§ 1
All his way across the down, Dan shivered with that kiss. It seemed to
have given her to him, without promise, without words. Or rather, it had
given him to her--he felt as if till now his courtship had been on wrong
lines, as if he had merely sought to win her, and now instead he had
given himself. He had given himself to her in that kiss; he belonged to
her now, whatever she chose to do with him.
His emotional history was simple. He had never been in love before.
During the three years he was in the army he had received a fair amount
of attention from girls; he had taken out girls, as his fellow soldiers
took them out, he had kissed them occasionally when they seemed to
expect it, but he had never felt deeply nor roused deep feelings. He had
also--partly from a good disposition, and partly from practical
commonsense--escaped any of those sordid adventures which the war
brought into the experience of so many boys.
But now that kiss seemed to have reversed all his preconceived ideas of
courtship, those ideas of the wooing, winning, possessing male. It had
made him the servant of love. He saw his life given to Belle, whether
she wanted his love or not. Hitherto he had rarely thought of rejection,
and if he had thought of it could not have faced it. But that kiss had
plunged him into an overwhelming humility.
If he had not been so humble, he would have been triumphant; for he
could not think that Belle had not had her full share in that pledge. He
could not believe that her lips had been casual or merely affectionate.
It was she who had caused their embrace, their motionless contact, to
flame into a kiss. Without her leading he was not sure that he would
have dared touch her lips--her cheek, perhaps, but not her lips--the
paradise of her sad mouth.... In the depths of his humility there was no
room for triumph, but there was a dwelling-house for hope.
As he walked over Heighton Hill, facing the last gutter of sunset beyond
the Ouse Valley, he thought of Belle as many things. He thought of her
as a white owl, flying out of a barn, and drooping against him with
tired, ruffled feathers. He thought of her as the lost pigeon he once
had found and nursed into warmth between his shirt and his breast. He
thought of her as the sea, far down at the mouth of the Ouse, beyond the
masts that rise from it like spears--the sea which was so sweet and so
rough, whose near shores were home and whose far shores were adventure,
who carried men’s hopes to sure harbours or swallowed them up alive. He
thought of her as the quiet Down, ridged with the scars of old
battlefields and burying the dead in its heart. He thought of her as an
inn, which had given houseroom to many before he came and whose last
guest had been his dearest friend.... He was not jealous of Ernley, any
more than a man is jealous of the guests who have been before him at an
inn. For he knew that he did not come to Belle as the others had come,
as even Ernley had come, as a guest to be entertained, but as the
host--to keep the house.
He was glad that he was not going to stop at Bullockdean, but had the
extra miles over to Telscombe and Brakey Bottom. He wanted to still his
heart with more breaths of the night air before he had to join in the
unrest of other lives. Belle ... Belle Shackford ... to most men the
lovely, tawdry, easy daughter of a failing tenant-farmer, to Ernley Munk
the fire that had laid waste two years of his life, to Daniel a
frightened owl, a tired pigeon, a sweet and wild adventure, a friendly
house. The strange thing was that Daniel knew all about the others, all
that she had been to other men, and yet still hoped for what she could
be to him. He knew that he wanted to be to her something that the others
had never been, so he was not afraid that she would be to him what she
had been to others.
§ 2
Daniel generally had supper once a week at Brakey Bottom. He was the
representative of family intercourse, for Tom Sheather was too busy with
his own tangled affairs to care to go much into the coil of his son’s,
and his wife disliked the long, shingly road that wound over the
barrenness of Bullock Down and Highdole to the final desert of Brakey
Bottom, while Chris and Len were always quarrelling on the ever-fruitful
subject of “What did you do in the Great War?”
Dan, on the contrary, loved mixing himself up with other people’s
affairs, and was equally ready to help Emmy with the housework or give
Len advice about the farm.
“Why don’t you shack out your fowls in the pond stubble? It ud do them
good, and save you a bob or two in sharps.”
“That stubble ought to be ploughs by now,” Len would mourn.
“So it ought. But the point is that it ain’t. It’s stubble. And while
it’s stubble you may as well shack your fowls in it.”
