealed to her; but now
that it had taken the man she loved, it had taken her too. She was
tied with him to its chariot-wheels, one of the nameless victims of
the great woe.
Her business, too, fretted her. She was not able for the exertions of
the times, and was worried by the difficulties of getting supplies.
To have no sweets for the little children who came in with their
pennies, no tea for the old men and women who wanted it to warm and
cheer their poor rheumatic bodies, no cheese and no bacon for the
young men who worked in the fields ... all this grieved her gentle
heart, and she brooded over it in a way she would not have done had
she been in her usual health. She grew pale and nervous, found she
had but little to say to lingering customers, sat huddled limply over
her fire, rising slowly and heavily when the buzz of the little bell
that used to be so gay forced her to exert herself and go to the door.
In this state, Mrs. Beatup took pity on her, and forgot the tacit
warfare of the mother on the wife. If Thyrza was going to give a
child to Tom, she was also going to give a grandchild to Tom’s
mother. She often waddled down to the shop with good advice, or asked
Thyrza up for an evening at Worge, and developed a new and unexpected
optimism for her comfort.
“Reckon if Tom’s alive he’ll stick alive to the end—if he’d bin going
to be killed he’d have bin killed afore now. Besides, he always wur
the chap fur luck. I remember how when he wur a liddle feller he
slid into the pond, and we all thought he’d be drownded, but Juglery
pulled him out, and his faather hided him nigh out of his skin. So
doan’t you vrother, my dear, but kip in good heart fur the saake of
the liddle ’un wot’s coming. Tom ull live to see un, I can promise
you. He sims unaccountable young to have a baby, but reckon he’d be
younger still to die.”
2
If that autumn was cruel to Thyrza in its torture of waxing hope it
was crueller still to Nell in its torture of hope’s dying. For a week
after the harvest she had lived in flowery fields of memory, pied
with all bright colours. When she shut her eyes she could see his
face bending close to hers over the shocked corn, his thin delicate
hands moving among the straw, sliding close enough to hers for an
accidental touch ... she could feel them brush her neck as he helped
her into his coat at the day’s end of prayer and storm....
For a week her heart drowsed in its own sweetness. Nell was happy,
she grew gentler and kinder. She was no longer an ineffective little
rebel, full of disgusts and grumbles—a delicious languor was upon
her, a bright dimness which veiled all the jags and uglinesses of her
life. During this week she did not see Mr. Poullett-Smith, but her
mind rested sweetly in his memory. Perhaps the physical fatigue of
the harvest, mixed with the natural inertia of her anæmic condition,
both had a share in bringing about a certain passivity, or perhaps
it was the change of her love from scourge to comfort which put
an end to all her old restless efforts to see him, her making of
opportunities, her fretting glances from the schoolhouse window, her
nervous strayings to church. Anyhow she did not see him till Sunday,
when her glorious castle fell.
He came into Sunday-school as usual, with a benedictory smile. Her
memories of him in his open shirt, with his face all red and shining
and his hair caked with sweat on his forehead, made her feel a little
shocked to see him again in his long black cassock, above which his
face showed waxy and white. Perhaps a touch of sunburn lingered,
but the black of his priestly garment wiped it out. Who would have
thought, said Nell to herself, that this day a week ago he had been
toiling as a farmhand, with bare arms and throat, all baked and burnt
and dirty and sweaty...?
He greeted the superintendent, and talked for a few moments at her
desk; then he came down among the teachers and their classes. Nell
wore a white blouse and a big white hat like an ox-eyed daisy. Her
book slid from her knee to the floor, and there was a scuffle among
her children as Freddie Gurr from Hazard’s Green dropped the worm
he had been nursing for comfort through the chills of his mediæval
Sunday; but she did not hear as she half rose for her greeting, then
sank back, as in the level, indifferent tones in which he had said
“Good morning, Miss Sinden—good morning, Miss Pix,” he said “Good
morning, Miss Beatup,” and passed on to “Good morning, Miss Viner.”
Nell’s heart constricted with pain. She told herself that she was a
fool to be so sensitive, that it was not likely Mr. Poullett-Smith
would greet her publicly in the manner of their harvest friendship.
But she could get no comfort from her self-rebuke, for deep
in herself she knew that she was wise. Doubtless there was no
importance to be attached to the coldness of her friend’s greeting.
Nevertheless, he had that morning, silently and symbolically,
declared the gulf between them. In the cornfield, working as her
comrade, he had stood for a short while on her level—for the first
time her efforts to attract him had been without handicap. But now
the handicap was restored—he was the Priest-in-Charge of Brownbread
Street, and she was the daughter of a drunken farmer. If for a few
hours she had charmed him out of his eminent sense of fitness, the
charm was over now. What had this dignified, cassocked ecclesiastic
to do with her, a poor little nobody? His friendliness during their
common toil had been a mere passing emotion; probably she had
exaggerated it—even the little her memory held must be halved, and
that poor remainder cancelled out by the probability that he had
forgotten it.
As a matter of fact the curate had not forgotten it, but the
attraction had not been robust enough to survive the loss of its
surroundings. He saw that he had been unwise and rather unkind in
yielding so easily to a mere temporary prepossession. His more solid
affections had long been engaged elsewhere, and he spent some hours
of real self-reproach for having ever so briefly faltered. He might
have put ideas into the girl’s head—they had certainly been in his
own. However, he reflected, there was not time to have done much
harm, and he would set matters straight at once. So for the next
month his behaviour to Nell was unflaggingly cold and polite, and at
the end of it all the parish was told of his engagement to Marian
Lamb.
