THE autumn rains set in early that year. Every night when Pamela fell
asleep in her bedstead with the fluted posts and hangings of chintz,
having a fearful pattern of black roses, she heard the murmuring rush
of rain down the pipes and into the soft-water tubs. Every morning she
was awakened by the swish of rain against the casement and the clatter
of the maidservant’s clogs on the stones in the yard.
She spent long afternoons in the drawing-room staring dismally out at
the sodden fields and the hills beyond, which shed sad mist. She was
left very much to her own resources; her new relations rarely visited
in bad weather.
She gave the house the benefit of her active brain, instituting all
sorts of changes which she honestly believed to be reforms. She flung a
modern, flimsy feeling of culture about the staid old place--a feeling
expressed by current magazines, superficial opinions, shallow daring.
Jethro was pleased and invigorated by her reckless dogmatic opinions,
by her dainty domestic ways. He used to watch her graceful figure flit
from room to room, used to listen to her high young voice giving
peremptory orders. She fascinated him. She was always changing, and the
women to whom he had been accustomed all his life never changed. Each
one said and did exactly what her mother had said and done before her:
to be original was to break the fifth commandment.
They sat round the great open hearth on wet, wild evenings. Gainah
would be sewing or painfully writing out recipes in a dirty copy-book.
Pamela generally had a catalogue of bulbs, a sheet of paper, and a
pencil. Nancy’s gushing, incapable enthusiasm, and Mrs. Clutton’s
practical knowledge of flower gardening had infected her. She already
knew them well enough for that. She was full of ideas for spring
bedding.
“I must have a hundred early tulips,” she would say coaxingly.
When Jethro, looking up from the local paper, returned indulgently,
“Order what you please,” she added the hundred tulips to her list with
the glee of a child.
Gainah seldom said anything. She had always been a silent woman, and
Pamela’s whirling, modern influence had petrified her altogether. The
thin white lips hardly opened except to timidly rate the two maids, who
now tossed their heads at their former tyrant. She took Pamela’s
presence passively, never commenting on anything she did. But
sometimes, when the girl looked up suddenly from the fascinating bulb
catalogue, and found those odd eyes on her, she shivered. They were so
dead--those eyes. Yet such a secret, such a terrible soul seemed to
play and lurk behind them.
Gainah never protested. Little by little she felt the scepter slip
from her powerless hand. Little by little her life lost color. Pamela
laughed at her methods, was often disgusted by her thrifty, traditional
economies. She had a superior trick of saying, “My way is the correct
one.” Or she would quote the domestic routine of her father’s house, in
the prosperous time when they lived in a detached house with a carriage
drive and stabling. She was more than a bit of snob, but Jethro knew
nothing of snobbery. He approved of all she did.
She gabbled on hygiene. She took tickets for a course of lectures on
domestic economy, driving into Liddleshorn every alternate Friday. When
she returned, she was more ardent than ever for reform. She penetrated
to the scullery, and examined the dishcloth--with a scared murmur of
microbes, because it had not been scalded in soda water and hung up in
the air to dry. She insisted on making the tea herself in a patent pot.
Once she said lightly that Gainah was trying to poison them all because
she told the cook to boil halfpence with the cabbage to make it green.
The flash in Gainah’s eye had been sinister, but Pamela did not see it.
She laughed Jethro out of his favorite supper--a loaf hot from the oven
and soaked in cider. She tried very hard to abolish supper as a
meal--wishing to call the eight-o’clock meal dinner. But here she was
stopped by the opposition of every member of the family; even Aunt
Sophy entered a diplomatic protest.
She begged Jethro to make Chalcraft wring the necks of the poultry. She
couldn’t bear the slow sounds of death. It was barbarous--the slight,
skillful slit of the knife, the long bleeding, the fluttering
“glug-glug” in the throat, growing fainter and fainter. Gainah had
always insisted on that method; she said it made the flesh white.
Gainah shut the doomed birds for twenty-four hours before death in a
coop, and made them fast, so that they might be more easily got ready
for table: Pamela went surreptitiously to the corn sack, and gave them
an extra feed before the ordeal. Gainah, in hot weather, hung meat down
the well to keep it fresh; she buried sour milk in the earth, tied up
in a muslin bag, and dug it up cream cheese. She had a theory about leg
of mutton: it should be buried in the earth for three days to make it
tender; the same might be done with an old hen. She did not approve of
eggs in a milk pudding, and never used butter in white sauce if the
milk was new and not skimmed. To waste nothing, to be lavish with
nothing--that had been her religion. The hygiene lecturer--through
Pamela, who conscientiously took notes--told her that some of her
antique tricks were not only dirty, but dangerous.
