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HERITAGE
“_I was born, and learned myne English in Kente,
in the Weald, where English is spoken broad and
rude._”
WILLIAM CAXTON.
HERITAGE
BY
V. SACKVILLE WEST
[Illustration: NEW ^GD^H YORK]
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1919,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MY MOTHER
_Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam,
Et super arboribus, Cæsar dum magnus ad altum
Fulminat Euphraten bello:
Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque juventa,
Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HERITAGE
PART I
I
Two years of my life were spent in a rough gray village of the
Apennines; a shaggy village, tilted perilously up the side of the hill;
a rambling village, too incoherent to form a single perspectived street,
but which revolved around, or, rather, above and below, a little piazza
warm with present sun, though grim with unknown, conjectured violence in
the past. Here stood the massive civic palace, ancient and forbidding,
with its tower poised and tremulous in the evening sky; and here the
church, with its marble pietà, the work, it was said, of Mino da
Fiesole. A mountain torrent poured down the village, a wild little storm
of water, brown and white, spanned by a bridge, which rose abruptly to a
peak, and as abruptly descended. In the evenings the youth of the
village drifted towards the bridge, gossiped there, sang a snatch of
song, or indolently fished. In the silent midday, stretched at length on
the flat stone parapet, they slept....
The village was called Sampiero della Vigna Vecchia.
If I dwell thus upon its characteristics, it is from lingering affection
and melancholy memories. My sentiment is personal; irrelevant to my
present purpose. I resume:—
In this village—and it is for this reason that the village started up so
irrepressibly in my thoughts—I had as a companion a man named Malory.
Like me, he was there to study Italian. We were not friends; we lodged
in the same house, and a certain degree of intimacy had thereby
necessarily forced itself upon us; but we were not friends. I cannot
tell you why. No quarrel stood between us. I liked him; I believe he
liked me. But we were each conscious that our last day in Sampiero would
also be the last day we spent together. No pleasant anticipation of
continued friendship in our own country came to sweeten our student days
in Italy.
Yet for one week in those two years Malory and I were linked by the
thread of a story he told me, sitting out under a clump of stone-pines
overlooking the village. It linked us, indeed, not for that week alone,
but, though interruptedly and at long intervals, for many years out of
our lives. Neither of us foresaw at the time the far-reaching sequel of
his confidences. He, when he told me the story, thought that he was
telling me a completed thing, an incident revived in its entirety out of
the past; I, when I later went to investigate for myself, went with no
thought of continuance; and finally, I, when I departed, did so in the
belief that the ultimate word was spoken. Our error, I suppose, arose
from our delusion that in this affair, which we considered peculiarly
our own, we held in some measure the levers of control. Our conceit, I
see it now, was absurd. We were dealing with a force capricious,
incalculable, surprising, a force that lurked at the roots of nature,
baffling alike the onlooker and the subject whose vagaries it prompted.
I should like to explain here that those who look for facts and events
as the central points of significance in a tale, will be disappointed.
On the other hand, I may fall upon an audience which, like myself,
contend that the vitality of human beings is to be judged less by their
achievement than by their endeavour, by the force of their emotion
rather than by their success; if this is my lot I shall be fortunate.
Indeed, my difficulty throughout has been that I laboured with stones
too heavy for my strength, and tried to pierce through veils too opaque
for my feeble eyes. Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind
it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work, which none have rightly
understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers.
It was less of a story that Malory told me, than a quiet meditative
reminiscence, and he wove into it a great deal which, I begin to
suspect, as I think over it, without extracting from my granary of words
and impressions any very definite image, was little more than the
fleeting phantom of his own personality. I could wish that fate had been
a little kinder to me in regard to Malory. I am sure now that he was a
man in whom I could have rejoiced as a friend.
When I think of him now, he stands for me as the type of the theorist,
who, when confronted with realities, strays helplessly from the road. He
had theories about love, but he passed love by unseen; theories about
humour, but was himself an essentially unhumorous man; theories about
friendship between men, but was himself the loneliest being upon earth.
At the same time, I sometimes think that he had something akin to
greatness in him; a wide horizon, and a generous sweep of mind. But I
may be mistaking mere earnestness for force, and in any case I had
better let the man speak for himself.
He said to me as we smoked, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and as he
spoke he indicated with his pipe stem a broad half-circle, and I had a
glimpse of flattened country lying in such a half-circle beneath my
view.
His words gave me a strong emotional shock; from those gaunt mountains,
that clattering stream, I was suddenly projected into a world of
apple-blossom and other delicate things. The mountains vanished; the
herd of goats, which moved near us cropping at the scant but faintly
aromatic grass of the hill-side, vanished; and in their place stood
placid cows, slowly chewing the cud in lush English meadows.
“I fancied once that I would take up farming as a profession,” said
Malory. “I have touched and dropped many occupations in my life,” and I
realised then that never before in the now eighteen months of our
acquaintance had he made to me a remark even so remotely personal. “Many
occupations, that have all fallen from me, or I from them. I am an
inconstant man, knowing that no love can hold me long. Perhaps that is
one of the reasons why I have never married. Such people should not
marry, or, if they do, should at least choose a partner as inconstant as
themselves. When I say inconstant, I mean of course the temperamentally,
not the accidentally, inconstant. It is a new kind of eugenics, a sort
of moral eugenics.
“So at one period of my life I had a fancy that I would try my hand at
farming. I think perhaps it was one of my most successful experiments. I
have a great love for the country people; they are to me like the oaks
of the land, enduring and indigenous, beautiful with the beauty of
strong, deep-rooted things, without intention of change. I love in them
the store of country knowledge which they distil as resin from a pine,
in natural order, with the revolving seasons. I love the unconsciousness
of them, as they move unheeding, bent only on the practical business of
their craft. I revere the simplicity of their traditional ideals. Above
all, I envy them the balance and the stability of their lives.”
I wasn’t very much surprised; I had always thought him a dreamy,
sensitive sort of fellow. I said,—
“But you surely don’t want to change with them?”
Malory smiled.
“Don’t I? Well, perhaps I don’t. I should have to give up my sense of
wonderment, for they have none. They may be poems, but they are not
poets. The people among whom I lived were true yeomen; they and their
forefathers had held the house and tilled the land for two hundred and
fifty years or more, since the Puritan founder of their race had
received the grant from, so tradition said, the hands of Cromwell in
person. Since the days of that grim Ironside, one son at least in the
family had been named Oliver.
“The house was partly built of lath and plaster and partly of that gray
stone called Kentish rag, which must have been, I used to reflect with
satisfaction, hewn out of the very land on which the house was set. I
remember how the thought pleased me, that no exotic importation had gone
to the making of that English, English whole. No brilliant colour in
that dun monochrome, save one, of which I will tell you presently. Have
patience, for the leisure of those days comes stealing once more over
me, when haste was a stranger, and men took upon them the unhurrying
calm of their beasts.
“After the fashion of such homes, the house stood back from a narrow
lane; a low stone wall formed a kind of forecourt, which was filled with
flowers, and a flagged path bordered with lavender lay stretched from
the little swing-gate to the door. The steps were rounded with the
constant passing of many feet. The eaves were wide, and in them the
martins nested year after year; the steep tiled roofs, red-brown with
age, and gold-spattered with stonecrops, rose sharply up to the
chimney-stacks. You have seen it all a hundred times. Do you know how
such houses crouch down into their hollows? So near, so near to the warm
earth. Earth! there’s nothing like it; lying on it, being close to it,
smelling it, and smelling all the country smells as well, not
honeysuckle and roses, but the clean, acrid smell of animals, horses,
dogs, and cattle, and the smell of ripe fruit, and of cut hay.
