SINCE the time of her Ludlow schooldays and her friendship with Mary
Condover, Marion Prosser’s horizon had widened to an extent that might
easily have explained the distance which now separated them. From Ludlow
she had been sent on to finish her education at a Cheltenham college; for
her mother had social ambitions and knew that the nearest way to the
homes of her superiors lay through the schools that their daughters
frequented. She always taught Marion to speak of her father as a
‘gentleman-farmer,’ a description which Mr Prosser accepted under more
protest than he usually offered to anything that his wife dictated. For
all that, he was proud of the fact that The Dyke had belonged to his
family for six generations, and when he walked round his fields on a
Sunday evening and surveyed their richness from the crumbled earthwork of
Offa’s Dyke, which gave the farm its name, could even be sentimental on
the subject.
Marion went to Cheltenham when her sister Ethel was a baby two years old.
She made many friends, for she was good at games and a creature of
unusual spirit; but the principal feature of her life was a sudden and
passionate friendship for one of her mistresses, a languid pre-Raphaelite
young woman with a phthisical tendency who made her read a good deal of
romantic literature of a sentimental kind. Miss Randall’s literary
heroes were Parsifal and Galahad, and her fetish personal purity, the
shame-faced purity of impotence. She was not fond of men, she said,
although she allowed herself the licence of a spiritual flirtation with
an advanced young priest of the Church of England, to whom she opened her
soul.
In due course Marion’s adoration of her mistress went the way of all such
passions; but her taste for letters remained. In her eighteenth year her
mother suddenly died, and she returned to The Dyke to look after her
father and her baby sister. Even in the excitement of her new activities
she rebelled, feeling herself isolated, alien, condemned to an infinity
of small-talk.
She became the hostess of her father’s friends; farmers of every age and
type, who made love to her with varying degrees of rustic clumsiness but
seemed to Mr Prosser the most desirable of suitors. Usually they drove
up to The Dyke on Sunday evenings or after Ludlow market. Some, by their
liquorish assumption of an easy conquest, offended her and caught the
rough side of her tongue; but she soon found that with them her genteel
shades of irony were so much waste of time, since they were not even
understood.
The young men retired puzzled, and their sisters sympathised with them.
‘She isn’t natural,’ they said, ‘and you can’t go against nature like
that. I never could think what you saw in her.’ In this way Marion
Prosser got a reputation for shrewishness and conceit. The young men of
the neighbourhood felt that even the possession of The Dyke would be a
small compensation for that of such a difficult wife. They began to
treat her with the instinctive respect of the terrier for the hedge-hog,
leaving her to her books and to her fancies.
With these, for some years, she was content. The walls of her bedroom at
the Dyke showed evidences of culture in as many strata as can be found in
the coloured ribbon along the edge of a geological map of England. They
ranged from the primary Rossettis of her Cheltenham period to
reproductions of late impressionist pictures. Among books she groped her
way determinedly. In Ludlow she found a branch of one of the London
circulating libraries. Every week she would drive there in her pony trap
and bring back the books that she had ordered, to the amazement of the
stationer who kept the shop. Her father laughed at her tastes. Among
his friends she gained the reputation of a bluestocking, which was enough
to make any young man think twice before he spoke to her. And the years
went by.
They were dull years, and for very boredom she tried to identify herself
with the work of the farm. She threw herself violently into these new
interests to the amazement of her father. Although he was still more
than a little afraid of her, he could not help respecting her capability.
During the lifetime of her mother he had been so infused with the spirit
of this active woman that he had appeared to be a man of some
determination. Her death annihilated him: he had relapsed into
nonentity, caring nothing, as it seemed, for his crops or his herds,
driving in regularly every week to Ludlow market like an automaton,
driving back in the evening, morose and fuddled, with no clear idea of
what he had been about. On these occasions he would talk piteously of
his motherless girls, and his large, sentimental eyes would fill with
tears. He confided to his friends that he himself was not long for this
world, though, physically, he was as strong as a horse.
Marion’s determination changed all that. Subtly, without his knowledge,
she pulled him together and made a man of him again, and, never having
known the subjection with which her mother had entered the estate of
marriage, she did what she liked with him, sometimes wounding his pride
with her rather brutal frankness. Yet, even when he was wounded, he
submitted to her; for she flattered him by pretending that he was the
real head of the household. At root he was a lazy man, and dared not
quarrel with his comforts. He realised, too, that the knowledge of
practical farming, that was as deeply rooted in him as an instinct, was
more essential to the success of their partnership than Marion’s acute
and active mind.
He prospered, and in moments of exaltation would tell himself that she
was only a girl after all and that he was the man who counted. He made a
startling recovery of his self-possession and talked no more of death;
but his greatest happiness he still found in the society of his younger
daughter Ethel, a child whose nature was nearer to his own. Some day, he
decided, Ethel should marry a solid husband of his choosing, some big man
with many lowland acres, and when the grandchildren began to come along,
he would pass a quiet old age among them. Marion should have The Dyke.
