HARBOROUGH OF CROWS’ FARM.
Nobody could make farming pay, at least no one about Wrugglesby.
This was an axiom in the Ashelton district, which no one attempted
to confute though each had an explanation for it, according to his
political opinions and education, or want of education. But one and all
believed it, though they continued to farm and to grumble, both the
small men and the great. The small men were very small, little more
than peasant tenants with neither the capital nor the ability to farm
their small holdings with any show of justice to the starved land,
living from hand to mouth, employing no labour, themselves and their
families practically doing the work, and doing it indifferently. The
great men were quite another class, a cross between a landed gentry
and a yeoman squirearchy, socially ranking with the professional
classes and for all practical purposes supplying the place of the
county-families, now for the most part either impoverished or else
removed to more congenial centres. The greater farm-owners undoubtedly
did make some profit out of the land, or appeared to do something very
like it, though possibly they might have done so more successfully had
they inclined more towards the yeoman squirearchy and less towards the
landed gentry in their tastes and habits.
At least such was the opinion of one who, a little more than six months
previous to Bill’s advent in the Morton household, had come to settle
among the yeoman-farmers and to prove to himself and to them some of
the theories he held with regard to farming. His theory-in-chief was a
short one, and could be summed up in one word,--work. A working farmer
could make it pay; there were one or two of the old-fashioned sort of
large working farmers still left, who made it pay, even though they had
no social position and wanted none. Their net profits were small, it
is true, but then they had not the benefit of a modern education; they
were also abnormally pig-headed, and, in spite of experience, would
do as their fathers had done in the palmy days of Protection. Young
Gilchrist Harborough was of opinion that, were it only possible to
unite the work in detail of these men with the knowledge and capital of
the gentleman-class, results of surprising grandeur could be obtained.
He held this theory long ago, before ever he saw the English farmer
at work; he held it still more firmly now that fate had given him
an opportunity of putting it to the test. The opportunity had come
unexpectedly in the shape of a legacy from a friend of his father’s,
a man who had at one time stayed in the bush home where Gilchrist
was reared, and who, half amused and half pleased by the young man’s
earnestness, had left him Crows’ Farm and a sufficiency on which to try
his theories on a small scale.
An unpretentious, whitewashed building was the farm, not unlike two
cottages knocked into one. For many years it had been inhabited by a
bailiff who farmed the adjoining land, the owner, frequently absent
abroad, only coming down for the partridge-shooting. Ashelton was fond
of this man, and genuinely sorry to hear of his death; he was the kind
of man those good folks understood, and was sadly missed at the social
functions which always took place in September and in which he usually
joined. But the new owner, the young Australian to whom he had left
the farm, was something of a puzzle to them. Of course he had a right
to his theories: everyone has in these highly educated days; but it
is not everyone who tries to put his theories into practice, nor who,
moreover, has such uncomfortable ones. Harborough lived the life of a
working farmer in his little old house; lived, so report said, almost
like Robinson Crusoe, doing his own cooking and cleaning, rising early
and sharing even the most menial toil with his few labourers. This
was not all strictly correct, but it was near enough to the truth
to satisfy Ashelton, and the parish talked and wondered, and said
dubiously that the experiment might answer, questioning for a while how
Mr. Harborough would be received. But in the winter the question was
settled by Mrs. Dawson, who, perhaps, alone was capable of settling it
finally. She, under the influence of her son Jack, decided that Mr.
Harborough was as one of themselves, notwithstanding his theory and his
colonial origin,--a decision which scarcely did justice to Harborough,
but gave great satisfaction to everyone, even including Mr. Dane, the
old rector. He, indeed, had seemed particularly to appreciate it, and
had even listened to Mrs. Dawson’s judgment on the case with a faint
smile flickering in his grey eyes. It is true he made Harborough’s
acquaintance without waiting for Mrs. Dawson’s decision, but then,
as she said, the rector, of course, knew everybody. Mr. Johnson, the
curate, being only a curate, had waited for her decision.
But none of these matters troubled Harborough. He lived his life in
his own way, working hard as long as he was able, smoking hard when
work was done; reading sometimes, and the books had nothing to do with
the theory, neither were they such as Jack Dawson would have chosen;
dreaming sometimes in spite of the theory, in spite also of the pure
reason with which he was still young enough to believe he governed his
life. Of his neighbours he thought little; he was friendly when he came
across them, but with the friendliness of the self-contained man who
regards the rest of his kind as supernumeraries, necessary parts of
the world-play, but as well filled by one set of actors as by another.