3
There were days of desolation for Nell Beatup that November. Her
disappointment gripped her as a black frost grips the fields; she
felt powerless, bound, and sterile. Even the last month, when bit by
bit her happy memories were destroyed, when she learned that all her
hopes were built on an exaggeration, a mistake, even that month of
slow disillusion had been better than this black month of despair.
In October a few crumpled leaves had reddened the trees, a few pale
draggled flowers had sweetened the garden, a bird had sometimes
perched on the gable end and sung before he flew away. But now the
fields were black and the woods were dun, the lanes were a poach of
mud, and the smell of mud hung above field-gates and barns—a clammy
mist rose from the ponds, making the air substantial with the taste
of water ... tears ... they seemed to hang in the rainy clouds, to
dribble from the trodden earth, and, mixed with the dead summer’s
dust, they made a grey slimy mud that sobbed and sucked under her
feet on her daily trudge to school.
The killing of her hope was no mercy. Even that sick thing had been
better than this emptiness, this death. Hope had sustained her for
years, for years she had had nothing more robust to feed on than her
pale infatuation for a man who seldom gave her crumbs. She had become
skilled in hoping, long practice made her an experienced artificer
of hope, able to build a palace out of a few broken bricks. She had
never known any other love than this ghost of one, so there had never
been a chance of its dying of comparison. She had no intimate girl
friends, and Ivy’s full-blooded affairs struck her only with the
grossness of their quality, giving her own by contrast a refinement
and poetry that made it doubly precious.
Then had come the wonderland of those harvest days, when hope
had almost passed into confidence, when all the wonderful things
of love she had never learned yet—glamour, pride, perfection,
satisfaction—had shown her their burning shapes. But it had all been
false, a mirage of that same hope’s sick intensity, an overreaching
of the artificer’s skill; and now her tears had turned to mud the
golden dust of harvest, and all her dreams were dead—and stuck to her
still, clogging and fouling, like this mud of Slivericks Lane on her
boots.
Luckily, her day-long absence made it possible for her to hide
her wretchedness from her family. At school her listlessness was
commented on—a listlessness alternating with an increased nerviness
and a tendency to cry when found fault with—but as Nell had always
been a little languid and a little hysterical, these exaggerations of
her natural state were put down to her health, and the schoolmistress
persuaded her to take a patent medicine containing iron. Her love
affair had been conducted on such delicate lines that only a few had
noticed it, and no one except Ivy had given it any importance. Ivy
was intensely sorry for her sister, and on one Sunday’s visit dared
to probe her state. But Nell was like a poor little cat caught by
the tail, and could only scratch and spit, so Ivy good-naturedly
gave up the effort. She was quite her old self again, judging by the
“pals” she brought over to Worge on her Sundays off—Motorman Hodder
and Motorman Davis, and Sergeant Staples, and Private La Haye, and
Corporal Bunch of the Moose Jaws, and other Canadians quartered at
Hastings, who sat in the kitchen, saying, “Sure” and “Yep” and “Nope.”
“Reckon it’s kill or cure wud you,” said Mrs. Beatup, and no one knew
precisely what she meant.
Nell thought her worst moment would be when she delivered to Mr.
Poullett-Smith the pretty little speech she had been making up ever
since she heard of his engagement. It was fairly bad, for Marian Lamb
was with him and had already assumed a galliard air of proprietorship.
“Thank you so much, Miss Beatup—it’s awfully kind of you. Yes, I’m
awfully happy, and”—coyly—“I hope Harry is too. But we mustn’t stop
any more—Harry has still the remains of his cold. _Do_ turn up your
collar, you naughty boy.”
Nell walked away rigid with contempt. “She’s silly and she’s
vulgar—she’s vulgarer than I, for all I’m only a farmer’s daughter.
‘Naughty boy!’—how common! She’s worse than Ivy.”
Miss Marian gave up her Red Cross work, and was seen going for long
walks with her Harry, and accompanying him on his parish rounds. She
was a big, ungainly, soapily clean female, with a certain uncouth
girlishness which did not endear her to the curate’s flock. Nell
could not imagine what he “saw in her”—she certainly did not read the
_Sermons of St. Gregory_. She wondered if he had loved her long—the
parish said “years,” but that he had been unable to propose (1) till
an expected legacy arrived, (2) till Miss Marian was sure she could
get nobody else. At all events, he must have been in love with her
during those days of Nell’s mirage—it was another bitter realisation
for her to swallow, another choking mouthful of humble-pie.
The poor little teacher crept about forlornly. She had not officially
given up her Sunday-school class, but she seized flimsy pretexts to
keep away; she even sometimes stayed away from church—then would
force herself to go thrice of a Sunday, in case her absence should
be put down to its true cause. She dodged the curate and Marian in
the lanes, but she seemed to run into them at every corner—they
always seemed to be going by the schoolhouse window. One evening, as
she passed Mr. Smith’s cottage by the church, she saw the firelight
leaping in his uncurtained study, and two dark figures stooping
together against the glow. She stopped and stared in, like a beggar
watching a feast; the table was laid for tea, and there were his
books and his pictures, all ruddy in the firelight, the flickering,
shuttled walls of the little room in which she had never set foot—his
home. Marian was there; she would pour out his tea and hand him his
cup. She would say, “Eat some more, dear; you’ve had a tiring day.”