Pamela taught the cook to make bread without touching it with the hand.
She told Boyce how to milk the cows, washing his hands in an antiseptic
first. She had chemical tests for the milk, and made a rigorous
inspection of the dairy each morning. Gainah was calmly put aside as a
domestic fossil. She was openly flouted. She was told to sit by the
fire, to do nothing. Even needlework was not necessary--things could
be bought so cheaply ready-made, ready-marked even.
She was pushed aside. She must do nothing. Yet for over thirty years
she had done everything. Her life had been one long fury of immaculate
housekeeping according to her lights. She had thrown all the fierce
energy of a naturally passionate woman into her dairy and her
store-room. Love had just brushed her, then slipped away; maternity had
never been hers. Religion she regarded as a respectable duty, varied by
the clergyman coming to tea, which was a nervous trial, and meant
getting out the best china. She couldn’t write poems, or lecture, or be
an athlete; every outlet of the emotional woman was denied her by
circumstance or temperament. She had flung herself upon the altar of
good management, and now she was told that good management was not an
art--it was the merest detail in the day’s work of a truly capable
woman.
She said nothing. But there was a constant throbbing and seething in
her aching head, above the turgid eyes. If Pamela could have foreseen,
could have guessed, she might have been more temperate, more gradual.
But she was sublimely unconscious.
On those autumn nights the heavy rain drove down from the hills and
swept the sad common and beat against the thick walls of the farm. The
wind skirled across space, and the cider-press creaked and moaned.
Gainah let the press out to the villagers if they cared to make cider.
They paid her so much an hour for the use of it. This was one of her
economies.
Jethro would sit and sprawl and blink at the fire like a well-fed,
thoroughly satisfied, and sleepy dog after a day in the covers. Now and
again in the course of the evening he would get up, stretch his arms,
shake himself, fling back the doors, and look deep into the black
night. He was such a hearty, open-air being that he seemed to pant at
intervals for draughts of that strong wind down his throat, for an
angry splutter of the shot-like rain in his eyes.
When the wind blew in, Gainah, her back creaking and cold with
rheumatism at the merest draught, would say with acerbity:
“You come from Hartin’, where they have no doors.”
The rustic sarcasm was quite lost on Pamela. She regarded the old woman
as antiquated, dirty, and even slightly half-witted. All her attention
centered on Jethro.
When he walked across the room she watched him slyly. She admired him
very much. He was so big and strong; so independent. The men of her
acquaintance had always been under orders--Government clerks, and so
on. Here was a man, savage in his strength, who had never been in
bondage except to the great Earth. She admired him, but she didn’t love
him yet.
Love! She would never love him; never. She didn’t want to. She prayed
that the acrid taste of Love might never sear her lips again. And
then she thought of the prison. And the cruel wall rose up before her
blinding eyes, and her quick fingers dropped the pencil and caught
nervously at her side.
Jethro would come back to the fire and sink luxuriously into the big
horsehair-covered chair with the protecting ears. He would put out his
foot in the thick boot and touch the glowing logs. His gun was in the
corner just as he had left it when he came in tired and muddy from
pheasant shooting. Pamela was afraid of the gun, but it pleased her. It
was part of Jethro’s strength and masculinity. So were his careless
clothes, and so was his blunt Shaksperean tongue. She liked a man to be
frank, a little coarse even, when the man was Jethro. She once thought
fancifully that she wouldn’t mind being beaten by a man like that.
She already began to regard him as her own possession. She felt a
personal pride in him; the very hang of his homespun tweeds on his
tough, spare body seemed eloquent of sturdy independence.
The yellow firelight glided across the brass rosette-like heads of the
fire-dogs. They seemed to wink knowingly at every flicker. Now and
again the two hounds in the barn snarled as an infrequent foot came
slouching along the wet road, for it was always raining and blowing.
Rain, mist, and wind! These were the elements which watched over the
slow, reluctant growth of Pamela’s love for big Jethro.
Sometimes he read a paragraph from the paper to Gainah--about local
doings or people. Sometimes he would ask her advice--about a sale of
underwood or the fate of a cow. Sometimes he and Pamela would be left
alone for a moment, and then they were both shy. Neither of them forgot
that this was a time of probation. Who knew? When the rain and wind and
mist of next autumn came they might be man and wife.
Autumn grew to winter. She was happy--with a hushed dull happiness that
she wished would last forever. No anxieties, no fierce, tearing burst
of emotion, gay or sad. She was happy; satisfied with the mild
amusements of the simple family connections. They no longer irritated
her--these placid, narrow women--slow and heavy, but very useful and
harmless. She laughed at Mrs. Clutton’s extravagances, but did not
indorse them. She had become very intimate with the dark, sarcastic
woman whose husband was abroad.
