Difficult to say whether morality exists in a man like Bowden, whose
blood is racy of the soil, and whose farmyard is so adjacent. That his
son should run riot with the girl Pansy would have struck him more,
perhaps, if Steer had not shot his dog--the affair so providentially
put that fellow’s nose out of joint. It went far, in fact, to assuage
his outraged sense of property, and to dull the feeling that he had
betrayed his dog by not actively opposing village justice. As for the
‘Law,’ the Bowdens had lived for too many generations in a parish where
no constable was resident to have any real belief in its powers. He
often broke the law himself in a quiet way--shooting stray pheasants
and calling them pigeons; not inspecting his rabbit traps morning and
evening; not keeping quite to date in dipping his sheep, and so forth.
The ‘Law’ could always be evaded. Besides, what law was Ned breaking?
That was Steer’s gup!
He was contemptuously surprised therefore when, three weeks later, Ned
received a document headed ‘High Courts of Justice. Winch _versus_
Bowden.’ It claimed five hundred pounds from him for breach of his
promise of marriage. An outlandish trick, indeed--with the war on too!
Couldn’t Ned please himself as to what girl he’d take? Bowden was for
putting it in the fire. But the more the two examined the document
the more hypnotised they became. Lawyers were no use except to charge
money--but, perhaps, a lawyer ought to have a look at it.
On market day, therefore, they took it to Applewhite of Applewhite and
Carter, who subjected them to a prolonged catechism. Had Ned engaged
himself to the girl? Well, yes, he supposed he had. How had he broken
off the engagement--had he written to the girl? No. Well, had he
received letters from her asking him what was the matter? Yes; two.
Had he answered them? No. Had he seen the girl and done it by word of
mouth? No. He had not seen the girl for ten weeks. Was he prepared to
see the girl or write to her? He was not. Was he ready to marry her?
No. Why was that?
Ned looked at his father; and Bowden looked at Ned. The girl Pansy had
never been mentioned between them.
Mr. Applewhite repeated his question. Ned did not know.
According to the lawyer, if Ned did not know, nobody knew. What had
caused the change in his feelings?
It was Bowden who answered:
“He shot my dog.”
“Who?”
“Steer.”
Mr. Applewhite was unable to see the connection. If that was all, he
was afraid young Mr. Bowden would either have to marry the girl or
‘stand to be shot at’ himself. And suddenly he looked at Ned. “Is there
anything against this girl?” No, there was nothing against her.
“Then why not marry her?”
Again Ned shook his bullet head.
The lawyer smoothed his chin--he was a pleasant fellow, and a good
fisherman.
“About this young lady, Miss Winch; excuse my asking, but I suppose you
haven’t been putting the cart before the horse?”
For the third time Ned shook his head.
No, there had been nothing of that sort. He did not add that if there
had he might not have been overmastered by the propinquity of the girl
Pansy.
“There’s another girl in this, I suppose,” said the lawyer suddenly;
“well, I don’t want to hear. It’s for you to decide what you’ll
do--marry the girl or defend the action and get the damages
reduced--it’s a stiff claim. You and your father had better go away,
talk it over again, and let me know. If you defend, you’ll have to go
up to London. In the box, least said is soonest mended. You’ll simply
say you found you were mistaken, and thought it more honourable to
break off at once than to go on. That sometimes goes down rather well
with juries, if the man looks straightforward.”
The Bowdens went away. Steer passed them on the journey home. He was
alone, driving that mare of his. The Bowdens grinned faintly as he went
by. Then Bowden called out two words:
“Stickin’ plaster!”
If Steer heard he gave no sign, but his ears looked very red.
When his hurrying cart was a speck at the top of the steep rise, Bowden
turned a little towards his son.
“I want to make that chap sweat,” he said.
“Ah!” answered Ned.
But how to make Steer sweat without sweating themselves? That was what
exercised the Bowdens, each according to his lights and circumstances,
which, of course, were very different. Even in this quandary they
did not mention the girl Pansy. To do so would have been to touch on
feeling; both felt it better to keep to facts and to devices. It was
Bowden who put the finishing touch to a long and devious silence.
“If yu don’ du nothin’, Ned, I don’ see how they can ’ave yu. Yu’ve not
putt nothin’ on paper. How’m they to tell yu don’ mean to marry her?
I’d let ’em stew in their own juice. Don’t yu never admit it. Drop word
to that lawyer chap that yu’m not guilty.”
Ned nodded, but underneath his stolidity he could not help feeling that
it was not so simple as all that. By him, though not yet quite tired
of the girl Pansy, his first choice had begun to be faintly desired
again--her refinement ‘in the distance enchanted’ was regaining some of
its attraction to his cooling blood. What would have been the course of
events but for Steer’s next action is, indeed, uncertain.
V
In having the law of ‘those two fellers,’ Steer had passed through an
experience with his niece which had considerably embittered feelings
already acid. The girl had shown a ‘ladylike’ shrinking from pressing
a man who had ceased to want her. There was an absolute difference
between her wishes and her uncle’s. He would not have young Bowden
marry her for anything; he just wanted revenge on the Bowdens.