Then she would make him lie back in his armchair and put his feet to
the fire, and she would curl up at his feet and read him the _Sermons
of St. Gregory_.... No, she wouldn’t do anything like this. Nell
laughed—that woman was Nell, not Marian. She was putting herself
where she wanted to be, in the other’s place. Marian would say,
“Don’t eat all the cake, naughty boy.” And then she would go and sit
on his knee. Ugh!... And Nell, who would have done so differently,
stood outside in the November dusk, with tears and rain on her face,
and little cold, red hands clenched in impotent longing.
4
At the end of November the bells rang for the advance at Cambrai—old
Dallington tower rocked with its chimes, and even the little tin
clapper at Brownbread Street tinkled away for an hour or more. Mr.
Poullett-Smith and his organist spent half a dozen evenings trying to
make a dodging choir face a Solemn Te Deum approved by the Gregorian
Society. Unluckily, the singers who would have easily blustered
through Stainer in F or Martin in C, grew hang-dog and discouraged
in the knots of Tones and Mediations, so that by the time the Te
Deum was ready, Bourlon Wood had been evacuated by the British and
the victory of Cambrai became something perilously near a fiasco.
Fortunately the capture of Jerusalem soon afterwards saved the Te
Deum from being wasted.
These alternating victories and disasters were very bad for Mus’
Beatup, for he celebrated them all in the same way at the Rifle
Volunteer. The only difference was that from some obscure sport of
habit he celebrated a victory in gin and a defeat in whisky. He was
very bad after both aspects of Cambrai, and Jerusalem brought him to
ruin.
Soon after nine there was a loud knocking at the back door, rousing
all the Beatups who had fallen asleep in the kitchen. Nell was asleep
because she always seemed to be tired and drowsy now, Mrs. Beatup was
asleep because she reckoned she wouldn’t have much of a night with
Maaster, Zacky and Harry were asleep on the floor in front of the
fire, curled up together like puppies—Zacky because it was long past
the time he ought to have been in bed, Harry because he had had a
hard day ploughing the clays. There was great confusion and rubbing
of eyes, and the knock was repeated.
“Go and see who it is, Nell,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Harry, I dreamt as
we wur being bombed by Zepperlians like the folk at Pett.”
“I dreamt of naun—I’m going to sleep agaun.”
He dropped his head back against Zacky—and just at that moment Nell
reappeared in the doorway, with a terrified face.
“Mother—it’s father; he’s been hurt....”
“Hurt!—you mean killed....”
“I don’t—I mean hurt. There’s a man with him, helping him in.”
“I’m a-going,” and Mrs. Beatup seized the lamp and waddled out,
followed by her scared and sleepy offspring.
In the passage a big soldier was propping up a Mus’ Beatup who looked
as if he was stuffed with sawdust.
“He’s had a bit of a fall,” said the soldier as he staggered under
his burden. “I was seeing him home like, and he slipped in the yard.”
“I reckon every boan in his body’s bruk,” said Mrs. Beatup—“that’s
how he looks, surelye. Let him sit down, poor soul.”
Mus’ Beatup slid through the soldier’s arms to a sitting posture on
the floor. Harry pushed forward and offered to help carry him into
the kitchen.
“Someone ud better go fur a doctor,” said the escort. “I don’t like
the look of him.”
Mrs. Beatup held the lamp to her husband’s face, and Harry at
the same time recognised the soldier as the eldest Kadwell from
Stilliands Tower—not he who had loved and ridden away from Jen
Hollowbone, but another brother in the Engineers. Mus’ Beatup’s eyes
were open and dazed, his mouth was open and dribbling, and his limbs
were dangling forlornly. When they tried to pick him up, they found
that his right leg was broken.
“Zacky—run up to Dallington and fetch Dr. Styles this wunst,” ordered
Harry. “Tell him it’s a broken leg—he’ll have to bring summat to mend
it with.”
Zacky ran off agog, and Nell, who had been through a first-aid course
in the early days of her rivalry with Marian Lamb, forced herself to
swallow her repulsion of the drunken, stricken figure on the passage
floor, and come forward with advice.
“He ought to be put to bed at once ... he might collapse.”
“He’s collapsed,” said Mrs. Beatup in the indifferent voice of shock.
“But he must be kept warm—I’ll heat a brick in the oven. Harry, you
and Mr.——”
“—Kadwell,” put in the soldier, with a bold look into Nell’s eyes.
“Mr. Kadwell—please carry him up to bed. Can you manage him up the
stairs?”
“Reckon we’ll have to,” said Harry. “Stand clear, mother.... Got his
shoulders, Mus’ Kadwell?—I’ll taake his legs.”
They had a dead weight to carry to the upper floor, but Harry, though
short, was a strong, stuggy little chap, and Steve Kadwell was
enormous. He stood four inches over six foot and was proportionately
hullish of girth. He was a handsome man, too—as he passed Nell, she
noticed his brawny neck and great rolling quiff of fair, curly hair;
she also noticed that he looked at her in a way no other man had
done. The lamplight fell becomingly on her pretty scared face, and
suggested with soft orange lights and melting shadows the curves of
her little breast. At first she was pleased by his frank admiration,
then something in it made her feel ashamed, and she drew back angrily
into the shadow.