“And there’s something of the Noah’s Ark about a farm; there’s Mr. Noah,
Mrs. Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and the animals, because there’s
nothing in the world more like the familiar wooden figures of our
childhood than the domestic animals. If you had never seen a cow before,
gaunt and unwieldy, what a preposterous beast you would think it. Also a
sheep—the living sheep is, if anything, even more like the woolly toy
than the woolly toy is like the living sheep. And they all fit in so
neatly, so warmly, just like the Noah’s Ark. However, I won’t labour the
point....
“This house of which I am telling you was nearer to the earth than most;
it had, in fact, subsided right down into it, sinking from north to
south with the settling of the clay, and the resultant appearance of
established comfort was greater than I can describe to you. The
irregularity of the building was the more apparent by reason of the oak
beams, which should have been horizontal, but which actually sloped at a
considerable angle. I found, after I had lived there no more than a
couple of days, that one adopted this architectural irregularity into
one’s scheme of life; the furniture was propped up by blocks of wood on
the south side, and I learnt not to drop round objects on to my floor,
knowing that if I did so they would roll speedily out of reach. For the
same reason, all the children of the house, in this generation as no
doubt in many generations past, had made their first uncertain steps out
in the garden before they climbed the hill or toppled down the incline
of their mother’s room.
“I paused, on the evening of my arrival, before my future home. I said
to myself, here I shall live for one, two, three, possibly four, years;
how familiar will be that unfamiliar gate; I arrive with curiosity, I
shall leave, I hope, with regret. And I foresaw myself leaving, and my
eyes travelling yearningly over the house and the little garden, which
in a moment the bend of the lane would hide from me for ever. I say for
ever, for I would not court the disillusion of returning to a once happy
home. Then, as my eyes began to sting with the prophetic sorrow of
departure, I remembered that my one, two, three, or possibly four, years
were before and not behind me; so, amused at my own sensibility, I
pushed open the swing-gate and went in.
“The house door opened to my knock. I stood on the threshold—I stand
there now in spirit. Have you experienced the thrill of excitement which
overcomes one when one stands on the threshold of new friendship, new
intimacy? such a thrill as overcame me now as I stood, literally and
figuratively, in the doorway of the Pennistans’ home. I scanned the
faces which were raised towards me, faces which were to me then as
masks, or as books written in a language I could not read, but which
would speedily become open and speaking; no longer the disguise, but the
revelation of the human passion which lay behind. The facts of life at
Pennistans’ I could foresee, but not the life of the spirit, the mazy
windings of mutual relation, the circumstance of individual being. These
people were anonymous to me in their spirits as in their names.
“You might fare far before you came upon a better-favoured family. I was
in the low, red-tiled kitchen; they were seated at their supper round a
central table, the father, the mother, three sons, and the daughter
Nancy. Amos Pennistan had the bearing, the gravity, and the beard of an
apostle; I never saw a nobler looking man; he had his coat off, and his
scarlet braces marked his shirt like a slash of blood. His sons, as they
raised their heads to me from their bread and porridge, cast their eyes
over my city-bred frame, much as calves in a field raise their heads to
stare at the passer-by over the hedge, and I felt myself in the presence
of young, indifferent animals.
“An old, old woman was sitting over the fire. No mention of her had been
made in our correspondence, nor did I then know who she was. Yet had it
not been for her, and for the strange flame she had introduced into this
English home, the story I am endeavouring to tell you might never have
sprung up out of the grayness of commonplace.
“The faintest smell floated about the room, and as I stood in slight
bewilderment looking round I wondered what it could be; it was oddly
familiar; it transported me, by one of those side-slips of the brain,
away from England, and though the vision was too dim and transitory for
me to crystallise it into a definite picture, I dreamed myself for a
second in a narrow street between close, towering houses; yoked bullocks
were there somewhere, and the clamour of a Latin city. I have gazed at a
rainbow, and fancied I caught a violet ribbon between the red and the
blue; gazed again, and it was gone; so with my present illusion. Then I
saw that the old woman was fingering something by the fire, and in my
interest I looked, and made out a row of chestnuts on the rail; one of
them cracked and spat, falling on to the hearth, where she retrieved it
with the tongs and set it on the rail again to roast.
“The bullock-like sons took no notice of me beyond their first
dispassionate glance, but Mrs. Pennistan in her buxom, and Amos in his
reticent, fashion gave me an hospitable welcome. I was strongly
conscious of the taciturn sons, who, after a grudging shuffle—a
concession, I suppose, to my quality as a stranger—returned to their
meal in uninterested silence. I was abashed by the contempt of the young
men. It was a relief to me when one of them pushed aside his bowl and
rose, saying, ‘I’ll be seeing to the cattle, father.’
“Amos replied, ‘Ay, do, and see to the window in the hovel; remember
it’s shaky on the hinge.’ I had a sudden sense of intimacy: a day, a
week, and I too should know the shaky hinge, the abiding place of tools,
the peculiarities of the piggery.
“I wandered out. A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on
a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow
melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the
evening. I felt infinitely at peace. I reflected with a deep
satisfaction that no soul in London knew my address. My bank, my
solicitors, would be extremely annoyed when they discovered that they
had mislaid me. To me there was a certain satisfaction in that thought
also.”
“On the following morning,” continued Malory, “I rose early. I went out.
The freshness of this Kentish morning was a thing new to me. The ground,
the air, were wet with dew; gossamer was over all the grass and hedges,
shreds of gossamer linking bramble to bramble, perfect spiders’ webs of
gossamer, and a veil of gossamer seemed to hang between the earth and
the sun. The grass in the field was gray with wet. A darker trail across
it showed me where the cattle had passed, as though some phantom sweeper
had swept with a giant broom against the pile of a velvet carpet. The
peculiar light of sunrise still clung about the land.”
For a moment Malory ceased speaking, and the goats, the barren
mountains, the impetuous torrent, rushed again into my vision like a
wrong magic-lantern slide thrown suddenly, and in error, upon the
screen. Then as his voice resumed I saw once more the hedges, the clump
of oaks, and the darker trail where the cattle had passed across the
field.
“I was at a loss,” said Malory, “to know how to employ my morning, and
regretted my stipulation that my training should not begin until the
following day. I wished for a pitchfork in my hand, that I might carry
the crisp bracken for bedding into the empty stalls. I heard somewhere a
girl’s voice singing; the voice, I later discovered, of Nancy, upraised
in a then popular song which began, ‘Oh, I do love to be beside the
sea-side,’ and so often subsequently did I hear this song that it is for
ever associated in my mind with Nancy. I could hear somewhere also the
clank of harness, and presently one of the sons came from the stable,
sitting sideways upon a great shire horse and followed by two other
horses; they passed me by with the heavy, swinging gait of elephants,
out into the lane where they disappeared, leaving me to my loneliness. I
felt that the great fat ball of the world was rolling, rolling in the
limpidity of the morning, and that I alone had given no helping push.
“I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner
of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon
a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across
her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I
felt myself—do not misunderstand me—suddenly and poignantly conscious of
her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve
of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had
stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a
gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms,
and other children clinging about her skirts.”
I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had
hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords
of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened.
“You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions
so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received
now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another.
I knew, I _knew_,” said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though
driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, “that here
stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common,
she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless
something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her
future.”
As he spoke I thought that, by the look on his face, he was again
receiving what he described as an impression so powerful as to amount to
an emotion. And he communicated this emotion to me, so that I felt his
prophecy to be a true one, and that his story would henceforward cease
to be a mere story and would become a simple unwinding off the spool of
inevitable truth.
He went on,—
“Our silence of course couldn’t endure for ever. The girl herself seemed
conscious of this, for a smile, not unfriendly, came to her lips, and
she said quite simply,—
“‘How you startled me! Good-morning.’