“What I want is a steam-plough. No wonder I’m all behind, with the
little toy I’ve got--and the share for ever turning against the stones.
It’s all stones, this farm; this is the sort of thing they give us
ex-service men, and expect us to build a new world out of it. Stones.
You could scarcely grow mustard and cress on the Brow fallow, and I
can’t get decent machinery. The prices are wicked, and I don’t care to
pay ’em into the pockets of greasy mechanics getting ten quid a week.”
“If I was you, I’d do more with stock than grain. The ground isn’t good
around here, there’s no denying it--but if you had a few beasts----”
“And what am I to do with stock? If I kept sheep I’d have to get a
shepherd, and I can’t afford his wages. And as for cattle, the farmers
have been losing hundreds over cattle this year, thanks to government
letting us down. I’d start a milk-round if I was anywhere near a road,
but stuck out here----”
Dan would let him grumble on. Len had, in his brother’s opinion, been
born sorry for himself, and the only thing that ever seemed to make him
any happier was a good long cuss. So he seldom tried to argue him out of
his troubles, though convinced in his own mind that they were outweighed
by his blessings in the shape of wife and children, and though he found
their recital tremendously boring, especially this evening when his
heart was full of its own matters. He felt relieved when, after having
pessimistically considered the cows, shaken their heads over the pigs,
sighed over the oats, and given up all hopes of the barley, they left
Len’s dingy little box of an “office” for the cheerful kitchen, with its
leaping fire, flowered window curtains, and the colour and eyes of Emmy,
as she sat in a rocking-chair trying to force her daughter Ivy into a
clean pinafore.
Emmy was a cheery, buxom, overflowing soul, with warm-coloured cheeks
and a mop of red hair. She gave her brother-in-law a hearty kiss, and
told him to hold Ivy so that there might be some chance of her being
properly dressed before it was time for her to take her clothes off.
“Wriggling like a little worm, she is, and not fit to be seen since she
fell on that turkey’s egg--quite spoilt the front of her dress.”
“And quite spoilt the egg,” said Len, heavily sarcastic.
“Well, she couldn’t help it, poor mite, with those turkeys laying all
over the place as you might say. She finds it and she says: ‘Here’s a
beautiful egg, mumma,’ and brings it to me for a treat--and then she
falls over the dog’s chain and her father spanks her.”
“Poor Ivy!” said Dan. “What luck!”
“I don’ mind,” said Ivy.
She was a stolid child with a jammy countenance. Neither of Len’s
children could really be called attractive. Ivy had her mother’s
moon-face without her animation, and Leslie had his father’s inheritance
of the Le Couteur features, with an added beadiness. But to Daniel they
were both charming--he thought them the prettiest, funniest kids he had
ever seen, just as he thought Emmy, with her round face and peony
cheeks, the prettiest woman--prettier than Belle, though he loved Belle
the best. He took Ivy on his knee, and succeeded after a struggle in
tying her pinafore strings, while Leslie tugged at his sleeve and whined
for cigarette pictures. Then after he had searched his pockets for four
penn’orth of bull’s-eyes he had bought that morning in Lewes, and given
two cigarette cards to the rapacious Leslie, they settled down to a game
of snakes and ladders while supper was preparing--a game in which, after
some preliminary contempt, the father was persuaded to join, and in
which he forgot his woes with surprising quickness.
“Now--come to supper, or the tea will be cold!” summoned Emmy.
“One minute,” cried her husband. “I’ll have won in two more throws, if I
don’t get on to that damn snake on the last square but one.”
“If you get on the snake you’re to stop the game--I can’t wait while you
go back.”
Unfortunately Len got on the snake, and the game of snakes and ladders
was added to his list of grievances.
“They shouldn’t have a snake so close to the end--it isn’t fair, having
to go back almost from the winning post. Anyhow, I don’t think I approve
of these games with dice--teach the children to gamble, and we’ve got
enough of that already in the family.”
“Dad doesn’t gamble with dice,” said Daniel.