5
Nell had to stop away from school till the end of the term, for Mrs.
Beatup could not possibly nurse her husband without help; indeed,
Nell’s help was often not enough. A broken leg in itself was serious
damage for a man of Mus’ Beatup’s age and habits, and into the
bargain his alcoholic deprivations brought on an attack of delirium
tremens about the fifth day of his illness. For this both Nell and
her mother were inadequate—Nell was sickened and terrified by this
horrible travesty of a human being that shook the springs in her
father’s bed, and Mrs. Beatup made him worse by trying to argue with
him and taking as a personal affront his assertions as to the maggoty
condition of the pillows. Harry had to spend two days away from the
fields in the combined office of nurse and policeman, and on one
occasion when even his strength was not enough to keep Mus’ Beatup
in bed, Kadwell of Stilliands Tower prolonged an evening’s call of
enquiry till the next morning.
Young Kadwell often called to enquire, and made himself useful in
various ways. He was on a fortnight’s sick-leave, after an outbreak
of his old wound. He had been sniped during some patrol work at Loos
in 1915, and though once more fit for service had been kept in
England ever since. At present he was quartered at Eastbourne, but
expected soon to be sent back to France.
At first Nell was too harassed and miserable to realise that his
visits were largely on her account. Moreover, she was sexually very
humble—she had loved so long without return that she had never
learned to look for advances. But Kadwell had no reason to hide his
feelings, nor any skill if he had had reason, so in time Nell was
bound to become aware of them. The discovery did not give her any
great pleasure—the faint pride she occasionally felt at his notice
was always dangerously on the edge of disgust. She was sensitive
throughout her being to his coarseness—which at the same time had
curious, intermittent powers of attraction—and there was something
in his bold, appraising look which struck her with shame; with his
tastes, thoughts and appetites she had nothing in common. She avoided
him as much as she could, feeling guilty because of the faint thrills
which occasionally mixed with her dislike.
It was a sad year’s ending. Her confinement in the house dragged down
even further her health and spirits, her father’s sick-bed filled her
with wretchedness and shame. It seemed to preach to her the lesson
of what she really was, in spite of all her dreams. How had she ever
dared to plot for the greatness of the curate’s love? Who was she to
mate with a priest, a scholar, a gentleman? The sordid grind of her
day, shut up in the muddle of Worge, her hours in that sag-roofed,
stuffy bedroom, nursing her father through the trivialities and
degradations of an illness brought on and intensified by drink—and
then the crowning irony of an occasional “parish visit” from her
loved one, his polite enquiries, his parsonic sympathy—all seemed to
shout at her that she was nothing but a common girl, not only of
humble but of shameful heritage, an obscure, half-educated nobody,
who was now bearing the punishment of her presumptuous hopes.
She gave up her Sunday-school class, making her father’s illness an
excuse; she also gave up going to church. This was partly due to
lack of time, partly to a dread of the empty shell. She told herself
bitterly that her religion had never been real—it had only been part
of the mirage—she might as well give up the pretence of it. Besides,
she could not bear to look any more on the background of her vanished
dreams, the soft colours and lights against which they had glowed, to
hear the sighing tones which had set them to music in her heart.
One Sunday evening, when she had gone out to stretch her cramped
legs, she heard the sound of singing come from the Bethel. She had
never been inside except for Tom’s marriage, but now in a sudden
softening of her heart she thought she would go in. She opened the
door, and slid into an empty pew—of which there was a big choice. Mr.
Sumption stood swaying and heating time in the pulpit, while before
him his mean congregation of Bourners and Hubbles sang—
“Let Christian faith and hope dispel
The signs of guilt and woe” ...
The air was heavy with the smell of lamp oil and Sunday clothes
and the rot of the plaster walls. Nell sat, a little timid, in the
corner of her pew. The scene was strange and grotesque to her, yet
rather kindly. She thought Mr. Sumption looked ill and worn. She was
shocked at his haggard smile, at the unhealthy smouldering of his
eyes.... All Sunday Street knew that he was in trouble again about
Jerry, who had not written for two months; but the village had come
to look upon it as Mr. Sumption’s natural state to be in trouble
about his son, and Nell felt there must be something worse than usual
to account for his altered looks. Her own sadness made her soft and
gentle towards him, and she watched him with pitying eyes.
The service ended, and Mr. Sumption came down to the chapel door,
where he waited to shake hands with his departing congregation. Nell,
with her ignorance of chapel ritual, had not expected this, and was a
little flustered by it. Now he must inevitably know of her presence,
which she had not meant. But there was no help for it, so she held
out her hand in her gentle, well-bred manner as she passed him in the
doorway. He gave a start of surprise.
“I never expected to see you here,” he said.
“I was passing ... and I thought the music sounded pretty ... so I
came in,” faltered Nell.
“Yes—the music’s pretty,” he said absently, and she thought his voice
sounded hoarse as if from a recent cold. Then her eyes met his, and
each seemed to read the other’s pain. Drawn together by a mystic
community of suffering, they stood for a moment in silence, still
holding hands. She felt his grip tighten on hers, and her throat
suddenly swelled with tears. They blinded her as she went out into
the dusk.
6
Shortly before Christmas Mrs. Beatup decided that Steve Kadwell
had “intentions.” He was now back at Eastbourne, but came over to
Worge every Sunday, and after little more than half an hour beside a
crushed and plaintive Mus’ Beatup would sit in the kitchen till it
was time to go home.