“‘I am very sorry,’ I said. ‘Can’t I make up for it by carrying those
buckets for you?’
“‘Oh, they’re nothing with the yoke,’ she answered.
“Here old Amos came round the corner, walking clumsily on the cobbles
with his hobnailed boots. He looked surprised to find me standing with
the dairymaid, a little group of two.
“‘Morning!’ he cried very heartily to me. ‘You’re out betimes. Fine day,
sir, fine day, fine day. Well, my girl, done with the cows?’
“‘I’m on my way to the dairy, dad,’ she said.
“I asked if I might come with her.
“‘Ay, go with Ruth,’ said Amos, ‘she’ll show you round,’ and he went
off, evidently glad to have shifted the responsibility of my morning’s
entertainment.
“Ruth refused to let me carry the buckets, and by the time we reached
the dairy—one of the pleasantest places I ever was in, clean and bright
as a yacht—their weight had brought a warm flush of colour to her
cheeks. Great flat pans of milk stood on gray slate slabs, covered over
with filmy butter-muslin; in one corner was fixed a sink, and in another
corner a machine which I learnt was called the separator.
“‘Father’s very proud of this,’ said my companion, ‘none of the other
farms round here have got one.’
“I sat on the central table watching her as she moved about her
business; she didn’t take very much notice of me, and I was at liberty
to observe her, noting her practised efficiency in handling the pans and
cans of milk; noting, too, her dark, un-English beauty, un-English not
so much, as you might think, owing to the swarthiness of her complexion,
as to something subtly tender in the curve of her features and the swell
of her forearm. She hummed to herself as she worked. I asked her whether
the evening did not find her weary.
“‘One’s glad to get to bed,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone, adding,
‘but it’s all right unless one’s queer.’
“‘Can’t you take a day off, being on your father’s farm?’
“‘Beasts have to be fed, queer or no queer,’ she replied.
“The milk was now ready in shining cans, and going to the door she
shouted,—
“‘Sid!’
“A voice calling in answer was followed by one of the sons. Neither
brother nor sister spoke, while the young man trundled away the cans
successively; I heard them bumping on the cobbles, and bumping more
loudly as, presumably, he lifted them into a cart. Ruth had turned to
wiping up the dairy.
“‘Where is he going with the cans?’ I asked.
“‘Milk-round,’ she answered laconically.
* * * * *
“That was the first time I saw her,” he added. “The second time was in
full midday, and she was gleaning in a stubble-field; yes; her name was
Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field,
throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it
back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when,
laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and
skilfully into a sheaf. The occupation seemed wholly suitable. Although
her head was not covered by a coloured handkerchief, but hidden by a
linen sunbonnet, she reminded me of the peasant women labouring in the
fields of other lands than ours. I do not know whether, in the light of
my present wisdom, I exaggerate the impression of those early days. I
think that perhaps at first, imbued as I was with the idea of the
completely English character of my surroundings, I remained insensible
to the flaw which presently became so self-evident in the harmony of my
preconceived picture.
“Tiny things occurred, which I noted at the time and cast aside on the
scrap-heap of my observation, and which later I retrieved and strung
together in their coherent order. As who should come upon the pieces of
a child’s puzzle strewn here and there upon his path.
“Ruth, my instructress and companion, I saw going about her work without
haste, almost without interest. She was kind to the animals in her care
after an indifferent, sleepy fashion, more from habit and upbringing
than from a natural benevolence. She brought no enthusiasm to any of her
undertakings. Her tasks were performed conscientiously, but by rote. Yet
one day, when the sheep-dog happened to be in her path, I saw her kick
out at it in the belly with sudden and unbridled vehemence.
“I was first really startled by the appearance of Rawdon Westmacott. In
the big, shadowy, draughty barn I was cutting chaff for the horses,
while Ruth sat near by on a truss of straw, trying to mend a
bridle-strap with string. I had then been at Pennistans’ about a week.
The wide doors of the barn were open, letting in a great square of
dust-moted sunlight, and in this square a score of Leghorn hens and
cockerels moved picking at the scattered chaff, daintily pricking on
their spindly feet, snowy white and coral crested. A shadow fell across
the floor. Ruth and I raised our heads. A young man leant against the
side of the door, a tall young man in riding breeches, with a dull red
stock twisted round his throat, smacking at his leathern gaiters with a
riding whip he held in his hand. The rein was over his arm, and his
horse, lowering his head, snuffed breezily at the chaff blown out into
the yard.
“‘You’re back, then?’ said Ruth.
“‘Ay,’ said the young man, looking suspiciously at me, and I caught the
slightest jerk of the head and interrogative crinkle of the forehead by
which he required an explanation.
“‘This is my cousin, Rawdon Westmacott, Mr. Malory,’ Ruth said.
“The young man flicked his whip up to his cap, and then dismissed me
from his interest.
“‘Coming out, Ruth?’ he asked.
“She pouted her indecision.
“‘You shall have a ride,’ he suggested.
“‘No, thanks.’
“‘Well, walk a bit of the way home with me, anyhow.’
“‘I don’t know that I’m so very keen.’
“‘Oh, come on, Ruthie, after I’ve ridden straight over here to see you;
thrown my bag into the house, and come straight away to you, without a
look into one single thing at home.’
“‘It’d be better for things if you did look into them a bit more,
Rawdon.’
“Overcome by the perversity of women, he said again,—
“‘Come on, Ruthie.’
“She rose slowly, and, untying the apron of sacking which she wore over
her skirt, she stepped out into the sunshine. For a flash I saw them
standing there together, and I saw Rawdon Westmacott as he ever after
appeared to me: a Bedouin in corduroy, with a thin, fierce face, the
grace of an antelope, and the wildness of a hawk; a creature captured
either in the desert or from the woods. Strange product for the English
countryside! Then they were gone, and the horse, turning, followed the
tug on the rein.
* * * * *
“I date from that moment my awakening to a state of affairs less simple
than I had imagined. I saw Ruth again with Westmacott, and learnt with a
little shock that here was not merely an idle, rural, or cousinly
flirtation. The man’s blood was crazy for her.
“And so I became aware of the existence of some element I could not
reconcile with my surroundings, some unseen presence which would jerk me
away abruptly to the sensation that I was in the midst of a foreign
encampment; was it Biblical? was it Arab? troubled was I and puzzled; I
tried to dismiss the fancy, but it returned; I even appealed to various
of the Pennistans for enlightenment, but they stared at me blankly.
“Yes, I tried to dismiss it, and to brush aside the haze of mystery as
one brushes aside the smoke of a cigarette. And I could not succeed. How
trivial, how easily ignored are facts, when one’s quarrel is with the
enigma of force at the heart of things! It isn’t often in this civilised
life of ours that one comes into contact with it; one’s business lies
mostly with men and women whose whole system of philosophy is inimical
to natural, inconvenient impulse. It obeys us as a rule, like a tame
lion doing its tricks for the lion-tamer. A terrifying thought truly,
that we are shut up for life in a cage with a wild beast that may at any
moment throw off its docility to leap upon us! We taunt it, we provoke
it, we tweak its tail, we take every advantage of its forbearance; then
when the day comes for it to turn on us, we cry out, and try to get away
into a corner. At least let us do it the honour to recognise its roar of
warning, as I did then, though I was as surprised and disquieted as I
dare say you would have been, at meeting a living lion in the woods of
Kent.
“I could compare it to many other things, but principally I think I felt
it as a ghost that peeped out at me from over innocent shoulders. Am I
mixing my metaphors? You see, it was so vague, so elusive, that it
seemed to combine all the bogeys of one’s childhood. Something we don’t
understand; that is what frightens us, from the child alone in the dark
to the old man picking at the sheets on his deathbed. Perhaps you think
I am exaggerating. Certainly my apprehension was a very indefinite one,
at most it was a dim vision of possibilities unnamed, it wasn’t even a
sense of the imminence of crisis, much less the imminence of tragedy.