She had her little excitements--skating parties, small dances,
occasionally the visit of a dramatic company to Liddleshorn. In this
way winter went. The last snow melted into a puddle; the first flowers
of March came. She was delighted with the dazzling white of the arabis.
Gainah called it snow-on-the-mountains; but Annie Jayne, who brought
her baby round in the mail-cart on sunny mornings, said that “dear
mother” had always called it March-pride.
She ran out frequently to look at the thin green spears which begun to
bristle in the borders: these were her bulbs. She spent long hours in
her new greenhouse, giving Daborn orders. He was retained exclusively
for the garden now, at her wish. There wasn’t a weed to be seen, and
every bed was raked and cleaned.
As the sun strengthened in the sky Gainah grew more silent than ever.
Spring was here, summer on the way, and she had nothing to do. Pamela
had taken the keys. The maids went to her for orders. She paid them
their wages and gave them each an evening out during the week--an
indulgence which until her coming had never been dreamt of.
Nothing to do! Not wanted! In her idle hours Gainah wandered over the
rambling house alone, going from room to room, touching things without
meaning, taking up and putting down; mumbling vaguely to herself. One
morning she put on her shabby cloth cap--an old one of Jethro’s--and
went into the garden. It was raining--a soft, warm rain, with the sun
behind it.
“Good growing weather,” she said to herself with satisfaction--and
then remembered that the garden had been taken from her.
Winter storms had made the borders draggled in spite of Daborn’s labor
and Pamela’s enthusiasm. Gainah felt, in a fumbling, wordless way, that
this garden was like the devastation of her own life. She carried a
little fork; force of habit had made her get it from the tool-shed. Now
and then, again from habit, she bent her stiff back to dig out a weed;
but there were no weeds.
The stalks of the Michaelmas daisies had been left--by Pamela’s orders,
so that the frost might not get down to the roots. Gainah viewed the
stiff clumps of brown wood with injury; _her_ rule had been to cut down
everything in November. She remembered that she had promised a bit of
white daisy to Chalcraft’s “missus” in exchange for a deep purple one
with a golden eye--her generosity took the form of barter.
She went round and round in the spraying rain. There was no wind,
simply a feeling of soft, patient dampness and melancholy in the
garden. Over the wall was the sodden, empty road, and on the horizon
the streaming, formless hills.
Her eyes spied out a few self-sown hardy plants in the neatly-raked
beds. She dropped little fragments of criticism as she went.
“The slugs have been at the ‘reckless’ plants,” she murmured
regretfully, stooping to look more closely at a clump of sickly
auricula, which seemed mostly thick stalk.
“There’s a Glory in bud already. I remember old Jethro budding the
brier. He was a good hand at budding, and it was a wet season, with the
sap running well, that year. Ah! the Glory Die! John makes a fine head
on a standard.”
She touched the yellow bud--a little pinched and small--with tender
fingers. A faint touch of red rushed into her white face.
“That green Yule when she was taken,”--she was thinking of Jethro’s
mother--“I picked a Glory full out on Christmas morning, and kept it in
water for more ’n a week. The hard frost came soon after--the hardest
for forty years. The old sow was frozen stiff in the sty, and Joan
Wadey’s boy was out digging swedes for old Farmer Scotter, and he set
down and his breeches turned into ice and burned into his flesh. I mind
that--and the Glory blooming on the shelf.”
Perhaps it was the memory of the frost and the sow who fell a victim to
it; at all events, she went round to the piggeries, taking a stick from
the bristling fagot stack on the way. It had always been one of her
recreations to stand over the sty and scratch the great rough backs of
the animals. She did it now, rubbing the stick insinuatingly up and
down, across and across, and almost fancying that the thick grunts held
meaning, and that there were appreciation, friendliness, and compassion
in the small, slitlike eyes that looked up at her.
Then, restless and idle, she went round again to the garden and stood
staring stupidly at the red, newly graveled paths and the glass of the
new greenhouse. She could see Daborn inside pricking out seedlings into
boxes.