“Never shows the end of his nose to ’em at Stilliands Tower,” said
Mrs. Beatup. “Reckon thur’s someone here he liks better.”
“Do you mean me?” asked Nell wearily.
“Well, I doan’t mean _me_—and I doan’t mean that trug-faaced lump
of an Ellen, so I reckon it’s you. You needn’t look so black at me,
Nell—thur’s no harm in a maid getting wed. I’d bin wed a year at your
age, surelye, and three month gone wud my fust child—the one that
never opened his eyes on day.”
“Did father always drink?”
“Always a bit more or less—naun very lamentable—just here a little
and there a little, as the Bible says. He’s got wuss this last few
year. It’s that hemmed war.”
“You and father aren’t a very good advertisement for marriage.”
Mrs. Beatup was huffed.
“I dunno wot you want—here we are three years past our silver
wedding, and five strong children still alive. It aun’t the fault of
his marriage he’s bruk his leg—he might have done it single, and you
cud say the saum of his drinking too.”
Further argument was prevented by the arrival of Steve Kadwell
on his Sunday visit. Nell, who had been a little excited by her
mother’s remarks, received him with more friendliness than usual.
Certainly he was a very personable man—better-looking even than Ivy’s
Corporal Seagrim, and younger. The grip of his huge hand gave her an
extraordinary sense of well-being and self-confidence, and the flush
which always came while his eyes appraised her was this time half
pleasurable. She fidgeted a good deal while he was upstairs.
His conversational powers were not great, and she suffered a reaction
of boredom during tea, which she and her mother had ready for him
when he came down. He ate enormously and not very elegantly, though
he was not entirely a bumpkin—for he had spent an occasional leave
in London, “having a good time,” he told her with a wink. He talked
a good deal about himself and various men in his platoon, whose
dull doings and sayings he related in detail. Nell lost her new
friendliness, and as soon as tea was over went out to feed the
chickens and shut them up for the night.
She went into the barn to mix the feed. The sun had just set and
there was a reddish dusk, through which she groped for the binns.
She was kneading a paste with middlings, bran and barley-meal, when
she heard a footstep on the frosty stones of the yard, and the next
minute the barn grew quite dark as a man blocked the doorway.
“Your mother said I cud come and help you.”
Nell felt somehow a little frightened.
“I’m all right.”
“Reckon you are”—he came into the barn. “You’re fine,” and he stooped
down to her, she felt his breath fanning her neck. Her hands ceased
to move in the paste, and suddenly she began to tremble.
She tried to save herself with a small, faltering remark about the
chicken-food—“Reckon soon we’ll have to do without the meal.”
He did not answer, but stooped closer still, so that she could smell
him, his virile smell of hair and leather and tobacco. Then she
suddenly snatched her hands out of the trug, all clogged and sticky
with paste and meal, and tried to push him away.
“Don’t ... don’t....”
“Nellie—you’re not afraid of me?”
“Please let me go”—for his arms were round her now.
“Not now I’ve got you, little kid.... I’m justabout going to keep you
till I know what you’re made of.”
He laughed, and her struggling passed suddenly into weakness.
Then his mouth pressed down on hers, and Nell, who had till that
moment known nothing but the bodiless spirit of love, suddenly met
him in the power of his fierce body. The contact seemed to break her.
She lay back helpless in Kadwell’s arms, unable to stir or resist
till he let her go, and he did not let her go till he seemed to have
drawn all the life out of her in a long kiss—all the hoard of fire
and sweetness which she had kept long years for another man he drew
out of her with his lips and took for his own.
Then he released her, and she fell back against the binns, gasping a
little, and crying, while her eyes strained to him through the dusk.
She seemed unable to move, and he pointed to the bowl of chicken-food
on the floor, saying, “Pick up that trug and come out.”
She did as he told her, and went out meekly at his heels.
7
Kadwell looked on Nell as a conquered kingdom. She herself was not
so sure, for after he had gone home that night, her flagging powers
revived, and she had a week in which to recruit her forces. During
that week she passed through moments of sick revulsion from him, in
which his strength and roughness disgusted her. But when he came
again, she found herself powerless as she had been before.
He had strong allies. Nell was lonely, friendless, humbled to the
dust; she was at the same time reacting from her former intellectual
and ecclesiastical influences. His love helped restore her
self-respect and his outstretched arms were rightly placed to catch
her as the pendulum swung her away from her old tastes and glories.
Nell found herself for the first time the interesting member of the
family—at least in her mother’s eyes. She was the courted, the
beloved—even if hand in hand with love came strange tyrannies—and her
sudden change to exaltation from degradation turned her head a little.
Sometimes there were hours when she saw clearly, saw that Kadwell was
impossible as her mate, that they had nothing in common, that not
even his passion was really acceptable to her.... He was a coarse
brute, who would always trample on her tastes and wishes and ignore
her mind and soul—and in these hours she knew that it was her mind
and soul which counted most, in spite of the newly-awakened body. She
was not really of a passionate nature, only a little drugged. She was
doping herself with Steve so that she might forget the anguish and
humiliation of the past autumn.
But this clearness did not last long, and it was always fogged in
the same way—by a sense of her own unworthiness. She told herself
that she was wicked to despise Steve, who was much better than she in
his different way. He might be uneducated, coarse, and self-willed,
but he was strong and brave and resolute, all the things that she
was not—“And I say unto you, despise not one of these little ones,
for their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in
heaven.” ...