And yet ... I don’t know. I still believe that tragedy was there
somewhere, perhaps only on the horizon, and that the merest chance alone
served to avert it. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely averted. One never knows;
one only sees with one’s clumsy eyes. One sees the dead body, but never
the dead soul. The whole story is, to me, unsatisfactory; I often wonder
whether there is a conclusion somewhere, that either I have missed, or
that hasn’t yet been published by the greatest of story-tellers.
“Anyway, all this is too fanciful, and I have inadvertently wandered
into an inner circle of speculation, I mean soul-speculation, when I
really meant to be concerned with the outer circle only.
“I could lay my hand on nothing more definite than the appearance,
certainly unusual, of Ruth or of Westmacott; other trifles were so
absurd that I scorned to dwell on them in my mind, the red braces of
Amos and that faint scent of roasting chestnuts in the kitchen under the
hands of Amos’s grandmother. Whenever I went into the kitchen I met that
scent, and heard the indefinite mumble of the old woman’s toothless
mouth, and the smell of the chestnuts floated out, too, into the narrow
entrance-passage and up the steep stairs which led to the rooms above. I
associate it always now with a narrow passage, rather dark; sloping
ceilings; and rooms where the pictures could be hung on the south wall
only, because of the crookedness of the house. In the parlour, which
balanced the kitchen, but was never used, was an old-fashioned
oil-painting of a soldier with whiskers and a tightly-buttoned uniform,
and this painting swung out from the north wall with a space of perhaps
six inches between the wall and the bottom of the frame.”
II
On the morrow we again took our pipes to the clump of pines, and Malory
began, in his drowsy, meditative voice, to tell his story from where he
had left off.
“I hope you are by now as curious as I was to discover the secret of the
Pennistan quality. The family were evidently unconscious that there was
any secret to discover. They thought no more of themselves than they did
of their blue surrounding hills, though in relation to the weather they
considered their blue hills a good deal, and Amos taught me one evening
that too great a clearness was not to be desired; the row of poplars
over towards Penshurst should be slightly obscured, misty; and if it was
so, and if the haze hung over Crowborough Beacon, I might safely leave
the yearling calves out in the field all night. I should look also for a
heavy dew upon the ground, which would predict a fine day besides
bringing out the mushrooms.
“We were standing in the cross-roads, where the white finger-post said,
‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ and Amos had corrected my pronunciation
from Lee to Lye, and from _Cow_den to Cow_den_. I know no greater joy
than returning to the heart of a beloved country by road, and seeing the
names on the finger-posts change from the unfamiliar to the familiar,
passing through stages of acquaintance to friendship, and from
friendship into intimacy. Half the secret of love lies in intimacy,
whereby love gains in tenderness what it loses in mystery, and is not
the poorer by the bargain.
“Mrs. Pennistan came out to join us, and I took the opportunity of
asking her whether I might use a certain cupboard for my clothes, as I
was pressed for room. She replied,—
“‘Granny had that cupboard, but she’s surely past using it now, so
anything of hers you find in it, hang out over the bannister, and I’ll
pack it away in a box.’
“Out of this little material circumstance I obtained my explanation; I
went in, leaving husband and wife strolling in the road, for it was
Sunday evening, and on their Sunday evening they clung to their hour of
leisure. I went in, past the chestnuts, up the stairs, and at the top of
the stairs I opened the cupboard door, and explored with my hand to
discover whether the recess was empty. It was not, so I fetched my
candle in its blue tin candlestick, and lifted out the garments one by
one; they were three in number.
“I carried them carefully into my room, with no intention of examining
them, but as I laid them on the bed their texture and fashion arrested
me. A smell came from them, faded and far away. I held them up one by
one: a heavily fringed shawl of Spanish make, a black skirt with many
flounces, a tiny satin bodice that would barely, I thought, fit a child.
As I unrolled this last, something fell from it: a pair of old, pink
shoes, tiny shoes, heelless shoes,—the shoes of a ballet dancer.
“As I turned over these relics I heard some one moving in the passage
below, and going to the top of the stairs I called to Ruth. She came up,
then seeing the shoes in my hands she gave an exclamation of surprise.
“‘Are these yours?’ I asked.
“‘Mine! no; why, look here,’ and she held a shoe against her foot,
which, although small, outstripped the shoe in width and length.
‘They’re granny’s, I reckon,’ she added.
“Then she took up the bodice and examined it critically.
“‘It’s a bit rotten, of course,’ she remarked, pulling cautiously at the
stuff, ‘but where’d you buy satin now to last as well as that? and
bought abroad, too.’
“The subtlest inflection of resentment was in her tone.
“‘Here, give them to me,’ she said. ‘Granny can’t want these old rags,
messing up the house. There’s little enough cupboard room anyhow. I’ll
put the shawl away up in the attic, for there’s wear in it yet, but the
rest can go on the midden.’
“I detained her.
“‘Tell me first, how comes your grandmother to have these things?’
“She was surprised at my ignorance.
“‘To start with, she’s father’s grandmother, not mine. She’s so old, I
forget her mostly.... She’s ninety-six, ninety-seven come Christmas.
We’re wondering if she’ll last to a hundred.’
“How callous she was! Triply callous, I thought, because of her own
youth, because of her great-grandmother’s extreme age, and because of
the natural philosophic indifference of her class towards life and
death.
“‘She was a dancer, once, you know,’ she went on. ‘Used to dance on the
stage, and my great-grandfather found her there, and married her. What a
tiny little thing she must have been, just look at this,’ and she held
the little bodice across her own breast with a gay laugh, like a child
trying to put on the clothes of its biggest doll.
“Then she held the skirt against her slender hips to show me how short
it was, and pointed her foot in an instinctive dance position.
“She was holding up the bodice by tucking it under her chin. I looked at
her, and she blushed, and convinced me that no woman ever stands
altogether innocent of coquetry before any man.
“‘Tell me more about your grandmother,’ I said.
“‘It’s so long ago,’ she replied. ‘She had two children, and one was my
father’s father, and the other was Rawdon Westmacott’s mother. You know
my cousin Rawdon?’
“‘I know him,’ I said. ‘So you and he are of different generations,
though there’s not more than twelve years between you in age.’
“‘Yes, that’s so. Now I come to think of it, there’s the old book in the
parlour you might like to read, a diary or something, kept by my
great-grandfather. It’s only an old thing; I’ve never looked on it
myself, but I’ve heard father talk of it. Shall I get it for you?’
“I begged that she would do so, and she ran downstairs, and returned
with a little tartan-covered volume in her hand.
“‘Father sets great store by it,’ she said hesitatingly, as she gave it
up to me.
“‘He won’t object to my reading it?’
“‘Oh, no, if you’ve a mind.’
“She evidently looked down on me a good deal for my interest in the
old-fashioned volume.
“Left alone, I drew my chair near to the chest of drawers, whereon I had
set the blue candlestick; I had two hours before me, and I felt as an
explorer might feel on the verge of a new country. Here was a document
written by a dead hand, an intimate document, private property, not
edited and re-edited, but quietly owned by dignified and unassuming
descendants, who would neither cheapen nor profane by giving the dead
man’s confidence to the world. It was probable that no intelligently
interested eyes but mine would ever read it. I hesitated for an
appreciable time before I opened the diary, and in that pause my eyes
wandered from the little book to the little garments on the bed, and I
fancied that these inanimate objects, made animate by the spirit of
their respective owners, called to one another yearningly across the
silence of my room.