Even if she were not the elder she had earned it. It seemed unlikely
that she would ever marry, being so hard to please.
Now, at the age of twenty-eight, Marion found herself lonely. The farm
work had become so intimate a part of her life that it served no longer
to distract her. Life was slipping away from her. Ten years had passed
almost without her knowing it. In another ten she would be nearly forty.
A hidden fear possessed her that by separating herself from her own class
and kind she had sacrificed the chance of living. Life was the thing
that mattered, and she had exchanged her heritage for a few pitiful
shreds of culture. The motherly cares that she lavished on Ethel were a
poor substitute for veritable maternity, and she knew it. She began to
see that by refusing all commerce with the men of her own class in the
hope of realising a problematical grand passion she had sacrificed all
opportunity of passion whatever.
For some years after leaving Cheltenham she had exchanged letters with a
number of her college friends, but little by little this correspondence
had grown more slender and at length it had ceased. In her growing
apprehension she made an attempt to revive several of these ancient
friendships. The result filled her with despair and vague envies. Most
of her girl friends were married: many of them sent her photographs of
their husbands and children. She alone, it seemed, of all their company
was left alone. It was her own fault. She knew it was her own fault,
for her mirror told her that she did not show her age and that she was
still desirable. All things seemed to conspire in fostering her unrest.
The sights and sounds of the great farm around her were full of
insistence on the cycle of birth, fruitfulness, and decay. Her books
helped her no more. Her old æsthetic idols had long since been broken,
and her latest passion, Whitman, whom she had discovered through the
anthologies, swamped her mind with an endless adoration of the body’s
pride, the splendour of the flower no less than that of the fruiting.
In this distressful and desirous state, two incidents moved her deeply.
The first was the dismissal of one of the farm girls who had been seduced
by a clogger and had gone into the workhouse to have her baby. She was a
puny, undesirable creature, with neither beauty nor health, yet she had
found a lover. The second was the scandal of Mary Malpas, her old school
friend, and the young lodger at Wolfpits, rehearsed with many winks by Mr
Williams, whom her father had brought in for a glass of whisky on a
Sunday evening.
‘A well set-up chap, that Fellows!’ said Williams to her father. ‘It’s
no great wonder she’s took a fancy to him.’
‘Well, well, ’tis the way of the world!’ said Mr Prosser comfortably.
‘Fill Mr Williams’s glass, Marion!’
She did so, and then, furiously blushing, left the room.
‘What’s up with your maid?’ Williams asked. ‘I reckon I’ve shocked her.
Did I say anything out of the way?’
‘Not you! She’s a rum ’un is Marion,’ Mr Prosser laughed.
And a few days later she had met Abner returning from his fruitless visit
to The Dyke.
She had looked at him standing bare-headed in the level sunshine, and
seen that he was well-favoured, but when she pulled up her horse and
emerged from the dream state into which the rhythm of trotting hoofs had
thrown her she had not thought that this meeting would be different from
any other with a labourer out of work. She liked Abner’s face, and for
this reason had taken the trouble to ask him where he lived. Then came
the word ‘Wolfpits,’ and a sudden realisation that Fellows was the name
that Mr Williams had mentioned in his scandalous tale. It thrilled her
to find herself face to face with Mary’s lover. She lowered her eyes,
not daring to look at him, and all the time her soul was consumed with a
curiosity to see more of him, to find out what he was like. She knew
that this curiosity was dangerous, that she was deliberately courting
temptation, but she had had enough of prudence and felt that she was old
enough to look after herself. And yet she knew that she had done a
momentous thing when she told him to call next morning at The Dyke, and
feared that trouble, indefinite trouble, might come of it.
Abner had not been working three days on the farm when Harris, his
principal labourer, told Mr Prosser who the new workman was: ‘Young Mrs
Malpas’s fancy man,’ he called him; and Mr Prosser, who set great store
on the respectability of his farm, felt that he had made a mistake in
employing him. The matter had been settled by Marion. No doubt if she
had known all the circumstances of the case she would not have taken him
on.
‘Do you know who this young chap is, Marion?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He comes from Wolfpits.’
‘Do you realise that he’s the chap Williams was talking about, the one
that’s living with Mary Malpas?’
‘Yes, I do. Mr Williams himself said he didn’t blame her.’
‘I thought you yourself were put out a bit by his mentioning it.’
‘Put out? Of course I wasn’t. Why should I be put out?’
‘I think it’s bringing the scandal rather near home having him here.’
‘He’s a good workman, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him that way.’
‘Well, that’s all you want to know.’
‘Harris doesn’t speak well of him.’
‘Harris is jealous of every one who sets foot in the place. You’d think
he owned it.’
‘And what’ll the vicar say?’ he joked.
‘I don’t know nor care. But I’m sure we’re doing right to employ him. I
don’t know what would happen to poor Mary with that good-for-nothing
Malpas in jail and this man out of work.’