He knew about his neighbours, of course, since he could not well live
in Ashelton without doing so; but he did not care greatly about them,
nor was there any reason to care; nothing to his knowledge had gone
seriously wrong or seriously right in Ashelton until that night when he
took Robert Morton home.
That night there had been something seriously wrong, and the more
he thought about Morton, the more wrong the whole matter seemed.
Drunkenness looked such a beastly thing in this quiet little village,
in that peaceful home with that fair young wife. “The man’s a brute,”
was his disgusted verdict, “coming home to a wife like that! Lucky it
wasn’t her. By the way, I wonder who the girl was, queer little thing.”
But he did not wonder very much, for he was too sleepy that night
and too busy the next day till the time when the girl revealed her
identity to him. It was somewhere about noon when he saw her, as he was
returning by a lane which bordered one side of the Haylands property.
He had been that way once before during the morning, but was not aware
that anyone had been watching him. As he came back, however, he met
the girl of last night’s adventure evidently waiting for his return.
The Morton’s orchard was here; an untidy orchard, with old stooping
apple-trees, lichen-covered and unpruned, a thicket of nuts and pollard
quinces and, beyond, a briery tangle of blackberries. As yet there was
neither flower nor leaf, except for one plum-tree near the gate white
as snow in its blossom.
It was in the orchard that Harborough saw the girl. She was sitting on
the gate deliberately waiting for him, and when he came in sight she
made the fact known.
“I want to speak to you,” she announced. “I have been waiting ever so
long.”
“I’m sorry,” he answered, in some surprise; “now I have come, what can
I do for you?”
“It is about Robert, Robert Morton--is he often drunk?”
If Harborough had any delusions as to her not grasping the situation
last night, they were now dispelled. “I don’t know,” he said; “I have
never seen him so before.”
“Do you think he often is?”
“I really cannot tell you; I am only very slightly acquainted with him.”
A little smile crept round the corners of the girl’s mouth. “I didn’t
suppose you were great friends,” she said.
Harborough bit his lip. His tone had not implied it, yet he was
conscious that there had been a slight feeling of annoyance at the
suggestion of intimacy conveyed by her words; there was now a second
feeling of annoyance that she should have discovered the first.
“I am a comparatively new comer in the place,” he said somewhat
stiffly; “you would perhaps do better to ask someone who has lived here
longer.”
“Umph!” As she made the oracular answer she drew her legs up to the
top bar of the gate and clasped her hands round them in a position
Harborough considered most unsafe. As he watched her, fascinated,
wondering which way she would fall, she turned a little towards him.
“Take care!” he exclaimed.
“Theresa does not know,” she said, answering her own thoughts. “She has
no idea; but she will, you know.”
Harborough thought it possible, but he only said: “I suppose her
husband told her he did not wish to disturb her last night?”
“Yes.”
“Then I do not see how she is to know, if you do not tell her.”
“No, not this time; but next,--I may not be here then.”
“How do you know there will be a next time?” he asked. “You have no
reason to suppose this was anything but,--but an accident which might
happen to any of us.”
“You, for instance?”
Her blandly innocent eyes were turned on him. “Any man,” he answered
briefly. The eyes showed neither surprise nor disgust; in fact they did
not seem much convinced, and he went on. “There is no reason to say it
must occur again; why do you?”
“Why do _you_?”
“I do not,” he answered; “I should be very sorry to give such a
definite opinion on the subject.”
“Well, then,” she replied cheerfully, “that is the difference between
us. I give the opinions, you only have them, but we mean the same
thing.”
“I have not formed any opinion.”
“No, but you know him,--not very well, I dare say,--but you know other
men. I don’t know him very well either, better than you do, of course,
but not well. I came here on Tuesday, and to-day is Friday; before that
I don’t think I saw him more than six times; but, all the same, I know
he will get drunk again.”
“Pray, did you expect him to be drunk last night?” Harborough asked.
“No,” she answered; “I had never thought about it. Until I saw him last
night I never thought about his drinking; now, of course, I know.”
“I must say you took it very coolly,” he observed, “that is, if it was
a revelation to you.”
She shrugged her shoulders, till he thought she must inevitably fall
off the gate; she did not, but turned to him, asking, “What would you
have had me do?”