“When I at last opened the diary I found myself carried straight away
into an unanticipated world. The man, whose name and rank, ‘Oliver
Pennistan, captain, Dragoons,’ I read on the fly-leaf, was writing in
Spain. His first entry was dated Madrid, 1830. He wrote without
conscious art, and indeed his daily jottings seemed to me solely the
occupation of a lonely evening; at one moment he was annoyed because he
had been given _pan de municion_, which was hard, black, and uneatable,
instead of _pan de candeal_; at another, he had been overcharged by his
landlord, and feared he must exchange into a different posada.
“He was innocent of literary artifice, this Pepys of nineteenth century
Spain, yet the natural, matter of fact, unstudied candour of his daily
biography brought the preposterous age before me, crimped and grotesque,
the Spain of Goya. Eighteen-thirty, an incredible period in any country,
attained in Spain an incredibility which turned it into a caricature of
itself. Oliver Pennistan, I knew, wore whiskers and an eyeglass; tight,
straight, high military trousers; drawled; guffawed; said ‘Egad.’ As for
the women of his acquaintance, I knew them to be frizzed and fuzzed,
with faces mauve beneath their powder, and hearts sick with sentiment
beneath their tight bodices. I did not know what had taken Oliver
Pennistan to Spain, but I supposed that he was a younger son, as I had
heard Amos boast of the dozen boys of his grandfather’s generation.
“Still I did not connect his Spanish experiences with the Pennistans I
knew. I read the Madrid portion of his diary without impatience, because
I was greatly entertained by the subtle flavour of the age which I found
therein, but when he came to packing his valise preparatory for a trip
to Cadiz, I fluttered the pages over, looking for his return to England.
I wanted to get to the dancer who now sat in the room below mine
roasting chestnuts over the fire. I was disappointed to see that the
diary never accompanied him to England, and I began to fear that his
courtship and marriage would not be revealed to me.
“‘Leaving Madrid with regret,’ ran the diary, ‘but have the benefit of
agreeable society on the road. Hope to cover thirty miles to the day. I
have a broad sash to keep off the colic, and an amulet from a fair
friend to keep off the _evil eye_.’
“Thus equipped, the dragoon rode to Cadiz, and I must do him the justice
to say that he looked on the country he rode through with an
appreciative eye, noting the scent of the orange-blossom which assailed
him as he entered Andalusia, and the grandeur of the rocky passes which
connect northern and southern Spain. At the same time, he kept that nice
sense of proportion by which tolerable food and lodging remains more
important to the traveller than beauty of scenery. He noted also the
superior attractions of the Andalusian women, ‘little, and dark, and for
the most part fat, but with twinkling eyes and a smile more _friendly_,
if also more _covert_, than their sisters of Madrid.’
“I turned over the pages again at this point, and chanced at last upon a
phrase which convinced me that he had met his love. Then the book fell
from my hand, and I lost myself in a reverie, working my way laboriously
through a maze of preconception to the fact that this dancer of whom I
had heard from Ruth was not an English dancer, but a Spanish dancer, and
as this fact broke like daylight upon me I realised that I had bored
into the heart of my mystery. Moments of revelation are intrinsically
dramatic things, when a new knowledge, irrevocable, undisputable, comes
to dwell in the mind. All previous habitants have to readjust themselves
to make room for the stranger. A great shuffling and stampeding took
place now in my brain, but I found that, far from experiencing
discomfort or difficulty in accommodating themselves to their new
conditions, my prejudices jumped briskly round and presented themselves
in their true shape beneath the searching glare of the revelation.
“I read on eagerly, the shadow of disappointment lifting from me. Oliver
Pennistan lodged at an inn which provided him with excellent Valdepeñas;
his business in Cadiz was somehow connected with wine, and many
technical jottings followed, put in as a guide to his memory; I did not
understand all his abbreviations, but was nevertheless impressed by his
knowledge of sherry. His business took him most of the day. In the
evenings he was a free man, and spent his time in the theatre; probably
it was here that he first saw his dancer, for at about this time her
name began to appear in the diary: ‘To the fight with Concha,’ or ‘With
Concha to the merry-go-round.’ There were also references to the
‘Egyptians,’ who were Concha’s people, and the Goya world of Madrid was
replaced by a society of Bohemians—bull fighters, mountebanks, acrobats,
hunchbacks, thieves, fortune tellers, all the riff-raff of the gipsy
quarter.
“I took this as a miniature allegory, for in the Prado at Madrid the
Goya portraits of ladies and the Royal family hang upstairs, while in a
basement, typical of the underworld into which Oliver Pennistan had now
plunged, hang his series of extraordinary cartoons, caricatures,
nightmares, peopled with obscene dwarfs and monstrous parasites.
“How remote the England of his boyhood must have seemed to him, his
eleven brothers, the hills, the hawthorn, the farm-buildings; if he saw
them at all, it must have been as at the end of a long avenue. I looked
up, out of my window across the sleeping fields, and returned again to
the pages yet hot and quivering with life, written in an ill-lighted
posada at Cadiz.
“In the same way that, without a descriptive word, he had contrived to
give me an unmistakable impression of the Spain of his day, he now gave
me a portrait of the dancer, passionate but strangely chaste, scornful
of men, but yielding her heart to him while she withheld her body. He
gave me a picture also of his own love, flaming suddenly out of a night
of indifference, overwhelming him and sweeping aside his reason,
determining him to make a wife of the gipsy he would more naturally have
desired as a passing love. I was intimate with his intention, yet he
never departed from his catalogue of facts and doings; stay, once he
departed from it to say, ‘Her head sleek as a berry, her little teeth
white as nuts.’ His one description.... I looked across at the little
silent heap of garments on my bed, that had clasped the fragile being he
revered with so much tenderness.
“‘To the bull-ring with Concha,’ he noted on one occasion. ‘Not to the
spectacle, but to the driving in from the corral. Miura bulls, black and
small, but agile more than most. They are driven in through the streets
in the small hours of morning, together with the tame cattle, by men on
horses. These men wear the bolero and high, peaked hat, and carry a long
pole armed with an iron point. I would have ridden, but she dissuaded
me. We waited on a balcony above a yard. A long wait, but not dreary in
such company. There is much _shouting_ when the bulls come, and the yard
beneath is filled with fury and bellowing; I would not willingly chance
my skin among such angry monsters, but their drivers with skill manœuvre
each bull by himself into a separate cell where he is to remain without
food or drink until morning. A diverting spectacle, had it not been for
the press and the stench of ordures.’
“I have seen that dim yard myself,” said Malory, “chaotic with lashings
and tramplings, and pawings and snortings, and the vast animals butt
against the woodwork, and their huge forms move confusedly in the
limited space. Like Pennistan, I would not care to chance my skin.
Concha, who being a Spaniard was bred up to violence, was even a little
frightened, ‘clung to me,’ said the diary, ‘and besought me not to leave
her. We saw the bulls in their cells from above, by the light of
torches. These brands may be thrust down to burn and singe and further
enrage the beast,’ but Oliver Pennistan, who had been nurtured on this
mild farm among pampered and kindly kine, did not like the sport, so
turned away with Concha on his arm and passed through a door into the
upper gallery of the arena.
“The vast circle seemed yet vaster by reason of its emptiness. Its ten
thousand seats curved round in tiers and tiers and tiers, a gigantic
funnel, open to the sky in which sailed a full and placid moon. The
arena, ready raked and scattered with whitish sand, gleamed palely
below, as if it had been the reflection of the heavenly moon in a pool
of water. The great place lay in haunted silence.
“It was here, sitting in a box, that they came to their final agreement.