‘Well, I suppose you know best,’ said Mr Prosser. He had not expected
Marion to take the matter up so warmly. And Abner stayed.
He was not long in finding out who was the real ruler of The Dyke and
that Mr Prosser, for all his commanding figure, stood for nothing. When
the men knocked off for their dinner at midday and the two girls came
down the field carrying ‘baggins’ of bread and cheese and great jugs of
harvest beer, they would wink at each other and say: ‘Here comes the
boss!’
Marion scarcely ever spoke to him more than a word, but her eyes were
conscious of him, and he always felt that he was working under her
scrutiny. Whenever they spoke together he was aware of the fact that it
was she who had got him his job and that she could take it away from him
as easily. When he came back from his work at night Mary would ask him
questions about her old friend, but he could never satisfy her.
‘Does she know that you come from here?’ she would say.
‘Of course she knows. I told her at the first.’
‘But she’s never mentioned me? Never asked after me?’
‘We’ve never spoke ten words together.’
‘It’s funny, that! When you come to think of her and me having slept in
the same bed. . . . She must know about me!’
‘She’s a rum ’un, Miss Marion. There’s no getting away from that.’
He and Mary never saw much of each other in those days, for Abner had to
get up very early in the morning in time for his seven mile walk, and the
harvest labour was severe. Severe, and yet pleasant, for the summer
weather held and no rain fell. The sun shone pitilessly on the whitening
stubbles, but the corn-fields of The Dyke were so lifted upon the back of
the hills that they seemed to be part of a high cloudland and free from
all heaviness. On the lower levels the whir of reaping machines might be
heard, but higher up the fields were so unlevel, following the broken
contour of the hills and bounded by the sloping ramparts of the dyke,
that all the reaping must be done with sickles and the dry shocks carried
to the head of a rough road. Abner had not the skill to wield a sickle,
and so in this part of the labour he was useless. Harris, the labourer,
who acted as foreman when Mr Prosser was not in the fields, resented
this. Before Marion’s interest in the farm began he had been his
master’s right-hand man. He had been present at the time when Abner was
first employed by Mr Prosser, and knowing that the newcomer was a protégé
of Miss Marion’s, was naturally jealous. When the men sat in the shade
of a hedgerow for lunch he grumbled to his mates and grudged Abner his
share of the food. The two casual labourers were inclined to take
Harris’s side; but old Avery, a man of sixty who had worked at The Dyke
all his life, stood up for Abner.
‘I don’t know what the place is coming to,’ Harris said. ‘We don’t want
no navvies here. There’s too many about as it is. ’Tis a farming man’s
job, reaping. I reckon you’re one of Miss Marion’s fancies. You’d a’
better look out!’
The men laughed, and Abner asked him what the hell he meant.
Harris was a dangerous-looking customer for all his years, strong as a
bull, with a low, ape-like forehead, badger-gray hair, and long, ungainly
arms that seemed to have been bowed by the carrying of trusses of hay.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing. We
don’t want no bleedin’ outsiders here, snatching the bread out of our
mouths.’
Violence would surely have followed, but at the most dangerous moment the
farmer and his daughters arrived. The reaping of the twelve-acre field
was almost finished, a huge expanse of stubble lay gleaming under the
noon-day sun, and crackled with heat. In the midst of the field a square
of barley stood unreaped and shimmering, and within it cowered a secret
multitude of field-mice, hares, and rabbits that the destruction of their
homes had driven inwards. Mr Prosser and Marion carried guns, and Ethel
was playing with three dogs that sniffed and trembled with eagerness for
this annual pastime of slaughter.
‘Now, Harris, let’s get a move on!’ said the farmer.
The horses, that had stood stamping and swishing their tails and flicking
flies from their ears in the shade of an elder-bush, were brought round
with cries of encouragement, and the machine rolled clanking over the
stubble towards the standing corn. Prosser and his daughters stayed
behind in the hedgerow, the day’s work went on, and as the square
diminished, narrowing with each turn of the machine, the dogs sniffed
along the edge of that narrow sanctuary until the guns were ready.
‘Give Miss Marion a hand with her loading, Fellows,’ Prosser shouted.
‘Tell the men to get their sticks ready, Harris, and we’ll put the dogs
in on the far side.’
Abner and Marion stood together with the sun beating on their backs. The
dogs ran barking into the corn. Above them, in the eye of the sun, a
kestrel hovered. Three frightened rabbits bolted from the farther edge.
Prosser fired two barrels and killed one. Another was wounded, and
Harris ran after it with ungainly strides and stick uplifted. He brought
down the stick with a savage cry and dashed out the animal’s brains. ‘I
got him, the varmint!’ he shouted.
The multitude within the square of corn trembled. One by one, terror
drove them out into the open. Marion fired twice and missed. Her hands
shook as she gave the gun to Abner to reload. She could not see her
pitiful target; she saw nothing but the young man at her side with his
sun-bleached hair, his red chest and neck, and the milk-white skin above
the roll of his shirt sleeves.