Then she would remember his wound, which he had got fighting for her
and England over at Loos, and in the depths of that self-contempt
which was so often with her now, alternating with her moods of
self-confidence, she acknowledged that she had done nothing for the
War. Though she had always prided herself on being more patriotic
than the rest of her family, she had done far less than they—less
than Tom, who had gone to fight, even if ignorant and unwilling; less
than Harry, who had boldly flung down his challenge to the earth and
taken up arms against her for his country’s sake; less than Ivy,
who was cheerfully and competently filling a man’s place and doing a
man’s work; less than her mother, who had borne these children for
her country’s need; less even than her father, who paid rates and
taxes and cultivated the ground. The fact that they were all, except
perhaps Harry, more or less unconscious of their service, only made
her reproach greater. She of her knowledge had done nothing, and they
of their ignorance had done much. Who was she to despise them or
Kadwell? Should she not take this chance to do the little she could
by bringing comfort and happiness into a soldier’s life? She knew all
the difference that Thyrza had made to Tom—let her do the same for
Steve, humbly, simply, conscious of her failure up till now.
Early in the New Year Bill Putland suddenly came home on leave,
and still more suddenly married a bewildered and delighted Polly
Sinden. They had not even been definitely engaged; she had not known
he was coming home till she got his telegram, fixing not only the
date of his arrival but the date of the wedding. They were married
at Brownbread Street, by an elderly clergyman who was taking the
curate’s place during his honeymoon—Mr. Poullett-Smith had been
married up at Dallington, and the joyful clash of his wedding chimes
came to Nell as she sat with Steve in the sun-slatted murk of the
Dutch barn, and made her more than usually submissive to his caresses.
Ivy, delighted at her friend’s good luck, forgave a long coldness,
and came to Polly’s marriage. She brought with her Sergeant Staples,
and after the ceremony took him to Worge for tea.
Mrs. Beatup had not been to the wedding, for Thyrza’s illness had
begun, and her mother-in-law had spent most of the afternoon down at
the Shop.
“Oh, she’s doing valiant,” she said in answer to their enquiries,
“but ’tis unaccountable hard on a girl to be wudout her husband at
such a time....”
“Where’s Nell?” asked Ivy.
“Up wud her father, surelye. He’s bin easier to-day, but he’s a
tedious cross oald man these times. You’d never think the pacerfist
and objectious conscience he’s got lying in bed and reading the
paapers and wanting things to eat and drink as he can’t git—reckon
he’d stop the War to-morrow for a bit of cheese.”
“Kadwell bin here any more?”
“Reckon he never misses—it’ll be Nell’s turn next after Polly. You’d
best maake haste, Ivy Beatup, or at the raate we’re going, you’ll be
the only oald maid left in the parish.”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Ivy, with her mouth full of bread.
“But Nell ull be a fool if she marries him,” she added seriously. “He
aun’t her kind. I know him, and he’s a bit of a swine, I reckon.”
“Reckon he’s a valiant, stout chap, and Nell ull be a fool if she
says no.”
Ivy did not argue the matter, but before she went away she made an
opportunity to speak to her sister alone.
“Nell, you haven’t promised Steve Kadwell?”
Nell did not answer for a moment—she looked dazed. Then she said
slowly:
“Yes—I promised him on Sunday.”
“Then write and tell him you’ve changed your mind.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a fool. You know quite well he aun’t the chap for
you—you, wud all your liddle dentical ways!”
The tears came into Nell’s eyes.
“I love him.”
Ivy stared critically at her. She seemed to have altered.
“Have you told mother?”
“No.”
“When are you going to be married?”
“I dunno—we haven’t talked about it yet.”
“Well, doan’t be in a hurry—give him a good think over.”
She had no time to say more, and realised that there was not much
more to be said. Nell seemed dazed and foolish, like a pilgrim lost
in a strange land.
8
Sunday Street was dazzled by its multitude of marriages. There had
been Tom Beatup’s, not a year ago, then the curate’s, and Polly
Sinden’s, on the top of each other in January, and now, in February,
Nell Beatup’s. The last was a surprise; who would have thought,
asked the village, that Nell would be married before Ivy? One or two
mothers improved their daughters’ minds with the moral of demure,
gentle Nell’s marrying before her sister with her loud, friendly
ways. There was some jealousy, too, for Kadwell, heir of Stilliands
Tower, was considered a good match, though a certain amount of
suspicion attached locally to his morals, due to his having once
spent a leave in Paris.
Nell’s wedding was a shorn affair. Her father was, of course, unable
to come and give her away, and she had to go up the aisle on the arm
of a shuffling and miserable Harry, to be finally disposed of by Mrs.
Beatup, who was full of doubts as to the legality of a marriage thus
officiated. Ivy could not get another day off, so had been obliged to
content herself with sending Nell a silver-plated cruet and a rather
tactless message to “come to her if ever she felt things going a
bit wrong.” Thyrza was not present, either. She had mended slowly,
in spite of the joy of her little son, and felt unequal to the fag
and excitement of a wedding, either socially or ecclesiastically.