“Nothing different from what you did. I meant that you did not seem at
all upset.”
“No, I don’t think I can be upset easily.” He unconsciously looked at
the squirrel-like perch on the gate. “You see,” she went on, “there was
a good deal to be done till you went; after that I thought.”
“Yes?” He wondered what she thought, what sort of brain she had under
that thatch of copper-brown hair.
“It is about Theresa,” she went on to explain; “she does not know, and
she must sooner or later; he is bound to let it out some time. He may
have got drunk and hidden it in the past: he may do so in the future;
but sooner or later there will come another time like last night, and
she will find out.”
He drove his stick into the ground thoughtfully. “Well,” he said at
last, “if this is all as inevitable as you say, if this takes place, I
suppose Mrs. Morton will have to bear it, as other women have borne it
before. There is nothing else for it; we can’t help her; she will just
have to bear it.”
Harborough felt this was cold comfort. It was easy talking out here in
the spring sunshine, easy adjusting the burden to the accompaniment of
the thrushes’ love-songs; but to bear it was another matter, and the
girl evidently thought so.
“You don’t know Theresa,” she said. “She just can’t bear it; I think it
would kill her.”
Harborough repressed a smile. “I don’t think it would do anything of
the kind,” he said, from his wider knowledge of mankind. “Mrs. Morton
by this time knows, what you, too, will find out some day, that the
world is peopled with men not heroes, and that you must take men, even
husbands, as you find them, and not despair and die because they are
not heroes of romance.”
“That’s just what Theresa has not found out,” Theresa’s cousin
persisted, “at least not properly. She and Robert don’t quite
understand one another, I’m afraid. It’s an awful pity for people to
get married; they can’t really know one another unless they have lived
together for a long time first. You see, T. has lived such a different
life. It was a kind of she-life, quiet and dainty and small, and nice
as nice could be,--weak tea in old china and wash the cups up carefully
afterwards--that is how we lived. The pity is she married Robert; it
might have answered if she had married some other man, better, perhaps,
or more,--more watered down, or something; I don’t know how to say it,
but you understand how it is. They just belong to different kinds of
people.”
Harborough leaned against the gate-post, the one opposite to the end
of the gate on which the girl sat; he was careful not to give her the
least jar as he considered the connubial problem presented to him. “Of
course you think Morton is to blame,” he said at last. “You would blame
him far more than your sister--cousin is it?--your cousin then. He is,
I suppose, a low hound, drunken and all the rest of it?”
“Well,” she answered slowly, “it isn’t so much that; he has his good
points of course, though I don’t altogether like him. It isn’t exactly
a case of right and wrong; it’s how the thing seems to the other
person, and it’ll seem bad to T. For myself, I don’t think I should
like getting drunk, but I don’t so much mind about things; I can
understand how it is in a way, and besides, it is not such a sin to his
nature; it isn’t nice, but it is all of a piece with himself.”
Harborough nodded. “That’s so,” he said and added: “To come home drunk
is not, after all, such a dreadful thing from a man’s point of view;
it is not nice, as you say, but it is not the most awful thing in the
world. Life’s entire happiness does not cease because of it; it is not
the end of all things.”
“No,” she said thoughtfully looking past him into some fancy picture.
“No, there is always the necessity to get up and have breakfast next
morning, even after a big tragedy; things don’t end.”
He laughed a little. “Naturally not, and a good thing too on the whole,
though perhaps it is not dramatic. Why not induce Mrs. Morton to take
your truly judicial view of the case?”
“My view? It couldn’t be done.”
“Why not? I think I understood you to say that she had lived in the
same circumstances as yourself; if the view is possible to you, why not
to her?”
“I don’t know, but it is not.” Bill spoke with absolute conviction.
“Besides, I can’t speak about it to her; I can’t even warn her what to
expect. If she had been with me when you brought him home last night, I
should have been obliged to pretend I did not know what was the matter,
and I should have kept up the pretence afterwards.”
“Would you?” he said, eyeing her curiously. “I suppose you would, and
she would have helped you; women always try to hide the shortcomings of
their loved ones. She won’t admit it when she finds him out; she will
stand by him with a sort of proud deceit to the end.”
“Of course,” Bill answered simply; “he is her family now, and you must
stand by your family, right or wrong.”
“I suppose that is what you call loyalty,” Harborough said with a
laugh. “I was born in a land where we don’t think so much of our
families, where we have not always reason to think much of them.”
