Early next morning Vessons was calling the cows in for milking. He
leant over the lichen-green gate contemplatively.
All the colours were so bright that they were grotesque and startling.
Above the violently green fields the sky shone like blue glass, and
across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill
the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing
monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet
clover behind him--a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile
dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his
head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a
fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape
again. After an interval, a polished red and white cow appeared at a
distance of five fields, coming serenely on at her own pace. A white
one and a roan followed her at long distances. They advanced through
the shadows, each going through the exact middle of the many gateways,
always kept open like doors in a suite of rooms at a reception. Vessons
waited patiently--more as a slave than a ruler--only uttering his
plaintive 'Come o-on!' once, when the last cow dallied overlong with a
tuft of lush grass in the hedge. This was the daily ritual. Every
morning he appeared, neutral-tinted, from the house, and cried upon an
apparently empty landscape; every morning they meandered through the
seven gates from the secret leafy purlieus where they spent the night.
Mysterious of eye, leisured, vividly red and white, they followed the
old man as queens might follow an usher.
Hazel was coming down the path from the house. With morning, her
abundant vitality had returned. The outer world was new and bright, and
she wanted, shyly, to be up and dressed before Reddin awoke.
She was full of merriment at the subservience of Vessons to the cows.
'D'you say "mum" to 'em?' she inquired.
Vessons looked her up and down. He was very angry, not only at her
criticism, but at the difficulty of retort, since he supposed she was
now 'missus.' His friendliness for her had entirely gone, not, as would
have seemed natural, since her last night's instalment at Undern, but
since her marriage with Edward. He felt that she had 'gone back on
him.' He had taken her as a comrade, and now she had gone over to the
enemy. He was also injured at having been kept up so late last night.
He chumbled his straw for some time, until the last cow had
disappeared. Then he said: 'You'm up early for a married 'ooman, or
whatever you be, missus.'
Hazel laughed. She had lived so completely outside the influence of the
canons of society that the taunt had no sting.
'Ha! you're jealous!' she said.
Then, with a mercilessly accurate imitation of his voice and face, she
added:
'A missus at Undern! Never will I!'
He quailed under her mocking amber eyes, her impish laughter. Then,
looking from side to side with suppressed fury, he said: 'Them birds is
after the cherries! I'll get a gun. I'll shoot 'em dead!'
'If you shoot a blackbird, the milk'll turn bloody,' said Hazel; but
Vessons paid no heed.
All morning, at any spare moment, and after dinner (which he brought in
in complete silence, and which was exceedingly unpalatable), he lurked
behind trees and crept along hedges, shooting birds. Even Reddin felt
awed and could not gather courage to expostulate with him. In and out
of the stealthy afternoon shadows, black and solemn, went the shambling
old figure with his relentless face and outraged heart. He shot
thrushes as they fluted after a meal of wild raspberries; he shot tiny
silky willow-wrens, robins, and swallows--their sacredness did not awe
him--a pigeon on its nest, blackbirds, a dipper, a goldfinch, and a
great many sparrows. The garden and fields were struck into silence
because of him; only a flutter of terrified wings showed his
whereabouts. He piled his trophies--all the delicate ruffled plumage of
summer's prime--on the kitchen table, draggled and bloody.
Hazel and Reddin crept from window to window, silent, watching his
movements. Undern grew ghostlier than ever, seeming, as the shots rang
out startlingly loud in the quiet, like a moribund creature electrified
by blows.
'He'd liefer it was me than the birds!' said Hazel. 'Wheresoever I go,
folk kill things. What for do they?'
'Things must be killed.'
'It seems like the earth's all bloody,' said Hazel. 'And it's allus the
little small uns. There! He's got a jenny-wren. Oh, dearie me! it's
like I've killed 'em; it's all along of me coming to Undern.'
'Hush!' said Reddin sharply. 'What I'm afraid of is that he'll shoot
himself, he's so damned queer.'
The last cow had sauntered to the gate before Vessons opened it and
milked them that night. Afterwards he went in with the pails, set them
on the parlour floor, and said with fury to Hazel: 'Bloody, is it?'
She owned, faintly, that it was not.
'And now,' said Vessons, turning on Reddin, 'it's notice. Notice has
been give--one month--by Andrew Vessons to John Reddin, Esquire, of
Undern.'
With tragic dignity he turned to go.
He saw neither Hazel nor Reddin, but only the swan, the yew-tree swan,
his creation, now doomed to be for ever unfinished. The generations to
come would look upon a beakless swan, and would think he had meant it
so. Tears came into his eyes--smarting, difficult tears. The room was
full of brooding misery. Reddin felt awkward and astounded.
'Why, Vessons?' he said in rather a sheepish tone.
Vessons did not turn. He fumbled with the door-handle. Reddin got up
and went across to him.
