Undern Hall, with its many small-paned windows, faced the north
sullenly. It was a place of which the influence and magic were not
good. Even in May, when the lilacs frothed into purple, paved the lawn
with shadows, steeped the air with scent; when soft leaves lipped each
other consolingly; when blackbirds sang, fell in their effortless way
from the green height to the green depth, and sang again--still,
something that haunted the place set the heart fluttering. No place is
its own, and that which is most stained with old tumults has the
strongest fascination.
So at Undern, whatever had happened there went on still; someone who
had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful
with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their
fleeting mimicry of immortality.
It was only at midsummer that the windows were coloured by dawn and
sunset; then they had a sanguinary aspect, staring into the delicate
skyey dramas like blind, bloodshot eyes. Secretly, under the heavy
rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees,
gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their
smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely
old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous
lolling tongues, and the smell of the mud tainted the air--half sickly,
half sweet. The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky
shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful
in desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses
and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with
the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay
under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly
and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's
heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting
sparely beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In
the sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the
thyme and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the
path. The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the
golden day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very
principle of life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of
elder blossom, decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the
place attained one of its most individual moods--narcotic, aphrodisiac.
In winter the yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and
mantled, headless goddesses; then the giant beeches would lash
themselves to frenzy, and, stooping, would scourge the ice on Undern
Pool and the cracked walls of the house, like beings drunken with the
passion of cruelty. This was the second mood of Undern--brutality. Then
those within were, it seemed, already in the grave, heavily covered
with the prison of frost and snow, or shouted into silence by the wind.
On a January night the house seemed to lie outside time and space;
slow, ominous movement began beyond the blind windows, and the
inflexible softness of snow, blurred on the vast background of night,
buried summer ever deeper with invincible, caressing threats.
The front door was half glass, so that a wandering candle within
could be seen from outside, and it looked inexpressibly forlorn, like
a glow-worm seeking escape from a chloroform-box or mankind looking
for the way to heaven. Only four windows were ever lit, and of these
two at a time. They were Jack Reddin's parlour, Andrew Vessons' kitchen,
and their respective bedrooms.
Reddin of Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did
for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no
time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel
lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such
creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three
times a year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended
to continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times,
with amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head,
his rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers from Wolfbatch Hall
said, 'so chivalrous, so uplifted.' The Miss Clombers purred when they
talked, like cats with a mouse. The younger still hunted, painfully
compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut,
and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that
she might have had a blood-feud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode
down the anxious red-brown streak, she thought she was riding down a
cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when
the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing
so the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never
missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased their long silent
battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they
were his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath
them--hardly more than a farmer, but still--a man.
Reddin went on his dubious and discreditable way, and the woman Sally
Haggard, of the cottage in the hollow, gained by virtue of a certain
harsh beauty what the ladies Clomber would have given all their wealth
for.
The other inhabitant of Undern, Andrew, revolved in his own orbit, and
was entirely unknown to his master. He cut the yews--the peacocks and
the clipped round trees and the ones like tables--twice a year. He was
creating a swan. He had spent twenty years on it, and hoped to complete
it in a few more, when the twigs that were to be the beak had grown
sufficiently. It never occurred to him that the place was not his, that
he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn work;
in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself; and in
the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew somnolent. He
sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he seldom scrubbed,
and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and chopped meat) and
slept the afternoons away in the ceaseless drone of flies.
When Reddin called him he rarely answered, and only deigned to go to
him when he felt sure that his order was going to be reasonable.
Everything he said was non-committal, every movement was expostulatory.
Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he always had such
meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor. Monasticism had found, in a
countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple. If Vessons
ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never
said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he
thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his tolerance of
her ways. Ruminative and critical, he went to and fro in the darkly
lovely domain, with pig buckets or ash buckets or barrows full of
manure. The lines of his face were always etched in dirt, and he always
had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister. He was a lonely soul,
as he once said himself when unusually mellow at the Hunter's Arms; he
was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.' He preferred it to
the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin because they never
spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite indifferent to
Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.
But to Undern itself he was not indifferent. Ties deep as the tangled
roots of the bindweed, strong as the great hawsers of the beeches that
reached below the mud of Undern Pool, held him to it, the bondslave of
a beauty he could not understand, a terror he could not express. When
he trudged the muddy paths, 'setting taters' or earthing up; when he
scythed the lawn, looking, with a rose in his hat, weirder and more
ridiculous than ever; and when he shook the apples down with a kind of
sour humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having
apples!'--at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind
force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was
stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the
beetle, he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the protoplasm of a
poet.