There was a weedy patch--the one weedy patch--in a corner of the
garden. She fetched the spud and began to dig for dandelion-roots. She
had almost forgotten that she made dandelion-tea every spring and
insisted on Jethro taking a cup in the morning to clear his liver. She
took them up, transferring them from her knotted, earth-caked hand to
her apron. She meant to take them back to the house, wash them, cut
them up, and infuse them in water for a certain number of hours. But
halfway along the path she stopped blankly, a sudden thought dismaying
her. Pamela would not let her make the tea. Scalding childish tears
rose in her eyes. She felt sure she would not be allowed to make the
dandelion-tea. She went stumblingly back to the weed-grown patch and
let the roots drop in a little hill from her apron to the ground. Then
she looked up, and saw old Chalcraft, who was beginning to trench up
the farther end. He was leaning idly on his spade, watching her with
affectionate solicitude. There was a little suspicion mixed with his
compassion; your true rustic is always distrustful of what he doesn’t
understand. She, standing there idle, vacant, with a still tongue, was
a mystery. He didn’t know what blighting thing had touched and turned
her.
She stood there stupidly, dead to the familiar sounds on the farm--the
excited cluck of laying hens, two cocks crowing in rivalry, the weak
bleat of very early lambs in the fold, and the yapping of puppies in
the barn. She didn’t hear the steady break of stones in the road, nor
the song of a lark as it rose from the neighboring field.
The weedy patch had last year been sown with beet. Sparrows had eaten
it--beet on that soil being, with carrots and spinach, a chance crop.
Chalcraft was digging the weeds in and preparing to make a second
sowing of broad beans. Pamela had not yet brought her reforming
intellect to bear on the kitchen-garden; she thought vegetables very
uninteresting.
The spade was deep in the stiff soil. The piece that Chalcraft had
already turned up was wet and yellow in contrast to the hard gray of
the untouched piece. Gainah watched him closely, as if he had been a
stranger and digging was to her a new and intricate performance. She
saw his bald head: there was a red, shining wen on one side. There were
two careful patches, side by side and of a different color and stuff,
on the back of his waistcoat.
“You’ve got another patch on the back of your waistcoat, Master
Chalcraft,” she said childishly.
He spat thoughtfully, first on the palms of his hands and then into the
trench where the weeds were buried. He looked at her--looked with the
slow wonder of the aged, to whom nothing matters very much. Then he
said, with a chuckle:
“Aye! so there be! Patch side by side look neighborly, but patch upon
patch be beggarly, Mis’ Toat.”
She didn’t answer. She still stood in that wavering, uncertain way on
the other side of the trench.
“The worms in this ’ere patch is past believin’,” he said, with an
infantile slobber and chuckle, at last, stolidly chopping through the
writhing bunches.
“It must be nearly dinner-time, Master Chalcraft,” said Gainah
mechanically, with a steady glare across the trench with her pale eyes.
“Aye, that it be,” he returned rather nervously; “I’ve had mine.”
She turned and went back to the path. He stood and watched her. He was
conscious, in his slow-witted way, that some queer change had come to
her. The sun broke through the rain-cloud and touched the silver tip of
his spade and the hard red lump on his head. He bent his back again and
turned up slab after slab of sticky ground.
Gainah went round to the front of the house. She had a bed of lilies of
the valley beneath the umbrella yew. She stooped down behind the wall
of somber green and saw the tender leaves uncurling. One root already
had a cluster of snowy buds. Then, as she stooped, she heard a
voice--the high, imperious voice of Pamela. Looking through the yew,
she saw her standing by the wall with Jethro. She was talking very
fast, moving impetuously now and then, throwing out her firm white
hands, and pointing eagerly.
“It would be the simplest thing in the world. Oh, you must do
it--_please_. Then the house would look like Turle. You take away the
gate and build the wall along--so. Then you take up those horrid
cabbages.” She threw a look of intolerance at the leggy stalks of
Brussels sprouts which were thickly covered with widely opened
miniature cabbages.
“Chalcraft likes this patch. It is the richest in the garden, so he
says. In June the old man will dibble in his cauliflowers; they want a
rich soil.”
“They’ll grow anywhere; ground is ground,” she cried, with Cockney
superiority. “You are too indulgent to Chalcraft; he and Gainah are
past work. They should be pensioned off. She might be allowed to come
to dinner on Sundays.”
“She has been a mother to me.”
Gainah, behind the yew, her head furtively poked forward, saw the girl
look at him--a look that said plainly enough:
“And shall not I be your wife? Doesn’t a man leave all and cleave to
his wife?”
The elder woman’s hands, rubbed over with wet mold which was drying and
caking, crossed convulsively on her chest. This was not new to
her--this comedy of love. She had played it, too, with something less
of fancy. She knew what was coming. She waited, sick at heart, for the
first kiss. She nearly fell upon the half-opened leaves of the young
lilies when Jethro dropped his massive head and pointed his lips to
Pamela’s. Her fingers lost their last hold of the domestic scepter when
she heard the quick, liquid chirrup of his kiss on the firm scarlet
flesh.