I
Its psychic origin, like that of most human loves and hates, was
obscure, and yet, like most human hates and loves, had a definite point
of physical departure--the moment when Bowden’s yellow dog bit Steer’s
ungaitered leg. Even then it might not have ‘got going’ as they say,
but for the village sense of justice which caused Steer to bring his
gun next day and solemnly execute the dog. He was the third person the
dog had bitten; and not even Bowden, who was fond of his whippet, could
oppose the execution, but the shot left him with an obscure feeling
of lost property, a vague sense of disloyalty to his dog. Steer was
a Northerner, an Easterner, a man from a part called Lincolnshire,
outlandish, like the Frisian cattle he mixed with the Devons on his
farm--this, Bowden could not help feeling in the bottom of his soul,
was what had moved his dog. Snip had not liked, any more than his
master, that thin, spry, red-grey-bearded chap’s experimental ways of
farming, his habit of always being an hour, a week, a month earlier
than Bowden; had not liked his lean, dry activity, his thin legs, his
east-wind air. Bowden knew that he would have shot Steer’s dog if he
himself had been the third person bitten by it; but then Steer’s dog
had _not_ bitten Bowden, Bowden’s dog _had_ bitten Steer; and this
seemed to Bowden to show that his dog knew what was what. While he was
burying the poor brute he had muttered: “Damn the man! What did he want
trapesin’ about my yard in his Sunday breeks? Seein’ what he could
get, I suppose!” And with each shovel of earth he threw on the limp
yellow body, a sticky resentment had oozed from his spirit and clung,
undissolving, round the springs of its action.
To inter the dog properly was a long, hot job.
‘He comes and shoots my dog, of a Sunday too, and leaves me to bury
’un,’ he thought, wiping his round, well-coloured face; and he spat as
if the ground in front of him were Steer.
When he had finished and rolled a big stone on to the little mound he
went in, and, sitting down moodily in the kitchen, said:
“Girl, draw me a glass o’ cider.” Having drunk it, he looked up and
added: “I’ve a-burried she up to Crossovers.” The dog was male, a
lissome whippet unconnected with the business of the farm, and Bowden
had called him ‘she’ from puppyhood. The dark-haired, broad-faced,
rather sullen-looking girl whom he addressed flushed, and her grey eyes
widened. “’Twas a shame!” she muttered.
“Ah!” said Bowden.
Bowden farmed about a hundred acres of half and half sort of land,
some good, some poor, just under the down. He was a widower, with a
mother and an only son. A broad, easy man with a dark round head, a
rosy face, and immense capacity for living in the moment. Looking at
him you would have said not one in whom things would rankle. But then,
to look at a West Countryman you would say so many things that have
their lurking negations. He was a native of the natives; his family
went back in the parish to times beyond the opening of the register;
his ancestors had been churchwardens in remote days. His father, ‘Daddy
Bowden,’ an easy-going handsome old fellow and a bit of a rip, had
died at ninety. He himself was well over fifty, but had no grey hair
as yet. He took life easily, and let his farm off lightly, keeping it
nearly all to pasture, with a conservative grin (Bowden was a Liberal)
at the outlandish efforts of his neighbour Steer (a Tory) to grow
wheat, bring in Frisian stock, and use newfangled machines. Steer had
originally come to that part of the country as a gentleman’s bailiff,
and this induced a sort of secret contempt in Bowden, whose forefathers
in old days had farmed their own land here round about. Bowden’s
mother, eighty-eight years old, was a little pocket woman almost past
speech, with dark bright eyes and innumerable wrinkles, who sat all
day long in any warmth there was, conserving energy. His son Ned, a
youth of twenty-four, bullet-headed like all the Bowdens, was of a
lighter colour in hair and eyes; and at the moment of history, when
Steer shot Bowden’s dog, he was keeping company with Steer’s niece,
Molly Winch, who kept house for the confirmed bachelor that Steer was.
The other member of Bowden’s household, the girl Pansy, was an orphan,
some said born under a rose, who came from the other side of the moor
and earned fourteen pounds a year. She kept to herself, had dark fine
hair, grey eyes, a pale broad face; ‘broody’ she was, given somewhat
to the ‘tantrums’; now she would look quite plain; then, when moved
or excited, quite pretty. Hers was all the housework, and much of the
poultry-feeding, wood-cutting and water-drawing. She was hard worked
and often sullen because of it.
Having finished his cider, Bowden stood in the kitchen porch looking
idly at a dance of gnats. The weather was fine, and the hay was in.
It was one of those intervals between harvests which he was wont to
take easy, and it would amuse him to think of his neighbour always
‘puzzivantin’’ over some ‘improvement’ or other. But it did not amuse
him this evening. That chap was for ever trying to sneak ahead of his
neighbours, and had gone and shot his dog! He caught sight of his son
Ned, who had just milked the cows and was turning them down the lane.
Now the lad would ‘slick himself up’ and go courting that niece of
Steer’s. The courtship seemed to Bowden suddenly unnatural. A cough
made him conscious of the girl Pansy standing behind him with her
sleeves rolled up.
“Butiful evenin’,” he said, “gude for the corn.” When Bowden indulged
his sense of the æsthetic, he would, as it were, apologise with some
comment that implied commercial benefit or loss; while Steer would pass
on with only a dry ‘Fine evenin’.’ In talking with Steer one never
lost consciousness of his keen ‘on-the-makeness,’ as of a progressive
individualist who has nothing to cover his nature from one’s eyes.
Bowden one might meet for weeks without realising that beneath his
uncontradictious pleasantry was a self-preservative individualism
quite as stubborn. To the casual eye Steer was much more up-to-date and
‘civilised’; to one looking deeper, Bowden had been ‘civilised’ much
longer. He had grown protective covering in a softer climate or drawn
it outward from an older strain of blood.
“The gnats are dancin’,” he said, “fine weather”; and the girl Pansy
nodded. Watching her turn the handle of the separator, he marked her
glance straying down the yard to where Ned was shutting the lane gate.
She was a likely-looking wench with her shapely browned arms and her
black hair, fine as silk, which she kept brushing back from her eyes
with her free hand. It gave him a kind of farmyard amusement to see
those eyes of hers following his son about. ‘She’s Ned’s if he wants
her--young hussy!’ he thought. ‘Begad, but it would put Steer’s nose
out of joint properly if that girl got in front of his precious niece.’
To say that this thought was father to a wish would too definitely
express the circumambulatory mind of Bowden--a lazy and unprecise
thinker; but it lurked and hovered when he took his ash-plant and
browsed his way out of the yard to have a look at the young bull
before supper. At the meadow of water-weed and pasture, where the
young red bull was grazing, he stood leaning over the gate, with
the swallows flying high. The young bull was ‘lukin’ up bravely’--in
another year he would lay over that bull of Steer’s. Ah! he would that!
And a dim savagery stirred in Bowden; then passed in the sensuous
enjoyment--which a farmer never admits--at the scent, sight, sounds,
of his fields in fine weather, at the blue above and the green beneath
him, the gleam of that thread of water, half smothered in bulrushes,
‘daggers,’ and monkey flower, under the slowly sinking sun, at the
song of a lark, and the murmuring in the ash-trees, at the glistening
ruddy coat of the young bull and the sound of his cropping! Three
rabbits ran into the hedge. So that fellow had shot his dog--his dog
that had nipped up more rabbits out of corn than any dog he ever owned!
He tapped his stick on the gate. The young bull raised a lazy head,
gazed at his master, and, flicking his tail at the flies, resumed his
pasturing.
‘Shot my dog!’ thought Bowden; ‘shot my dog! Yu wait a bit!’