The gaps were completed by the absence of Mr. Poullett-Smith, who
was still away on his honeymoon. He was expected back next week, and
it was considered locally that Nell and Kadwell would have shown a
more becoming spirit if they had waited for his ministrations. No one
guessed that it was just this chance of being married in the curate’s
absence which had finally dropped the balance, and made Nell give way
to her lover’s entreaties and make him happy at once.
After the ceremony there was a breakfast at Worge, and that too
was shorn. There had been no Ivy to help Mrs. Beatup with the
cooking, and trug-faced Ellen had burnt the cake, which was not only
sugarless, as Tom’s had been, but without peel or plums. “Might as
well eat bread and call it caake,” said Mrs. Beatup drearily. “They
both taaste lik calf-meal.”
There was no butter, as butter did not pay at its present price, and
was no longer made at Worge. Some greenish margarine had been Ellen’s
reward for standing two hours outside the grocer’s in Senlac, but
the cake had swallowed it all up, and wanted more, judging by its
splintering behaviour under the teeth. To balance these scarcities
there was tinned salmon and tinned crab and tinned lobster—also two
bottles of wine, left over from Tom’s wedding, and watered to make
them go further.
“This is wot you might call a War wedding,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Nell,
I’m unaccountable glad you got married in church—if it had bin a
chapel marriage on the top of this”—and she waved her hand over the
table—“I’d never quite feel as you wur praaperly wed.”
As a further counterblast to irregularity she had insisted on
Nell’s being married in white satin, with a stiff white veil
like a meat-safe bound over her hair with a wreath of artificial
orange-blossom. She looked very pretty, with a becoming flush in the
thick pallor of her skin. Her eyes were bright and restless, and she
breathed quickly, so that her little pearl-and-turquoise locket,
“the gift of the bridegroom,” heaved under her transparencies—she
was too shrinking and modest to have her gown cut low—like a shallop
on a wave. She scarcely spoke during the meal, but sat twisting her
wedding-ring and staring at her husband—following each movement with
her eyes, apparently unable to look away from him.
The meal was not lively; it lacked Ivy’s good-humour, Mus’ Beatup’s
talkativeness, Bill Putland’s wit, Mr. Sumption’s big laugh and
childish enjoyment of his food. The party consisted only of the two
families—Beatups and Kadwells. Old Mus’ Kadwell droned about the War,
and the “drore” in which he prophesied it would end, Mrs. Kadwell
compared with Mrs. Beatup a day’s adventures in search of meat,
Lizzie Kadwell tried to flirt with Harry, who was overwhelmed with
shame and annoyance at her efforts, and Sim Kadwell, who had been
best man, gave wearying details of the Indispensable’s Progress from
tribunal to tribunal.
Steve Kadwell could get only a week-end’s leave, so the honeymoon
would be short, and afterwards Nell would come back to Worge, and
live there as before, except for her “teachering,” which her husband
had made her give up, so that she might be at hand when he wanted
her, free to go with him on any unexpected leave. He would have
longer leave given him soon, he promised her, and they would go to
London and have a valiant time. On this occasion they were going no
further that Brighton, but they would stay at a fine hotel and have
late dinner and a fire in their bedroom.
Nell drove away with her hand limp and rather cold in Kadwell’s big
fondling clasp. The pale February sun slanted to Worge’s roof from
the west, and a clammy, mould-flavoured mist hung over the hedges,
like the winter ghost of those fogs which had webbed the farm with
dusty gold in harvest-time. Nell looked back at the old house and the
fields behind it—since she was leaving home only for two days, it was
queer to feel that she was leaving it for ever.
9
It was raining and foggy when she came back. Thick white muffles of
cloud drifted up the fields, and hung between the hedges, catching
and choking all sound. Rain fell noiselessly, almost invisibly,
apparent only in an occasional whorl, in the dripping eaves of the
stacks, the shining roofs of the barns, and the whiteness of the
beaded grass. Nell came from Hailsham station in a cab—her husband
had told her to do so, giving her paper money for the fare. He
certainly was princely in his ideas of spending, and there were loud
and envious exclamations at Worge when, instead of the soaked and
huddled figure expected, Nell appeared bone-dry, without even her
umbrella unfurled.
“A cab from Hailsham!” cried Mrs. Beatup. “Reckon you’ve got a good
husband.”
“And did you have the fire in your bedroom?” asked Zacky.
“Yes,” said Nell. “A shilling every night.”
She kissed her mother and brothers, and Ivy, who was over for the day
and now came out of the kitchen, with a bear’s hug for her sister.
“You’ve got a new hat!” she exclaimed.
“Yes; Steve saw it in a shop in Brighton and bought it for me.”
“Lork!” cried Mrs. Beatup.
“But it aun’t your usual style,” said Ivy; “you most-ways wear ’em
more quiet-like. I’ve seen many of that sort of hat come on the tram,
and it’s generally what the boys call a tart.”
Nell flushed and looked away.
“We’ve got Thyrza here,” said Mrs. Beatup. “She came up this morning
afore the rain started, and we’re kipping her till it’s a done—fust
time she’s bin out, and I’m justabout fritted lest she taakes cold.”
“Has she got the baby with her?”
“Surelye.... Here’s Nell, Thyrza, come up in a cab from the station,
and her husband’s guv her a new hat.”
Thyrza’s eyes opened big in wonder. She sat by the fire, with her
child in her arms; she was pale, but seemed plump and healthy, and
her eyes had an eager, yearning look which was new to them. Nell
kissed her and the baby, and sat down by the hearth with a little
shiver.