She wanted young Bowden still; but if she couldn’t get him, would
cry quietly and leave it at that. The two points of view had been
irreconcilable till Steer, taking the bit between his teeth, had
assured his niece that to bring the action was the only way of dragging
young Bowden back to her. This gave him a bad conscience, for he was
fond of his niece, and he really felt that to bring the action would
make that fellow Bowden stick his toes in all the more and refuse to
budge. He thought always of Bowden and of the five hundred that would
come out of _his_ pocket, not out of Ned’s.
Steer owned the local weed-sprayer, which, by village custom, was
at the service of his neighbours in rotation. This year he fetched
the sprayer back from Pethick’s farm just as it was on the point of
going on to Bowden’s without reason given. Bowden, who would not have
been above using ‘that chap’s’ sprayer so long as it came to him from
Pethick in ordinary rotation, was above sending to Steer’s for it. He
took the action as a public proclamation of enmity, and in ‘The Three
Stars Inn,’ where he went nearly every evening for a glass of cider
with a drop of gin and a clove in it, he said out loud that Steer was a
‘colley,’ and Ned wouldn’t be seen dead with that niece of his.
By those words, soon repeated far and wide, he committed his son just
when Ned was cooling rapidly towards the girl Pansy, and beginning to
think of going to church once more and seeing whether Molly wouldn’t
look at him again. After all, it was he, not his father, who would have
to go into the witness-box; moreover, he had nothing against Molly
Winch.
Now that the feud was openly recognised by village tongues, its origin
was already lost. No one--hardly even the Bowdens--remembered that
Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer, and that Steer had shot it; so much
spicier on the palate was Ned’s aberration with the girl Pansy, and its
questionable consequences. Corn harvest passed, and bracken harvest;
the autumn gales, sweeping in from the Atlantic, spent their rain on
the moor; the birch-trees goldened and the beech-trees grew fox-red;
and, save that Molly Winch was never seen, that Bowden and Steer passed
each other as if they were stocks or stones, and for the interest taken
in the girl Pansy’s appearance by anyone who had a glimpse of her (not
often now, for she was seldom out of the farmyard) the affair might
have been considered at an end.
The breach of promise suit was never mentioned--Steer was too secretive
and too deadly in earnest; the Bowdens too defiant of the law, and too
anxious to forget it; by never mentioning it, even to each other, and
by such occasional remarks as: “Reckon that chap’s bit off more than he
can chu,” they consigned it to a future which to certain temperaments
never exists until it is the present. They had, indeed, one or two
legal reminders, and Ned had twice to see Mr. Applewhite on market
days, but between all this and real apprehension was always the slow
and stolid confidence that the ‘Law’ could be avoided if you ‘sat tight
and did nothin’.’
When, therefore, in late November Ned received a letter from the lawyer
telling him to be at the High Courts of Justice in the Strand, London,
at ten thirty in the morning on a certain day, prepared to give his
evidence, a most peculiar change took place in that bullet-headed
youth. His appetite abandoned him; sweat stood on his brow at moments
unconnected with honest toil. He gave the girl Pansy black looks; and
sat with his prepared evidence before him, wiping the palms of his
hands stealthily on his breeches. That, which he had never really
thought would spring, was upon him after all, and panic, such as
nothing physical could have caused in him, tweaked his nerves and
paralysed his brain. But for his father he would never have come up
to the scratch. Born before the halfpenny Press, and unable to ride a
bicycle, unthreatened moreover by the witness-box, Bowden--after a long
pipe--gave out his opinion that it “widden never du to let that chap
’ave it all his own way. There wasn’t nothin’ to it if Ned kept a stiff
upper lip. ’Twid be an ’oliday-like in London for them both.”
So, dressed in their darkest and most board-like tweeds, with black
bowler hats, they drove in to catch the London train, with a small
boy bobbing on a board behind them to drive the mare back home. Deep
within each was a resentful conviction that this came of women; and
they gave no thought to the feelings of the girl who was plaintiff in
the suit, or of the girl who watched them drive out of the yard. While
the train swiftly bore them, stolid and red-faced, side by side, the
feeling grew within them that to make a holiday of this would spite
that chap Steer. He wanted to make them sweat; if they did not choose
to sweat--it was one in the eye for him.
They put up at an hotel with a Devonshire name in Covent Garden, and in
the evening visited a music-hall where was a show called the ‘Rooshian
ballet.’ They sat a little forward with their hands on their thighs,
their ruddy faces, expressionless as waxworks, directed towards the
stage, whereon ‘Les Sylphides’ were floating white and ethereal. When
the leading danseuse was held upside down, Bowden’s mouth opened
slightly. He was afterwards heard to say that she had ‘got some legs on
her.’ Unable to obtain refreshment after the performance, owing to the
war, they sought the large flasks in their bedroom, and slept, snoring
soundly, as though to express even in their slumbers a contempt for the
machinations of ‘that chap.’