Charlotte sat on the top of the slope in the field below Barrow Farm.
John Conway lay at her feet. The tall beeches stood round them in an
unclosed ring.
Through the opening she could see the farmhouse, three ball-topped
gables, the middle one advancing, the front built out there in a huge
door-place that carried a cross windowed room under its roof.
Low heavy-browed mullions; the panes, black shining slits in the grey and
gold of the stone. All their rooms. Hers and Gwinnie's under the near
gable by the fir-trees, Mr. and Mrs. Burton's under the far gable by the
elms, John's by itself in the middle, jutting out.
She could see the shallow garden dammed up to the house out of the green
field by its wall, spilling trails of mauve campanula, brimming with pink
phlox and white phlox, the blue spires of the lupins piercing up through
the froth.
Sunday evening half an hour before milking-time. From September
nineteen-thirteen to December--to March nineteen-fourteen, to June--she
had been at the farm nine months. June--May--April. This time three
months ago John had come.
In the bottom of the field, at the corner by the yard-gate, under the
elms, she could see Gwinnie astride over the tilted bucket, feeding the
calves. It was Gwinnie's turn.
She heard the house door open and shut. The Burtons came down the flagged
path between the lavender bushes, leaving them to their peace before
milking time.
Looking down she saw John's eyes blinking up at her through their lashes.
His chest showed a red-brown V in the open neck of his sweater. He had
been quiet a long time. His voice came up out of his quietness, sudden
and queer.
"Keep your head like that one minute--looking down. I want your
eyelids.... Now I know."
"What?"
"What you're like. You're like Jeanne d'Arc.... There's a picture--the
photo of a stone head, I think--in a helmet, looking down, with
big drooped eyelids. If it isn't Jeanne it ought to be. Anyhow it's
you.... That's what's been bothering me. I thought it was just because
you had black hair bobbed like a fifteen century page. But it isn't that.
It's her forehead and her blunt nose, and her innocent, heroic chin. And
the thick, beautiful mouth.... And the look--as if she could see behind
her eyelids--dreadful things going to happen to her. All the butchery."
"I don't see any dreadful things going to happen to me."
"No. Her sight was second sight; and your sight is memory. You never
forget things.... I shall call you Jeanne. You ought to wear armour and a
helmet." His voice ceased and began again. "What are you thinking of?"
"I don't know. I don't think much, ever."
She was wondering what _he_ would think if he knew.
She wondered what the farm would be like without him. Would it be what it
was last autumn and winter and in the spring before he came? But she had
been happy all that time without him, even in the hard, frost-biting
winter. When you had gone through that you knew the worst of Barrow Farm.
It made your face coarse, though.
Joan of Arc was a peasant. No wonder she was beginning to look like her.
If John went--
"John, shall you stay on here?"
"I don't know. I shall stick to farming if that's what you mean. Though
it isn't what I wanted."
"What did you want?"
"To go into the Army."
"Why didn't you then?"
"They wouldn't have me. There's something wrong with my eyes.... So the
land's got me instead."
"Me too. We ought to have been doing this all our lives."
"We'll jolly well have to. We shall never be any good indoors again."
"Has old Burton said anything?"
"I'm getting on. I can drive as straight a furrow as any man in
Gloucestershire. I've told my father that. He detests me; but he'd say
you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you _must_ farm. He turned
all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business. He
liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under
his engines. He'd simply love to see me here standing up to my knees in
wet cow-dung."
"He won't mind your leaving him?"
"Not if I make a good thing out of this. Anyhow he knows he can't keep me
off it. If I can't fight I'll farm. It's in my blood and nerves and
memory. He sits there selling motor cars, but his people were fighting
men. They fought to get land; they fought to keep it. My mother's people,
the Rodens, were yeoman farmers. That's why my furrow's so straight."
"And that's why you came here?"
"No. That isn't why."
"Aren't you glad you came? Did you ever feel anything like the
peace of it?"
"It's not the peace of it I want, Charlotte,--Jeanne, I mean. It's
the fight. Fighting with things that would kill you if you didn't.
Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you. Ploughing,
Charlotte--Jeanne. Feeling the thrust and the drive through, and the
thing listing over on the slope. Seeing the steel blade shine, and the
long wounds coming in rows, hundreds of wounds, wet and shining."
"What makes you think of wounds?"
"I don't know. I see it like that. Cutting through."
"I don't see it like that one bit. The earth's so kind, so beautiful. And
the hills--look at them, the clean, quiet backs, smoothed with light. You
could stroke them. And the fields, those lovely coloured fans opening and
shutting."
"They're lovely because of what's been done to them. If those hills had
been left to themselves there'd have been nothing on them but trees.
Think of the big fight with the trees, the hacking through, the cutting.