“I’ll git you some hot tea in a minnut,” said her mother, “and then
I’ll tell you a surprise about Ivy.”
“Adone do, mother—you’ve half toald her now.”
“I haven’t—I only said it wur a surprise, which I reckon it aun’t
much of, since you’ve near married three men in the last twelvemonth.”
Ivy groaned—“Reckon your tongue’s lik a bruk wurzel-cutter—slipping
all over the plaace. Well, Nell, you know it now—but guess who he is.”
This was more difficult, as there were at least half a dozen possible
claimants, and Nell restored the secret to a little of its lost glory
by guessing wrong several times.
“It’s Eric Staples,” said Ivy at last, “and we’re going out to
Canada soon as ever he gits his discharge, which woan’t be long now.
He wur wounded and gassed at Vimy, but he’s a stout feller still, and
has got a liddle farm in Saskatchewan wot me and him ull kip the two
of us. He says I’m the woman born for a colonial’s wife.”
“Reckon you are,” said her mother fondly, “but I wish you cud have
got a husband wot took you to hotels and guv you cab-rides and fine
hats like Nell.”
“I aun’t the girl fur hotels and cabs—reckon I’m only the girl for
washing the pots and scrubbing the floor, and lucky that’s the girl
Eric wants. I’d never do wud Nell’s life—she’s a lady...” and she
squeezed her sister’s hand.
Nell gave a faint squeeze in response. She was touched by Ivy’s
affection, at the same time it made her feel a little cold, for she
guessed the reason; Ivy was only saying without words, “I’m standing
by you, Nell—you’ve done a stupid thing, and nobody knows it but you
and I. Howsumdever you can always come wud any trouble to old Ivy.”
Tea was now on the table, with the remains of the wedding-cake. Mus’
Beatup was asleep upstairs, so it was arranged that later on Nell
should take him up his tea and pay him her dutiful greetings. Harry
and Zacky came in very grubby after handling roots. Harry was now a
pitiless tyrant who drove and slaved his brother out of school hours,
making him dig and rake and cart and dung; for the unthinkable thing
of a year ago had happened, and the War was dragging on towards
Harry’s eighteenth birthday, threatening to move his battle front
from the furrows and ditches of Sussex to the blasted fields of
France.
Thyrza had a letter from Tom, which she read to the company, every
now and then stopping to hum over some passage which for obviously
pleasant reasons could not be read out loud.
“To think he’s never seen his baby,” she murmured, bending towards
her crooked arm.
“To think of Tom ever having a baby to see,” said Mrs. Beatup—“and
you’d know he wur Tom’s by his flat nose.”
“Wot have you settled to call him?” asked Ivy. “Is it still Thomas
Edward?”
“No, it’s to be Thomas William, fur Bill Putland has promised to
stand godfather.”
“I doan’t lik William as much as Edward. Wot maade you change,
Thyrza?”
“Tom wants him called after his best pal, surelye.”
“And after the Kayser, too—William’s the Kayser’s naum.”
Thyrza looked shocked.
“You’ll have to call him Bill fur short.”
“That ud sound more like the Kayser than ever—I always call the
Kayser Bill.”
“Then call him Willie.”
“That’s the young Kayser, and Tom when he fixed William said as he
must never shorten it to Willie, ’cos there’s a kind of shell called
Little Willie, and he says as if, when peace comes and he gits hoame,
fulks wur to say, ‘Here comes Little Willie,’ he’d chuck himself down
in the lane and start digging himself in—Ha! ha!” and Thyrza laughed
at the joke, and tickled the baby to make it laugh too, which it
didn’t.
“Reckon he’s too young to laugh,” said Mrs. Beatup.
“He aun’t too young to cry.”
“We’re none of us too young fur that, nor too oald, nuther.”
Thyrza sighed gently—
“I’m unaccountable set on Tom’s coming fur the christening—and
Passon’s been wanting to christen him; he asked me at the churching.
I thought maybe Tom cud git leave to see his baby christened, but
seemingly he can’t.”
“They’re unaccountable short wud leave,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Steve
couldn’t git more’n three days to git married in.”
“But reckon he’ll git some more later, woan’t he, Nell?”
Nell started—during the little womanly talk her mind had gone off on
questionings of its own.
“Leave? Yes. He’s sure to get a week before he goes out to France.”
“You’re unaccountable lucky. Reckon he’ll taake you to another hotel
and buy you another hat.”
“And send you home in another cab.”
“I’ll go up and have a look at father,” said Nell.
There was silence in the kitchen for a little while after she went.
Harry and Zacky had gone back to their digging, and Ivy and Mrs.
Beatup sat squatting against Thyrza’s lap, where the baby lay more
helpless than a day-old kitten.
“Nell’s middling quiet,” said her mother at last.
“She’s sad at having said good-bye to Steve,” sighed Thyrza.
“I doan’t waonder as she’s vrothered,” said Mrs. Beatup. “Courted,
cried, and married, all in a huddle lik that. Ivy, I hope as this
ull be a lesson to you, and you’ll bide your banns praaperly and buy
your bits of things in more’n one day’s shopping. Pore Nell, she sims
all swummy and of a daze, and I doan’t woander, nuther, wud all the
hurriment thur’s bin. Reckon she scarce knows yit if she’s maid or
wife.”
“Reckon she does,” said Ivy.