‘Quick! You’m missing of them!’ he cried.
She fired again, and missed. She could hit nothing.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve been
too long in the sun. You’d better take the gun yourself.’
And she stood watching the sureness of his aim as he fired, knocking over
the pitiful, bright-eyed, furry creatures one by one. She watched him,
fascinated, conscious only of his health and strength and the perfect
co-ordination of his body. She saw it as that of her friend’s lover, and
in a yearning tenderness she thought of that hidden life away in
Wolfpits. She could stand it no longer.
‘Give me the gun,’ she said. ‘Don’t shoot any more.’
She took the weapon from him and went over to join her sister in the
hedge, where she sat watching the scene of slaughter in a dream. Then
she got up suddenly, telling Ethel that the sun was too much for her, and
went straight home to her bedroom. All afternoon she lay on her bed in
the green light of a venetian blind. Her eyes burned and her head was
splitting, but she knew that this was not altogether because of the sun.
Later, when she had bathed her eyes in cold water and done her hair, she
pulled out an old album in which there was a photograph taken at the
Ludlow school where Mary Malpas had been her friend. It was a group
ranged round the central figures of the two precise spinsters who kept
the academy. She and Mary Condover were standing side by side: two
solemn, self-conscious, childish faces with eyes staring straight at the
photographer. Now Mary Condover was Mary Malpas, and had this man for a
lover. Over in the secrecy of Wolfpits they loved. Ethel came knocking
at the door with a cup of tea. The sound of her knock made Marion jump.
It was not like her to be nervous.
‘They’ve counted the rabbits,’ said Ethel. ‘Thirty-two! That’s two more
than last year. Dad’s ever so pleased. Is your headache better?’
‘Yes, I’m all right,’ said Marion. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
For several days she saw next to nothing of Abner. One morning, however,
her father sent him up to her with a message. She was making pastry in
the kitchen; her hands and arms were white with flour and the heat of the
range had flushed her face. Again she found that in his presence she
lost her self-possession, and falling on an awkward silence she blurted
out:
‘Well, how does it suit you?’
‘Well enough,’ he replied. ‘Thanks to you, miss.’
‘Oh, don’t thank _me_!’ she said, with a laugh.
He was going, but she called him back to the kitchen door.
‘Don’t you find the walk to Wolfpits rather tiring?’ she asked.
‘It’s a fair step,’ he said. ‘But I don’t take much count of it.’
‘Why don’t you stay up here till harvest’s over?’ she said. ‘You could
make up some sort of a bed in the loft.’
He thanked her, but refused. ‘I find a good bit to do when I get home
nights,’ he said. ‘They can’t get on in the house without me.’
‘They?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘Ah, well, it won’t be for long.’
While they were speaking together at the door Harris passed them with his
basket slung over his stooping shoulders. He touched his cap to Marion,
and gave Abner a wry smile as he passed. Marion returned to the kitchen
without another word, and Abner, on his way back to the field began to
puzzle his head as to what she had meant by her sudden change of front
when he had excused himself from sleeping at The Dyke. The scorn that
she had put into her repetition of the word ‘they’ made him think that
perhaps there was more justification than he had imagined in Mary’s
feeling of resentment against Marion Prosser. But if she felt sore with
Mary for any reason, there was no need for her to practise on him. He
wasn’t going to be lugged in to any petty feminine quarrel, they might be
sure of that! He had quite enough to do on his own keeping even with
that leering devil Harris. Mr Harris was going to cop it one of these
days, and no mistake!
He dismissed Marion Prosser from his mind. And yet, all through the hot
harvest season the two of them were meeting and passing with a sense of
something desired but unspoken on the part of Marion; and whenever they
met there came into Abner’s mind a grudging recognition of her physical
presence. He decided that he did not like this strong, dark, almost
boyish creature who, without even speaking, could so thrust herself upon
his consciousness. She was too secret for him. He wished that she would
speak out what she had to say so that they might know where they were and
be finished with it, and since she would not do so he avoided her.
Meanwhile the harvest season was drawing to a close. The later crops
were marred by the long-awaited rain. From every corner of the uplands
came the same story: straw so weak as to be worthless and wheat sprouting
in the ear. Prosser, who could well stand these losses and many more,
picked up an infection of grumbling at the Ludlow market ordinary. Not
only were the standing crops ruined but the extra hands were eating their
heads off. Harris echoed his lamentations, and Abner, together with the
two other outsiders who had been engaged for the harvest, would have been
paid off but for the intervention of Marion.
He knew nothing of this. Through all that dead, wet season, when the
baked hill-sides steamed with rain and morning skies were heavy with
autumnal mist, he busied himself with odd jobs about the farm. It was
important for him if he were to find work in the neighbourhood when the
job at The Dyke was over, that he should learn as much as he could of the
farm-labourer’s craft. He learned to milk, to brush the horses and to
bed them down, helped with the lifting of the main-crop potatoes and dug
them into the immense buries, shaped like the barrows of the stone-men on
Castel Ditches, in which they were stored for winter.