'Why, Vessons?' he said again, with a hand on his shoulder. 'You and I
can't part, you know.'
'We mun.'
'But why, man? What's up with you, Andrew?'
The rare Christian name softened Vessons. He deigned to explain. 'She
is,' he said, with a sidelong nod at Hazel. 'She mocked me.'
'Did you, Hazel?'
'Now then, missus!' Vessons glared at her.
'I only said--'
'Her said, "Never will I!"' shouted Vessons. 'Ah, that's what her
said--"Never will I!" That's what _I_ say,' he added with the
pride of a phrase-maker.
Reddin could make nothing of them, one so red and angry, the other in
tears.
'I'll do no 'ooman's will!' said Vessons.
'Look here, Vessons! Be reasonable. Listen to me. I'm your master,
aren't I?'
'Ah! Till a month.'
'Well, you take orders from me; that's all that matters. I'm master
here.'
The tones of his ancestry were in his voice--an ancestry that ruled
over and profited by men and women as good as themselves, or better.
'So we'll say no more about it,' he finished, with the frank and
winning smile that was one of his few charms.
Vessons stared at him for some time, and, as he stared, an idea
occurred to him. It was, he felt, a good idea. It would enable him to
keep his swan and his self-respect and to get rid of Hazel. As he
pondered it, his face slowly creased into smiles. He touched his
forelock--a thing only done on pay-days--and withdrew, murmuring,
'Notice is took back.'
They saw him go past the window with the steps and the shears,
evidently to attend to the swan.
Reddin thought how easy it was to manage these underlings--a little
authority, a little tact. He turned to Hazel, crying in the high
armchair of black oak with its faded rose-coloured cushions. She was
crying not only because Vessons had come off victorious, but because
her position was now defined, and was not what she would have liked,
but also because Reddin's manner to her jarred after last night.
Last night, in the comfortless darkness of Hunter's Spinney, he had
seemed for a little while to be a fellow-fugitive of hers, one of the
defenceless, fleeing from the vague, unknown power that she feared.
Then she had pitied him--self-forgetfully, fiercely--gathered his head
to her breast as she so often gathered Foxy's. But now he seemed to
have forgotten--seemed once more to be of the swift and strong ones
that rode down small creatures.
She sobbed afresh.
'Look here, Hazel,' said he, in a tone that he intended to be kind but
firm--'look here: I'm not angry with you, only you must leave Vessons
alone, you know.'
'You want that old fellow more than you want me!'
'Don't be silly! He has his uses; you have yours.'
He spoke with a quite unconscious brutality; he voiced the theory of
his class and his political party, which tacitly or openly asserted
that woman, servants, and animals were in the world for their benefit.
'I'm not grass to be trod on,' said Hazel, 'and if you canna be
civil-spoken, I'll go.'
'You can't,' he replied, 'not now.'
She knew it was true, and the knowledge that her own physical nature
had proved traitorous to her freedom enraged her the more.
'You can't go,' he went on, coming towards her chair to caress her.
'Shall I tell you why?'
Hazel sat up and looked at him, her eyes gloomy, her forehead red with
crying. He thought she was awaiting for his answer; but Hazel seldom
did or said what he expected. She let him kneel by her chair on one
knee; then, frowning, asked: 'Who cried in Hunter's Spinney?' He jumped
up as if he had knelt on a pin. He had been trying to forget the
incident, and hoped that she had. He was bitterly ashamed of that
really fine moment of his life.
'Don't Hazel!' he said.
He felt quite frightened when he remembered how he had behaved. A
strange doubt of himself, born that night, stirred again. Was he all he
had thought? Was the world what he had thought? Misgivings seized him.
Perhaps he ought not to have brought Hazel here or to the Spinney. An
older code than those of Church and State began to flame before him,
condemning him.
Suddenly he wanted reassurance. 'You did want to come, didn't you? I
didn't take advantage of you very much, did I?' he asked. 'You want to
stay?'
'No, I didna want to come till you made me. You got the better of me.
But maybe you couldna help it. Maybe you were druv to it.'
'Who by?' he asked, with an attempt at flippancy.
Hazel's eyes were dark and haunted.
'Summat strong and drodsome, as drives us all,' she said.
She had a vision of all the world racing madly round and round, like
the exhausted and terrified horse Reddin had that morning lunged. But
what power it was that stood in the centre, breaking without an effort
the spirit of the mad, fleeing, tethered creature, she could not tell.
Reddin sat brooding until Hazel, recovering first in her mercurial way,
said:
'Now I've come, I mun bide. D'you think the old fellow'd let me cook
summat for supper? It's been pig-food for us to-day.'
But when they went to investigate, they found Vessons preparing a
tremendous meal, hot and savoury as a victorious and penitent old man
could make it. He showed in his manner that bygones were to be bygones,
and night came down in peace on Undern. But it was a curious, torrid
peace, like the hush before thunder.