“No, he gambles with silly race horses he don’t know anything about. I
shouldn’t grumble if he was any good at it, but he can’t even give a
chap a tip that’s worth having--I dropped half a quid over that Selling
Plater he told me to back last meeting. Mark my words, Dan, he’ll have
you all sold up some day or other--what with his bets and his debts to
his brewer. Or, he’ll have his licence taken away for allowing betting
on the premises.”
“He don’t.”
“Yes, he does--I tell you; I’ve seen slips passed over the counter.”
“Shush!”
“We’re all friends here; you shouldn’t let him do it, Dan.”
“I’ve never seen it, and if I had I couldn’t stop it.”
“It’s all very well for you to take it so easy, but if dad loses his
licence and gets sold up, I tell you who can’t do anything for him, and
that’s me. It’s hard enough to keep my own place going. I sometimes
think I’ll chuck it up and take up fishing.”
“Fishing!” cried Emmy and Dan together.
“Yes--I might go into partnership over a trawler if I could put up the
money. After all, we’ve got the sea on both sides of the family. Have
you ever thought you’d like to go back to mother’s people and take up
that sort of life? Sometimes I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hook
it from this damn country and go back to Sark.”
“Oh, Len!” cried Emmy. “You’d never.”
“Why not? Reckon we’d do better for ourselves over there, and sometimes
I think I’d sooner be there than here. I can remember it a bit ...
rocks, and fog-horns for ever moaning ... can you remember it, Dan?”
“Not I! Leastways, I remember a lobster’s claw I had to play with, if
that’s remembering.”
“A lobster’s claw! What a thing to give a child,” cried Emmy.
“I want a lobster’s claw,” said Ivy.
“I want a lobster’s claw,” shrieked Leslie, and the conversation was
swept into an orgy of scolding and pacification.
§ 3
It might not have struck anyone that Len’s and Emmy’s household was a
particularly good advertisement for matrimony, but Daniel seldom left it
without an earnest desire to get married and have an Ivy and Leslie of
his own. At first this wish had been dim and general, a cloud that might
settle anywhere; but now it had definitely fallen on Belle Shackford. He
would like to see Belle sitting at his supper-table when he came home of
an evening; he would like to see her undressing his children as he had
seen Emmy undress Ivy and Leslie to-night. Of course, the domestic
picture was a little blurred by the fact that for the first years of
married life he and Belle would have to live at the George and bear with
its intrusions on their privacy and romance. Still, they would have
their own room--two rooms perhaps, for there was seldom any call to
house travellers at night--which would seem all the more private and
their own because of the family and tavern life surging outside. In his
mind as he walked home was a picture of candle light moving over low
beams, Belle’s face lifted into it, her hair streaming back into the
darkness of the bed as he stood looking down on her with the candle in
his hand.... It was a marvellously clear picture, the only one his
imagination held as yet of the intimate joys of marriage, and it brought
a strange fog of tears into his eyes.
He reached home in time to persuade the mate and master of a Newhaven
trawler that it would be wisdom to leave the bar before the carrier’s
’bus went town-wards for the last time. Dan had a good persuasive way
with drunks and seldom had occasion to use more than his tongue, though
he was ready enough with hand and knee when the situation really
demanded it. “I never saw anyone run out a chap more neat than Daniel
Sheather,” was the verdict of the ploughman of Upper Barndean.
When he had helped his father tidy the place and lock up he was free to
go to bed. His bedroom was a primitive matter, for of his own choice he
still slept in his childhood’s little room, hoping that the larger ones
might entice guests and raise the George from mere tavern level. He
slept under the droop of the George’s eaves--outside a far view towards
the Downs that make the Gate of Lewes, inside a cot-bed, a chest of
drawers with a jug and basin upon it, and one or two hooks on the wall.
To-night there was nothing either outside or in to distract him from his
rapid business of undressing and getting into bed. He had worked hard,
he had walked many miles, his lungs were full of the open air; so in
spite of the excitement thrilling at his heart he fell quickly asleep.
All that remained of that kiss at the foot of the Bostal Way was a dim
dream of candle light moving over the ceiling of a low-raftered room.