Then, sudden, unheralded, came a September summer. The mists
disappeared; the drowned crops stood up golden in a hot and level
sunshine; the work of the fields began again. They laboured incessantly,
for the sunshine and drought were now more precious than gold. They
worked so hard from the light of dawn until the stunted sheaves threw
gigantic shadows, that there was no room in his mind for the foibles of
Marion or the growing jealousy of Harris. Prosser and his girls came
down into the fields to aid them. The sheaves ripened against time, and
Prosser watched the sky and tapped his glass all day long. He held on as
long as he dared; but on the eighth day of the drought the glass began to
fall, and the last sheaves were carted from the fields by moonlight.
At one o’clock in the morning they knocked off, exhausted, and strangely
happy in the consciousness of a work well done; but the sense of
happiness departed from Abner as he walked home through the owl-haunted
twilight, for he knew that the job at The Dyke was over, and he had
nothing else before him. At the end of the week, he supposed, he would
draw his money and be faced with a new search for employment.
Next day, in accordance with the ancient custom of The Dyke, a harvest
home was held in the long kitchen of the house. All morning Marion, her
sister, and Agnes the maid were busy baking cakes and boiling hams for
the festival. The wives and children of the labourers were asked to
share in these rejoicings, and more than twenty usually sat down to the
long table at night. Abner and the other extra hands were expected to
come, but Mary Malpas was not invited.
Abner saw nothing strange or pointed in the omission, and indeed he had
no time to spare for ceremonies of this kind, having been bred in a
country where feudal customs had long since died away under the new and
harder influence of capitalism. But to the labourers at The Dyke, and
particularly to older men such as Daniel Avery, the harvest home was a
feast as religious as any ancient mystery. To them it was the crown of
the year and its labours, more vital and more significant than any
convention of the calendar. Mr Prosser, as a member of the older
generation, was himself attached to the custom. It reminded him of his
boyhood, of the days when his father was master of The Dyke and his
grandfather sat watching the dances from the chimney corner, and in this
way it comforted him with a sense of continuity and flattered those
vestiges of family pride which were the deepest elements in his nature.
The day always found him in the best of spirits, and Marion, who loved to
see her father made happy even by the simplest things, caught a little of
his joyful infection. The house was in a stir; the servants laughed and
sang about their work; the oaken dresser was spread with holiday fare.
Marion caught old Avery in the yard and made him promise to sing his
mole-catcher’s song.
‘If I do sing it, I mun sing it right through,’ said the old man, with a
wink. ‘I can’t mind the verses without I sing them in arder.’
She laughed; for many of his verses were indecent. ‘You shall sing just
what you like, Dan,’ she said. As well quarrel with the indecency of the
Bible as that of Avery’s songs.
Mr Prosser had told the men to leave their work at five o’clock instead
of at six, in order that they might go home to clean themselves and fetch
their families. Only Hayes, the cowman, who slept on the premises, was
to be left behind. Abner, old Avery, and Harris set off down the drive
together. The others moved too slowly for Abner, for he had seven miles
in front of him. All day long Harris had taken a malicious pleasure in
letting Abner know that his time was up and that The Dyke would soon be
shut of him. There had been one or two ugly moments, softened by the
good humour of old Dan. Now they walked alongside in silence, Abner
setting the pace.
‘Hey, you do go too fast for old bones, my son!’ said Avery.
‘Wants to get home to his missus,’ said Harris.
‘Here, you’d better drop that!’ said Abner warningly.
But Harris would not be warned. He knew, as well as the others, that
Mary Malpas had not been invited to The Dyke. ‘I reckon you’m going to
leave her behind to-night,’ he said.
‘I reckon you’d better mind your own business. I’ve had a damn sight too
much of your lip.’
Harris laughed. ‘Stands to reason they won’t have that kind of muck in
the company of decent married women and innocent childer,’ he said.
Abner did not wait to answer him. He let out with his right, catching
Harris on the temple, and sent him spinning toward the ditch.
‘Steady, lad, steady!’ cried old Avery.
Harris pulled himself together and made straight for Abner with his head
low down like a bull. He was the older man, and, in spite of the iron
strength of his arms, Abner always had the advantage. Harris fought
desperately with his hob-nailed boots as well as his fists. They fought
till their faces were bloody and their clothes torn. Old Avery whined at
them to give over, but they took no notice of him. At last Abner drove
Harris into the ditch, where he lay spluttering blood. ‘I reckon that’ll
teach you to keep your bleedin’ mouth shut!’ said Abner savagely, and
left him there with the old man trembling and shedding weak tears above
him.
He washed in the Folly Brook and had made himself fairly presentable by
the time he reached Wolfpits.
‘I thought you were going to the harvest home,’ said Mary.