The diary naturally giving me no hint of the words that passed between
them, I had to be content with a laconic entry some few days later:
‘Married this morning at the church of S. Pedro.’ I sat on in my room
wondering what Oliver Pennistan had made of that surrendered, inviolate
soul, the no doubt rather stupid and affected soldier, the scion of
English yeomen; I wonder what he made of his wildling, sprung as she was
from God knows what parentage; the Moorish Empire and the Holy Land had
both surely gone to her making. They roamed Spain together for their
honeymoon, and I accompanied them in spirit, seeing her dance, not in
public places only, but in their room, for his eyes alone, his hungry
love her sweetest applause; dancing in her little shift, and teaching
his clumsy hands to clap and his lips to cry ‘Olé!’ I wonder too what
the mountebanks of the trade thought of Concha’s husband, who sat
through her performance in the hot, boarded theatres of Spanish
provincial towns, and would allow no other man near his wife, and who,
when one evening she for pure mischief eluded him, only grieved in
silence and thought her love was going from him. I wonder most of all
what Concha thought of him, his staid insularity, his perpetual talk of
home, and his unassailable prejudices?
“As I came to the last pages of the diary, which ended abruptly on the
last day of the year in Valladolid, Ruth knocked on my door and said she
had come for the clothes. I was so full of the illuminating romance that
I pressed her with questions. She was not so much reserved as merely
indifferent, but looking at her warm young face in the uncertain
candlelight I knew that therein, rather than in her speech, lay the
answer to all my queries. I had seen the portraits of Amos Pennistan’s
father, and of Rawdon Westmacott’s mother, daguerreotypes which hung,
enlarged, on either side of the kitchen dresser, and I knew that in that
generation no sign of the Spanish strain had appeared. I looked again at
Ruth, at her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise;
looked, and was enlightened. I urged her memory. Could she recall no
anecdote, dear to her father when in a mood of comfortable expansion, a
family legend of her grandfather’s youth? Yes, she remembered hearing
that the children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed
alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent
reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient
woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of
sudden and uncertain temper. But she remembered, though it was not worth
the telling, that Mrs. Oliver Pennistan, in her sunniest mood, would set
her children on hassocks to watch her, their backs against the wall,
would take down her hair, which was long and a source of pride to her as
to all Spanish women, would take her shawl from the cupboard, and,
stripping off her shoes and stockings, would dance for her children, up
and down, the sinuous intricacies of an Andalusian dance. I wondered
what Oliver Pennistan thought, when, coming in of an evening with the
mud from the turnip fields heavy on his boots, he found his wife with
hair and fingers flying, dancing to the music of her own voice on the
tiled floor of his ancestral kitchen?”
III
“Now,” said Malory, “I scarcely know how to continue my story. I have
told you how I went to live with the Pennistans, and I have told you
Oliver Pennistan’s Spanish adventure, and the rest lies largely in hours
so full of work that no day could drag, but which in words would take
five minutes’ reproducing. I have told you already how I loved that
simple monotone of life. I had arrived in autumn, an unwise choice for a
novice less enthusiastic than myself, for soon the trees were bare of
the fruit which had so rejoiced me, bare, too, of the summer leaf, and
the working day, which at first had drawn itself out in long, warm,
melting evening, now rushed into darkness before work was done, and not
into darkness alone, but into chill and wet, so that you might often
have seen me going about my work in the cow-sheds with a sack over my
shoulders and a hurricane lantern in my hand. I do not pretend that I
enjoyed these squally winter nights. They had the effect of dulling my
perception, and presently I found myself like the country people whose
life I shared, considering the weather merely in its relation to myself;
was it wet? then I should be wet; was it a bright, fine day? then I
should be dry. My standpoint veered slowly round, like the needle of a
compass, from the subjective to the objective. I wish I could say as
much for many of my contemporaries. Then in our age as in all great
ages, we might find more men living, not merely thinking, their lives.”
In after years I remembered Malory’s words, and wondered whether he had
found on the battlefield sufficient signs of the activity he desired.
“I remember how entranced I was,” he went on, altering his tone, “by the
sense of ritual in the labouring year. I thought of the country as a
vast cathedral, teeming with worshippers, all passing in unison from
ceremony to ceremony as the months revolved. When I had come to join the
congregation, apse and column and nave were rich with fruit, the common
fruit of the English countryside, plum and apple, damson and pear,
curved and coloured and glowing with the quality of jewels; then busy
hands came, and packed and stored the harvest into bins, and colour went
from the place, and it grew dark. A long pause full of meditation fell.
The trees slept, men worked quickly and silently, no more than was
imperative, and from darkened corners spread the gleam of fires which
they had lighted for their warmth and comfort. But then, oh! then the
place was suddenly full of young living things, and of a light like
pearls; children laughed, and over the ground swept a tide which left it
starred with flowers, and a song arose, full of laughter and the ripple
of brooks. The spring had come.”
He was strangely exalted. I knew that my presence was forgotten.
“The shepherd and his nymph were not long lacking in this Arcadian
world. I met them crossing the fields, I spied them beneath the hedges,
I learned to step loudly before entering the dairy with my pails of
milk. I loved them, more perhaps as a part of the picture than for their
own sakes. To me they were Daphnis and Chloe, not the game-keeper’s son
and the farmer’s daughter.
“The match was favourably viewed by Amos Pennistan, though Nancy was but
eighteen and her lover two years older. I was honoured by an invitation
to the wedding. I had already woven a little tale for myself around
those country nuptials, a celebration which, although slightly
irregular, would have become my lovers better than the parochial
gentility which did actually attend their union. I had pictured them by
a brook, Daphnis in, to our minds, becomingly inadequate clothing,
Chloe’s muslin supplemented by chains of meadow flowers such as the
children weave, accompanied by their flocks and the many young
creatures, lambs, kids, and calves, as are characteristic of that least
virginal of seasons. No wooing; no; or if there must be wooing, let it
be sudden and primitive, and of the nature of a revelation, and let the
oak trees be their roof that night, and the stars the witnesses of their
natural and candid passion. But passion, poor soul! was put into stays
and stockings, had his mad gallop checked into a walk, while fingers
poked, eyes peeped, and tongues clacked round the prisoner. Alas for the
secret of Daphnis and Chloe; shorn of the dignity of secrecy, it glared
in the printed column, was brayed out from the pulpit, was totted up in
pounds and shillings. Food entered to play his hospitable and clumsy
part. For days Mrs. Pennistan baked, roasted, and kneaded cakes and
pastries, and daily as she did it her temper disimproved. Such beauty as
was Chloe’s, the beauty of health and artlessness, was devastated by the
atrocious trappings of respectability....
“What a commonplace tale! you will say, and a vulgar one into the
bargain! and indeed you will be right, if a miracle can become a
commonplace through frequent working, and if you look upon the marriage
of two young creatures as a social convenience, ordained, as we are
told, for the procreation of lawful children. I have told you nothing
but the love of rustic clowns. But as the great words of language, life
and death, love and hate, sin, birth, war, bread and wine, are short and
simple, and as the great classical emotions are direct and without
complexity, so my rustic clowns are classical and enduring, because Adam
and Eve, Daphnis and Chloe, Dick and Nancy, are no more than
interchangeable names throughout the ages.
“My Arcady missed its lovers. I realised after they had gone that they
had been real lovers, imperative to one another, and that they had not
simply drifted into marriage as a result of upbringing and propinquity.
Had their parents’ consent been for some reason refused, they would, I
am convinced, have gone away together. Amos Pennistan, in one of his
rare moments of expansion, told me as much himself. ‘Nancy,’ he said,
‘it never did to cross Nancy. She was strong-willed from three months
upward. Ruth, now, she’s a steady, tractable girl for all her dark
looks. Of the two, give me Ruth as a daughter.’