The trunks staggering and falling. You'd begin with a little hole in the
forest like that gap in the belt on the sky-line, and you'd go on hacking
and cutting. You'd go on.... If you didn't those damned trees would come
up round you and jam you between their trunks and crush you to red
pulp.... Supposing this belt of beeches drew in and got tighter and
tighter--No. There's nothing really kind and beautiful on this earth.
Except your face. And even your face--"
"My face?--"
"_Could_ be cruel. But it never will be. Something's happened to it. Some
cruelty. Some damnable cruelty."
"What makes you think so?"
"Every kind and beautiful thing on earth, Jeanne, has been made so by
some cruelty."
"That's all rot. Utter rot. You don't know what you're talking
about.... It's milking time. There's Gwinnie semaphoring. Do you know old
Burton's going to keep us on? He'll pay us wages from this quarter. He
says we were worth our keep from the third day."
"Do you want to stay on here?"
"Rather."
"Very well then, so do I. That settles it."
"Get up," she said, "and come along. Gwinnie's frantic."
He sat up, bowed forwards, his hands hanging loose over his knees.
She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender
back dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of
her breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her
lips parting.
He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set
her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her weight
against his weight, tugging.
He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her
pull. As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing
forgotten, her right hand.
* * * * *
Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable--the
hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft
behind it--she lay thinking.
Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug
of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.
"If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie"--She knew what
Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another.
Thinking was the antidote to caring. If she had let her mind play freely
over Gibson Herbert in the beginning--But Gibson stopped her thinking,
and John Conway made her think. That was the difference.
There was nothing about John that was like Gibson. Not a look, not a
gesture, not the least thought in his mind. His mind was like his
body, clean and cold and beautiful. Set on fire only by dreams; loving
you in a dream, a dream that burned him up and left him cold to you.
Cold and clean.
There were things she laid up against him, the poor dear; a secret hoard
of grievances now clear to her in the darkness; she found herself turning
them over and over, as if positively her mind owed his romantic apathy a
grudge. Little things she remembered. Three things.
Yesterday in the hayfield, John pitching hay on to the cart, and she
standing on the top of the load, flattening down the piles as he swung
them up. Gwinnie came with a big fork, swanking, for fun, trying to pitch
a whole haycock. In the dark of the room she could see Gwinnie's little
body straining back from the waist, her legs stiffening, her face pink
and swollen; and John's face looking at Gwinnie.
She shouted down at him, "Why can't you _take_ the damned thing? She'll
break her back with it." And he shouted up, "That's her look-out." (But
he took it.) He didn't like Gwinnie.
That time. And the time Cowslip calved, the darling choosing the one
night old Burton was away and Jim down with flu. She had to hold the
lantern. Straw littered in the half-lighted shed. Cowslip swinging her
bald-faced head round to you, her humble, sorrowful eyes imploring,
between her groans and the convulsive heavings of her flanks. A noise
between a groan and a bellow, a supreme convulsion. The dark wall, the
white funnel of light from the lantern, and John's face in the flash....
But he had been sorry for Cowslip. Going out with the lantern afterwards
she had found him in the yard, by the wall, bent double, shivering and
retching. And she had sung out to him "Buck up, John. She's licked it
clean. It's the dearest little calf you ever saw."
Pity. Pity could drag your face tight and hard, like Burton's when his
mare, Jenny, died of colic.
But before that--the night they went to Stow Fair together; crossing
the street at the sharp turn by the church gate, something happened.
They hadn't heard the motor car coming; it was down on them before they
could see it, swerving round her side of the street. He had had his
hand tight on her arm to steer her through the crowd. When the car
came ... when the car came ... he let go and jumped clean to the curb.
She could feel the splash-board graze her thigh, as she sprang clear of
it, quick, like a dog.
She was sure he jumped first. She was sure he hadn't let her go before
the car came. She could see the blaze of the lamps and feel his grip
slacken on her arm.
She wasn't sure. He couldn't have jumped. He couldn't have let go. Of
course he hadn't. She had imagined it. She imagined all sorts of things.
If she could make them bad enough she would stop thinking about him; she
would stop caring. She didn't want to care.
* * * * *
"Charlotte--when I die, that's where I'd like to be buried."
Coming back from Bourton market they had turned into the churchyard on
the top of Stow-hill. The long path went straight between the stiff yew
cones through the green field set with graves.
"On the top, so high up you could almost breathe in your coffin here."
"I don't want to breathe in my coffin. When I'm dead I'm dead, and when
I'm alive I'm alive. Don't talk about dying."
"Why not? Think of the gorgeous risk of it--the supreme toss up. After
all, death's the most thrilling thing that happens."
"Whose death?"
"My death."
"Don't _talk_ about it."
"Your death then."
"Oh, mine--"
"Our death, Jeanne."
He turned to her in the path. His mouth was hard now, but his eyes shone
at her, smiling, suddenly warm, suddenly tender.
She knew herself then; she knew there was one cruelty, one brutality
beyond bearing, John's death.