‘Then you thought wrong,’ said Abner irritably. ‘Give us some tea.’
Neither Harris nor his family turned up at The Dyke that evening. Old
Dan, who had kept his own counsel, was in the middle of his mole-catching
song when one of the ploughman’s children came in with a message to say
that her dad was in a fever, and the bed wringing wet under him.
‘Why didn’t your mother come?’ Prosser asked.
‘Dad wouldn’t let her,’ said the child.
Marion took her aside and gave her a piece of cake.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Prosser grumbled. ‘Here’s Harris badly,
and now Hayes tells me he’s got a poisoned finger. I don’t know what
we’ll do for the milking to-morrow.’
‘There’s Fellows,’ said Marion.
‘Yes, it’s lucky we’ve got him. Why, he isn’t here either! What the
devil’s the matter with them all?’
Marion said nothing. She had guessed long ago why Abner was not there.
She had half suspected that he would not come to The Dyke without Mary,
but her pride would not let her ask her father to invite the family from
Wolfpits. In the bottom of her heart she doubted if she would dare to
meet her old friend. It would be so difficult, and besides that she felt
that the intuitions of the other woman might discover her own leaning
toward Abner. It was too dangerous.
Next morning Abner arrived at his usual hour. During the night Dr
Hendrie had been summoned to The Dyke and had found that the neglected
splinter in the cowman’s finger threatened him with blood-poisoning, and
the loss of his arm. At dawn Mr Prosser had driven him in to the
infirmary at Shrewsbury. Marion received Abner on his arrival.
‘Why didn’t you come up last night?’ she said.
‘That sort of thing bain’t much in my line,’ he replied.
‘I wanted you to come,’ she said.
He only smiled awkwardly, and she wished that she had been more prudent.
She told him that Hayes was in hospital and that Harris was laid up with
influenza. It would be a convenience to them if he could take over
Hayes’s work, which was the care and milking of the cows and the driving
of milk-cans morning and night to Llandwlas station. He was astonished
at this turn of luck, for he had expected to be dismissed with his
harvest earnings in his pocket. For all that, he didn’t mean to take the
job on false pretences.
‘So Harris has caught the influenza, has he?’ he said.
‘Yes, he sent up his little girl with a message last night.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘it wasn’t true. What Harris got was a damned good
hammering from me—one that he won’t forget.’
She thrilled to hear him. In her eyes he had become a hero. She knew
already that he could be gentle. It gave her a curious, almost physical
pleasure to realise him as a fighting man, for every one in the district
was aware of Harris’s iron strength.
‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.
‘He only got what he asked for,’ said Abner, ‘with his dirty talk about
young Mrs Malpas.’
‘Mary Malpas . . .’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, I’m sick of hearing her
name.’
She did not pass on to her father what Abner had told her. He came back
from Shrewsbury that evening tired and depressed. ‘The doctors reckon
that we were only just in time with poor Hayes,’ he said. ‘It’s a near
shave for his left arm. They’ve had to open it right up to the shoulder
and he’ll be lucky if he’s out of hospital by Christmas. I don’t know
what we can do, with Harris ill as well.’
‘There’s Fellows,’ she said.
‘Yes, there’s Fellows,’ he repeated, thinking of other things. He stared
at her vaguely, but it seemed to her that his eyes were searching her,
and she left him, blushing.
Abner’s new work kept him almost exclusively on the farm premises, and
for this reason he and Marion often crossed each other’s paths. They met
so often that Marion lost a little of her shame in speaking with him.
She handled him cleverly, so that in the end he lost a good deal of the
awkwardness that she herself had created. She was frank and kind,
helping him in many small things. He came to take her for granted, and
even to like her. In a little time he became accustomed to the cowman’s
job and took a pride in it. To all intents and purposes he was his own
master; for the dairy was Marion’s province, and Mr Prosser rarely
interfered with its management.
Within a week of his hammering, Harris returned, apparently not much the
worse for it. Nobody but old Avery knew what had happened, and the
ploughman kept to himself a story that was hardly flattering. Abner had
been prepared to treat him friendlily; but he soon saw that Harris had no
intention of doing the same, maintaining a surly silence that was never
to be broken, since their work now lay in different directions.
So autumn passed, the first frosts of winter whitened the upland, and the
first ploughing began. Abner kept to his own work. The Prossers’ dairy
was a small one, for their pasture land was limited, but he found that
with the two station deliveries, the milking, and the care of the cows,
his hands were pretty full. He saw less and less of Wolfpits, for it had
been arranged that he should take his evening meal at the farm on his
return from the station, and Mary was not altogether sorry for this,
since it freed her from many embarrassing moments.