“You may imagine my profound interest in the study of this strain sprung
from the stock of Concha and Oliver Pennistan. Here I had Nancy, with
her slight English prettiness, and the fiery will which might never be
crossed; and Ruth, who looked like a gipsy and was in fact steady and
tractable. I could not help feeling that fate had her hand on these
people, and mocked and pushed them hither and thither in the thin
disguise of heredity. You remember Francis Galton and the waltzing mice,
how he took the common mouse and the waltzing mouse, and mated them, and
how among their progeny there were a common mouse, a black and white
mouse, and a mouse that waltzed; and how in the subsequent generations
the common brown house mouse predominated, but every now and then there
came a mouse that waltzed and waltzed, restless and tormented, until in
the endless pursuit of its tail it died, dazed, blinded, perplexed, by
the relentless fate that had it in grip. Well, I had my mice in a cage,
and Concha, the dancer, the waltzing mouse, sat mumbling by the fire.”
I shuddered. I did not understand Malory. He had spoken of the violence
of his feeling when he first caught sight of Ruth; I could not reconcile
that mood with his present chill analysis.
“You held a microscope over their emotions,” I said.
“I was afraid there would not be many emotions left now that Nancy was
gone,” he replied regretfully. “I missed her as a study, and I missed
her as an intrinsic part of my Arcady. I turned naturally for
compensation to Ruth and to Rawdon Westmacott, but here I realised at
once that I must dissociate the figures from the landscape. They would
not fit. No; contrive and compress them as I might, they would not fit.
I am very sensitive to the relation of the picture to the frame, and I
was troubled by their southern exuberance in the midst of English hay
and cornfields. Now could I but have had them here ...” and again the
cropping goats, the mountains, and the torrent rushed across the magic
lantern screen in my mind.
“I told you that I knew young Westmacott was there crazy for her; he had
no reserve about his desire, but hung round the farm with a straw
between his teeth, his whip smacking viciously at his riding-boots, and
his eyes perpetually following the girl at her work. He would look at
her with a hunger that was indecent. Me he considered with a dislike
that amused while it annoyed me. I often left my work when I saw him
looming up morosely in the distance, but old Amos dropped me a hint,
very gently, in his magnificently grand manner, after which I no longer
felt at liberty to leave the two alone. If they wanted private
interviews they must arrange them when they knew my work would take me
elsewhere.
“I was not sorry, for I had no affection for Westmacott, and it amused
me to watch Ruth’s manner towards him. I had heard of a woman treating a
man like a dog, but I had never seen an expression put into practice as
I now saw Ruth put this expression into practice towards her cousin. She
seemed to have absolute confidence in her power over him. When it did
not suit her to notice his presence, she utterly ignored him, busied her
tongue with singing and her hands with the affair of the moment, never
casting so much as a glance in his direction, never asking so much as
his help with her work; and he would wait, lounging against the doorway
or against a tree, silent, devouring her with that hungry look in his
eyes. Often I have seen him wait in vain, returning at last to his home
without a word from her to carry with him. His farm suffered from his
continual absence, but he did not seem to care. And she? did she get
much satisfaction out of her ill-treatment of his devotion? I never
knew, for she never alluded to him, but I can only suppose that, in the
devilish, inexplicable way of women, she did. In his presence she was
certainly an altered being; all her gentleness and her undoubted
sweetness left her, and she became hard, contemptuous, almost impudent.
I disliked her at such moments; self-confidence was unbecoming to her.
“Then, when she wanted him, she would whistle him up like a little
puppy, and this also I disliked, because Westmacott, whatever his
faults, wasn’t that sort of man, and it offended me to witness the
slight put upon his dignity. He didn’t seem to resent it himself, but
came always, obedient to her call. And he would do the most
extraordinary things at her bidding. Mrs. Pennistan told me one day that
when the pair were children, or, rather, when Ruth was a child of ten
and he was a young man of twenty-two, she would order him to perform the
wildest feats of danger and difficulty.
“‘And he’d do what she told him, what’s more,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, to
whom these reminiscences were obviously a source of delight and pride,
as though she, poor honest woman, shone a little with the reflected
glory of her daughter’s ten-year-old ascendancy over the daring young
man. ‘Lord, you would have laughed to see her standing there, stamping
her little foot, and defying him to go down Bailey’s Hill on his bicycle
without any brakes, and him doing it, with that twist in the road and
all.... One day she wanted him to jump into the pond with all his
clothes on, and when he wouldn’t do that she got into such a rage, and
stalked away, and wouldn’t speak to him, enough to make a cat laugh,’
and Mrs. Pennistan with a great chuckle doubled herself up, rubbing her
fat hands in enjoyment up and down her thighs, straightening herself
again to say, ‘Oh, comical!’ and to wipe her eye with the corner of her
apron!
“‘Well, now, I declare!’ she said suddenly, craning her neck to see over
the hedge. ‘If she isn’t at her old tricks again!’
“I followed her with a thrill to a gap in the hedge whither she had
darted—if any one so portly may be said to dart. There, across the
field, by the gate, stood the pair we had been discussing, and I was
actually surprised to find that the little ten-year-old girl whom I had
half expected to see was a well-grown and extremely good-looking young
woman. She was sitting on the gate, and Westmacott was lounging in his
usual attitude beside her; even at that distance his singular grace was
apparent.
“They seemed to be looking at the two cart-horses which were grazing,
loose in the field.
“‘She’s up to something, you mark my words,’ said Mrs. Pennistan to me.
“I agreed with her. Ruth was pointing, and the imperious tones of her
voice floated across to us in the still evening; Rawdon was following
the direction of her finger, and now and then he turned in his languid,
easy way that covered—with how thin a veneer!—the fierceness beneath, to
say something to his companion. I saw his hand drop the switch he
carried, and fall upon her knee. Her manner became more wilful, more
imperative; had she been standing on the ground, she would have stamped.
I heard Rawdon laugh at her, but that seemed to make her angry, and with
a resigned shrug he pushed himself away from the gate and began to walk
across the field.
“‘Lord sakes,’ said Mrs. Pennistan anxiously, ‘whatever is he going to
do?’
“I begged her to keep quiet, because I wanted to see any fun that might
be going.
“Mrs. Pennistan was not happy; she grunted.
“Ruth was perched on the gate, watching her cousin. I was delighted to
have an opportunity of observing them when they thought themselves
alone. Besides, I intensely wanted to see what Rawdon was going to do.
He walked up to one of the horses, hand outstretched and fingers moving
invitingly, but the horse snorted, threw up its head, and cantered
lumberingly away to another part of the field. Rawdon followed it,
pulling a wisp of grass by means of which he enticed the great clumsy
beast until he was able, after some stroking and patting, to lay his
hand upon its mane. Ruth, on the gate, clapped her hands and called out
gaily,—
“‘Now up with you!’
“‘Lord sakes!’ said Mrs. Pennistan again.
“I saw Westmacott getting ready to spring; he was agile as a cat, and
with a leap and a good hold on the mane he hoisted himself on to the
horse’s back. The horse galloped madly round the field, but Westmacott
sat him easily—not a very wonderful feat for a farm-trained boy to
accomplish. As he passed Ruth he waved his hand to her.
“She wasn’t satisfied yet; she called out something, and, the horse
having come to a standstill, I saw Rawdon cautiously turning himself
round till he sat with his face to the tail. Then he drummed with his
heels to put the horse once more into its lumbering gallop.
“I saw the scene as something barbaric, or, rather, as something that
ought to have been barbaric and only succeeded in being grotesque. Ruth
ought to have been, of course, an Arab girl daring her lover in the
desert to feats of horsemanship upon a slim unbroken thoroughbred colt.