“Mine isn’t much to boast of,” Bill admitted. “But that has nothing to
do with it; I must stand by them all the same,--why, I should bolster
up Polly. But we are no nearer the settling of Theresa; I suppose we
never shall be, so there is no more to be said. Thank you for telling
me all you knew.”
“All I didn’t know; that is what it amounts to.”
She moved as if she were going to get off the gate, then stopped in the
act and said suddenly: “Polly said Robert would die of apoplexy,--die
young. What do you think?”
“I think it is a solution of the difficulty I should not dwell on, if I
were you.”
“Why not? Isn’t it likely?”
“I should say it was at least uncertain; also it is not usually
considered decent to think about such things, at all events to talk
about them.”
“Oh, decent!” she said, and laughed softly as she remembered Carrie’s
and Alice’s lecture. Then she dropped off the gate and was immediately
lost among the orchard bushes. He stood for a moment, half-expecting
her to come back, though he did not know why. As she did not, he went
on, smiling a little.
Gradually the smile died away. It was all very well to smile out there
in the sunshine, all very well to talk under the apple-boughs, but the
fact remained, the grim, stern fact. It was no concern of his, it is
true, but he could not help thinking about it. Of course he knew that
Morton drank, not desperately, nor enough to do any serious harm, not
more than did plenty of other men, nothing more than occasionally a
little too much; so serious an affair as last night’s occurrence would
probably be an exception. It was not exactly a cardinal sin, it was
just part of his nature, as the little brown girl had said, a kind of
nature for which Harborough had a tolerant contempt when regarded as
a detached specimen; as a personal acquaintance it naturally wore a
different aspect. “If a man drinks, he drinks, and it is his affair.
One can forgive lapses; we are none of us exactly bread-and-butter
saints when we are nearing the thirties.” Harborough emphasised the
words with his stick; he had almost said them aloud, not quite, but
loud enough for the man, who that moment joined him, to guess part of
the speech.
“Who is not a saint when he is nearing the thirties?” he asked.
“Forgive me for surprising your thoughts, Mr. Harborough; you really
should not think so loud, you know.”
“I will forgive you more easily than I fancy you would forgive me
for thinking them.” So Harborough answered, for he had certain very
definite notions as to what was and what was not acceptable to the
clergy, and it was a clergyman who had accosted him, the rector of
Ashelton on his way to the rectory by a field-path well known to at
least one of his parishioners.
Perhaps Harborough misjudged this clergyman; at all events he promised
forgiveness for all sins of thought before they were expressed. “I give
absolution beforehand,” he said; “now confess the whole.”
“The whole? I am afraid I was speech-making to myself, a bad habit
I have got from living so much alone; still you shall have it all.
Here goes,--If a man drinks, he drinks, and it is his affair. One can
forgive lapses; we are none of us bread-and-butter saints when we are
nearing the thirties. But a man whom the divine wisdom has, it would
seem, for its own purposes, made something of a beast, should keep
his beastliness for suitable places. There is a lot done ‘somewhere
east of Suez’ and in other places nearer at hand, which one does
not blame a man for doing there; but when he does it in his wife’s
drawing-room,--when he is such an egregious fool, such an unmitigated
brute--why then he wants kicking, and he should be soundly kicked.”
Mr. Dane laughed a little, but whether at the length of the speech or
the unconscious earnestness of its delivery did not appear. “Yes,” he
said, “yes, brutes want kicking; I’m not sure we don’t all want kicking
sometimes. Poor little wife; God help the wife, whoever she is!”
Harborough acquiesced. “And yet,” he said doubtfully, “if she
understood, it would be easier, much easier; a good woman is a hard
judge.”
“Ay, possibly.” The rector’s cold gray eyes seemed to summon up the
memory of some good woman who had judged hardly. “They were not made to
understand some things.”
“Not all women,” Harborough interposed.
“Not all; are you sure she was a good woman, this exception of yours?
But perhaps we had better not start a controversy now; it is too late.
I suppose the good women will judge the bad men, and love them too, to
the end of the story. Bad men? No, I beg pardon, average men, neither
good nor bad, just human, no bread-and-butter saints--good-bye.”
They parted at the rectory-gate. Just as it closed after Mr. Dane he
turned to call after Harborough: “How about the beef and beer saints?
What of them?”
“Are there any?”
“Yes, and they’re good for three-score years and ten.”