Abner was now earning a good wage, and the household was relatively
prosperous. He was even able to replace the watch that had been stolen
at Bran. In this peaceful interlude the only thing that really
disquieted Mary’s mind was George’s letter. She had never yet dared to
show it to Abner, but she had not destroyed it, and from time to time a
cruel fascination compelled her to take it from the drawer where she had
hidden it and to read it again. It seemed strange to her that she had
received no other word from him. If he could write once he could surely
write again, and though she did not dare to confide its contents to Mrs
Mamble, she induced the old woman to question the wife of a policeman at
Lesswardine whom she had attended in a confinement as to the conditions
under which a prisoner in the county jail might receive visitors or write
letters. A prisoner in George’s condition, Mrs Mamble told her, was
entirely separated from the outside world for the first three months of
his sentence. After that, if his conduct were good, he might write and
receive one letter every month, and invite one visitor to see him during
the same period. This knowledge amazed her; for George had now been in
jail more than nine months but had only written her this one, disturbing
letter and had never once asked her to visit him. The fact filled her
with an inexplicable pang of jealousy; but what troubled her more deeply
was to know that Mrs Mamble was conscious of her humiliation.
‘The less you think about him the better,’ said the old woman stoutly.
‘He was never no good to you, and never will be.’
But Mary could not put the matter out of her mind. Once again she
commissioned Mrs Mamble to make inquiries in Chapel Green and find out if
old Mrs Malpas had visited George in prison. The answer was definite.
Mrs Malpas had never left the village since the day of the trial,
although she had received several letters from George, as the postman,
who lodged with one of Mrs Mamble’s friends, could vouch.
Then Mary hardened her heart; for she guessed that George was choosing
for his only visitor the widow woman from Lesswardine, whom she had seen
at the trial. Re-reading George’s letter she burned with anger. What
right had he to dictate to her how she should behave? Her soul was full
of hatred and contempt, so that she almost wished that she had given him
real cause for suspicion. In this state she allowed her memory to dwell
with tenderness on the surprising moment that had come to her and Abner
by the sea-crows’ pool. She felt that she had been foolish to shrink
from it. And yet she dared not let Abner see what she was thinking;
knowing for certain, that if she did so something violent and terrible
must happen to them. For herself she had no fear; but the thought of
what the children might suffer chilled her. And she released her surfeit
of feeling in a more passionate devotion to these small creatures,
determining, whatever might happen, to hold on for the remaining eight
months of George’s imprisonment. This artificial resolution made her
harden herself more than ever against Abner.
One day Mrs Mamble brought her the news that Susan Hind was being married
in less than a week to Badger, the keeper. She now saw so little of
Abner that she could not be sure that his old relations with Susie had
ceased, but she found herself snatching eagerly at an occasion for
wounding him.
‘I hope you’re going to your old friend’s wedding, Abner,’ she said.
‘I don’t know nothing about one,’ he said. ‘I’ve no friends in these
parts that I know to.’
‘Susie Hind . . . she’s marrying Mr Badger next Monday.’
She watched him carefully.
‘Well, he’s welcome!’ said Abner, with a laugh.
And then, instead of being relieved, she found herself overwhelmed by a
new suspicion. He would not have spoken like that unless he had been
entangled with some other woman. She wondered who it could be, and a few
days later began to ply him with deliberate questions about Marion
Prosser. He did not guess what she was driving at; imagined that she was
still brooding over her old slight.
‘I know naught about her,’ he said.
‘Do you like her any better than you did?’
‘I don’t mind her,’ said Abner. ‘At any rate she don’t werrit me with
questions about you.’
One day in October Marion renewed her proposal that Abner should sleep at
The Dyke. She told him that she didn’t like to think of him walking to
and from Wolfpits every day. If she had substituted ‘Mary Malpas’ for
‘Wolfpits’ she would have been nearer to the truth.
‘We can make you quite comfortable in the little loft above the
harness-room,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in your wearing yourself
out.’
He said nothing; but told Mary of her proposal. Listening, she held her
breath.
‘I don’t want to keep you,’ she compelled herself to say. ‘You’d better
go.’
‘No fear!’ said he. ‘You don’t catch me losing my liberty that way! A
man that sleeps over his work’s no better than a slave.’
She felt a sudden relief. ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ she said. ‘I’m
sure you’re right.’ She spoke as if it were the matter of principle that
interested her.
Next day he refused Marion’s offer, and she left him in a huff. She was
miserable, for she could not overcome the attraction which he had
exercised over her from the first, yet was too bashful to declare herself
more openly. She tried to tell herself that Abner was only a labouring
man and her inferior in station, but she could not pretend that
physically he was not her equal, nor deny his influence. She hoped that
he would notice the change in her attitude, see that she was avoiding
him, and, perhaps, miss her; but he went on with his work as usual and
did not seem to care whether she came near him or sent him messages by
Ethel or Agnes, the maid, and so, gradually, with a feeling of shame, she
was driven back to his company.
The days were now drawing in rapidly, and it was after sunset when the
cows came to be milked. It had been Marion’s custom to carry the scoured
pails to the byre and stand by Abner’s side while he milked. When he
drove the cows into the shed he would light a stable lantern and hang it
from a nail in the wall before he found his stool and took the pail from
her hands. These were the moments when she felt herself nearest to him.