Instead of that, Westmacott was just making himself look rather
ridiculous upon a cart-horse. But the intention was there; yes, by Jove!
it was; the intention, the instinct; he was wooing her in a way an
English suitor wouldn’t have chosen, nor an English girl have approved.
Mrs. Pennistan, however, saw the matter in a different light, as a
foolish and unbecoming escapade on the part of her daughter; so,
thrusting herself between the loose staves of the fence and waving her
hands angrily, she called out to Westmacott to have done with his
dangerous nonsense.
“He slipped off the horse’s back, and Ruth slipped down off the gate,
the man looking annoyed, and, in a slight degree, sheepish, the girl
perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Pennistan rated them both. Westmacott
kicked sulkily at the toe of one boot with the heel of the other. I
glanced at Ruth. She had her hands in the big pockets of her apron and
was looking away into the sky, with her lips pursed for an inaudible
whistle. Her mother stormed at her.
“‘You’re getting too old for such nonsense. It was all very well when
you were a chit with pig-tails down your back. And you, Rawdon, I should
ha’ thought you’d ha’ known better. What’d Pennistan say if he knew of
your larking with his horses? I’ve a good mind to tell him.’
“‘I’ve done the brute no harm,’ he muttered.
“‘Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for,
anyway?’
“‘A bit of fun ... ’ he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes
resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth.
“Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her
cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which
I was to become so familiar.
“‘Ay, Ruth told you,’ stormed Ruth’s mother. ‘An old tale. You let Ruth
alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be
off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.’
“Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s
indifference.
“Ruth,” said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. “She is a
problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her,
lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have
already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with
her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of
her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be
conscious of her.
“She on her part, was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced.
Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion
that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents
in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural
apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work.
I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her,
however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me
back into the regions of fact. ‘Ruth,’ I would say, ‘does a woman cling
more to her children or to her husband?’ and she would stare at me and
reply, ‘What things you do say, Mr. Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I
have the dairy to wash down yet.’
“I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for
science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my
crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather,
that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the
sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.
“Sunday afternoon was our holiday on the farm, and to the worker alone a
holiday is passionately precious. It is all a matter of contrast. On
Sunday afternoon I would take Ruth for a walk; the sheep-dog came with
us, and we would go through shaw and spinney and young coppice, and
along high-hedged lanes. One spot I loved, called Baker’s Rough, where
the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, and wild flowers had
consequently gathered in their millions: anemones, wood-violets,
bluebells, cuckooflowers, primroses, and later the wild strawberry, and
later still the scarlet hips of the briar. I never saw a piece of ground
so starred. Here we often passed, and we would climb the hill-ridge
behind, and look down over the Weald, and fancy that we could see as far
as Romney Marsh, where Rye and Winchelsea keep guard over the melancholy
waste like little foreign towns. We stood over the Weald, seeing both
fair weather and foul in the wide sweep of sky; there a storm, and there
a patch of sun on the squares of meadow. On fine days great pillows of
white cloud drifted across the blue, painted by a bold artist in
generous sweeps on a broad canvas, and those great clouds were repeated
below in the great rounded cushions of trees. We looked over perhaps
fifty miles of country, yet scarcely one house could we distinguish, but
when we looked for a long time we made out, here and there, a roof or an
oast-house, and I used to think that, like certain animals, these
dwellings had taken on the colour of the land. For the most part, a
clump of trees would be our nearest landmark.
“I could evoke for you many of those hours when, with the girl beside
me, I explored the recesses of that tender country. Without sharing my
enthusiasm, she was yet singularly companionable, happy and contented
wherever our footsteps led us, with the reposeful quality of content
essential to a true comrade.”
He was silent, and I considered him covertly as he sat hugging his knees
and staring into the distance with a far-away look on his face. He was,
I thought, a queer chap; queer, lonely, alien; intensely, damnably
analytical. As I watched him, his head moved slightly, in a distressed,
unconscious manner, and his brow contracted into a frown that emphasized
the slight negative movement of the head. Yet he did not share his
difficulties with me. He dismissed them with a sigh, and a gesture of
the hand, and resumed,—
“I mentioned just now the place called Baker’s Rough. Ruth came to me
one morning with glowing eyes.
“‘There’s flowers such as you never saw on Baker’s Rough to-day,’ she
said mysteriously.
“I tried to guess: mulleins? ragged robins? periwinkles? but it was none
of those. She would not tell me. I must come and see for myself.
“We set out after tea for Baker’s Rough, walking quickly, for we had
only an hour to spare. As we drew near, the sheep-dog, who had run on
ahead, set up a tremendous barking at the gate. I cried,—
“‘Gipsies!’
“There was a real gipsy encampment, caravans hung with shining pots and
pans, gaudy washing strung out on a line, a camp fire, lean dogs,
curly-headed children. Ruth had guessed aright when she guessed that I
would be pleased. Amos hated gipsies, but I loved them. I’ve never
outgrown the love of gipsies that lurks in every boy. Have you?”
His eyes were actually sparkling as he asked the question, and I was
overcome by a feeling of guilt. Often I had thought this man a prig. He
was not one, but simply an odd compound of philosopher and vagrant, poet
and child. I resolved not to be hard on him again. I was uncomfortably
suspicious that it was I who had been the prig.
“As we stood looking,” he went on, “a woman came down the steps of a
caravan, and, seeing us, invited us with a flashing smile to come into
the camp. Ruth was delighted; she followed the woman, looking like a
gipsy herself, I thought, and the children came round her, little
impudent beggars, staring up into her face and even touching her
clothes. She only laughed, curiously at home; I felt, despite my love of
the roaming people, over-educated and sophisticated. I was loving the
camp self-consciously, almost voluntarily, aware that I was loving it
and rather pleased with myself for doing so.”
“Your mind twists,” I interrupted, “like the point of a corkscrew.”
He laughed, but he looked a little hurt, taken aback, checked on his
course.
“I am sorry,” he said, “you are right to snub me for it. Well, Ruth at
any rate was thoroughly at home, and I could see that the gipsy was
sizing her up with her shrewd eyes, and wondering whether I should be
good for half-a-crown or only a shilling.
“She let Ruth sit on a stool and stir the pot over the fire; it smelt
very good, though it probably contained rabbits, which of all foods in
the world is the one I most dislike. Then she offered, inevitably, to
tell our fortunes, and Ruth, as inevitably, accepted with alacrity. She
stretched out her little brown hand, strong and hard with work.
“Of course the gipsy told her a lot of nonsense, and I stood by, acutely
apprehensive that I should be drawn in an embarrassing rôle into the
prognostications. I had come there with Ruth; therefore, in the gipsy’s
eyes, I must be Ruth’s young man. I took off my cap to let the gipsy see
that my hair was going gray on the temples. But it wasn’t any use; I
found myself appearing as the middle-aged man whose heart was younger
than his years, and who would finally carry off the young lady as his
bride.
“I tried, of course, to laugh it off, but to my surprise I saw Ruth
growing very red and her mouth quivering, so I told the gipsy we had
heard enough and that we had no more time to spare. Ruth rose, the
pleasure all died away from her face. Then, to add to the misfortunes of
the evening, I heard a scream and an outburst of laughter from a
neighbouring caravan, and, looking round, I saw Rawdon Westmacott jump
to the ground in pursuit of a young gipsy woman, whom he caught in his
arms and kissed.
“I looked hastily at Ruth; she had seen the thing happen. The distress
which had troubled her face gave way to anger; the name ‘Rawdon!’
slipped in involuntary indignation from her lips. Then an instinct
asserted itself to pretend that she had seen nothing, and to get out of
the place before her cousin had discovered her. But she conquered the
instinct, staring at Westmacott till he turned as though compelled in
her direction.