Standing in the doorway of the shippon she would watch him as he sat with
his fair head pressed to the cows’ flanks and listen to the milk swishing
into the pails. It was a moment of most soothing silence. Neither of
them spoke, nor was there any other sound but that of the cows snatching
hay from the racks above them with their lips and filling the shed with
their sweet breath. Marion stood very still in that slow-breathing
quietude, and thither, like shadows, came the cats that lived in the
lofts and roofs of the granary, shy, half-savage creatures. It was part
of Abner’s ritual to set a tin basin of milk frothing-warm on the floor
for them, and round this they would walk, five or six of them, with
sidelong gait and tails uplifted. Every night at milking-time they came.
But if she stirred a muscle they were gone. She watched them, quiet,
hallucinated; and when they were gone she stayed on in the silence, while
Abner strained the milk into her scalded buckets and passed from stall to
stall.
One evening she found him troubled.
‘I don’t half like the look of Daisy here,’ he said.
Daisy was a red Devon cow, the only one of her breed in Prosser’s herd of
white-nosed Herefords. Some weeks before she had calved; but the calf
had been feeble and had died, and though they had given her a calf-skin
stuffed with straw to lick she had pined, and the milk had failed in
quality. Now she stood miserably in her stall with her ears turned back
and her sleek coat staring.
‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’ Marion asked.
‘She was coughing a good bit when I drove her in—seemed to have no heart
in her either—and you can see she’s breathing quicker than the others.
You put your ear to her and hearken. It’s like a lot of bubbles going
off inside of her.’
He put his arm over the animal’s neck and listened. Marion did as he
told her. They listened together, but she could hear nothing but Abner’s
own deep, placid breath. He seemed very near to her. She could see his
serious eyes shining with pin-points of lantern-light. Her heart began
to beat so violently that she feared he must hear it. She felt a choking
sensation in her breast, as though her heart was bursting and she must
cry out or weep. It was intolerable.
‘Do you catch it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I hear,’ she said.
‘I reckon she’s worse than she seemed,’ said Abner. ‘I think she’s got
the bronchitis. You’d best let the gaffer know.’
‘He’s gone down to Craven Arms for the sales to-morrow,’ she replied.
‘He’s booked a bed at the Railway Hotel.’
‘Like our luck!’ Abner grumbled. ‘Well, we’d better give her a drench of
gruel and poultice her when we’ve finished the milk.’
When he came back from the station she was ready with a draught of
oatmeal gruel. Then she set herself to making a poultice of linseed meal
and brought it out to him.
‘I reckon I can’t leave her to-night,’ he told her.
‘Hadn’t we better send for Harris?’ she asked.
He flared up at once. ‘Harris? . . . I don’t want that Harris poking
his nose in my shippon!’
‘Very well,’ she said mildly. She watched him adjust the poultice over
Daisy’s throat. The animal was now coughing painfully, and the chill of
the night air seemed to strangle her breathing. Marion found it
difficult to leave him.
‘There’s no call for you to go catching your death of cold,’ Abner said.
Again she submitted. ‘But I think we’d better take turns with her,’ she
said. ‘I’ll go and tell Agnes.’
She left him, and though she could not persuade him to let her take his
place she returned from time to time to the byre. He scarcely spoke to
her, for the animal’s condition made him more and more anxious. At one
o’clock in the morning she came out in her dressing-gown with her dark
hair braided down her back for the night. The cow was now a terrible
sight. She had sunk down upon the floor of the shed and was breathing in
desperate, quick gasps, with her brown eyes piteously upturned.
‘I don’t like the look of her,’ said Abner, ‘not half.’
‘We shall have to send for Harris. He understands them,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he returned, grudgingly.
‘I’ll send Agnes down to the village. And then I’ll bring you some tea.’
‘Don’t you worry about that!’
‘Agnes is making it now.’
She sent the maid running off at once. The kitchen fire was nearly out
and the kettle would not boil. It seemed to her an age before she could
get it boiling. Then she filled a jug with tea and prepared to take it
to him. At the door a shadow startled her and she gave a cry. Abner was
standing on the step.
‘It’s a bad job,’ he said. ‘She’s gone. She went off quite sudden.’
She did not realise what he was saying. She gave a nervous laugh.
‘Oh, what a start you gave me!’ she said, putting down the jug on the
table. And then, suddenly, she put her hands to her face and started
sobbing hysterically.
‘Don’t take on like that!’ he said. ‘It’s no fault of yourn.’
‘Oh, it’s not that!’ she cried. ‘It’s not that!’
He put his hand on her shoulder, trying to soothe her, and the next
moment she was clinging in his arms and he was covering her face and neck
with kisses. Harris, who had run up from his cottage as fast as he could
travel, stood panting and gazing at them in the doorway, but neither
Abner nor Marion saw him, and when he had stared at them for a moment he
moved quietly across the yard into the byre.