THE SALVATION OF SOCIETY
After Ursula's departure Mary doubled her parochial activities. She
visited the wives of all John's married labourers; she ministered
continually to the invalids and old age pensioners; she organized a
dance in the School Room in aid of the Village Institute, and a whist
drive in aid of the local hospital. She was going to make Anderby the
most prosperous, popular, well-cared-for village in the East Riding.
The village regarded her efforts with mingled awe and irritation. Mrs.
Robson was wonderful. Her generosity, her persistence, her catholicity
of interest, all were wonderful. At the same time they were a little
embarrassing.
"You've no sooner got your shirt in t' wash but she's after you to see
if you want a new one," sighed Ted Wilson.
But even he agreed that she was wonderful.
One day she stood in a bookshop in Hardrascliffe, tired out by a week
of perpetual activity. She was looking for a birthday present for
John. Lately his silence had become so wearisome that she welcomed any
opportunity of rousing his admiration or dislike, if only to evoke a
remark. Now he might talk about a book. He seemed to enjoy reading
about agriculture and even sometimes read her passages from the
_Farmer's Weekly_.
Mary herself hadn't much use for books. Once they had been well enough,
but now she was too busy to be bothered with them. There were quite
a lot in the house that had once belonged to her mother, but none of
these would be likely to move John to the companionship of criticism.
She stood indifferently turning over the volumes offered her by Mr.
Forsitt the bookseller. They all looked a little dull, she thought.
"Haven't you anything more modern than these?" she asked. "I want
something with a sort of kick in it. No, not a story. He doesn't like
novels. Something about farming."
"Ah." Mr. Forsitt pressed the tips of his fingers together and
meditated. Then he suddenly ducked his head and scurried off to the
corner table. "I have it," he cried. "The very book for you, Mrs.
Robson." He returned flourishing a volume in a bright orange cover.
"Here we are! _The Salvation of Society_ by David Rossitur. Essays.
Just out."
Mary took the book from him, and gazed at the vermilion letters
across the wrapper. _The Salvation of Society._ Somehow the title was
familiar, though she could not remember where she had last seen it. A
queer title. Rather high-flown perhaps.
She opened the book and looked at the chapter headings: "The Generation
at the Cross-Roads," "Revolution and Beyond," "The Reincarnation
of Bestiality," "The Agricultural Calvary," "The Tyranny of
Possession"....
No. It was not a Methodist production. What then?
"Yes, Mrs. Robson. I think I may safely say I recommend that to you if
you want something exciting. I have not read it myself. Not quite in my
line perhaps. A little rash, I gather. A volume of essays by a young
gentleman recently expelled from Cambridge--or was it Oxford?"
"Yes?"
"Quite young, I gather. Oh, quite young. A mere boy, Mr. Locking
tells me. The Reverend Mr. Locking. He has advanced views. Very. The
parishioners at St. Paul's and St. Giles's hardly seem to like him. But
there, he buys a good many books from us. Then there was Mr. Coast. He
bought a copy--the schoolmaster from your part of the world I believe,
Mrs. Robson."
Coast! That was it. Mary knew now that she had seen the book during
that preposterous interview, when Coast had dared to condemn her for
lack of generosity. It would be rather entertaining to discover what
sort of literature appealed to him.
"Will it do for a birthday present for my husband?" she asked, smiling.
Mr. Forsitt was an old friend and Mary retained a childish habit of
taking tradesmen into her confidence, which many of her relations
thought most unbecoming.
"Oh, quite suitable, I think. Very interesting to a farmer, I dare say.
Let me wrap it up for you. Seven _and_ sixpence. And the next thing?"
She went home with the flamboyant cover discreetly veiled in brown
paper. She quite intended to amuse herself with it that night before
she handed it over to John. But when she reached Anderby Violet had
toothache and the groceries weren't unpacked, and books were all very
well, but one had other things to see about.
On Sunday she forgot all about it. On Monday and Tuesday she was busy
washing and ironing. On Wednesday she drove with John to Market Burton.
On Thursday she always churned.
That was a busy day. She turned and turned before the butter came,
and, even when the churning was done, there were golden slabs to be
wrapped in grease-proof paper ready for the carrier to convey them
into Hardrascliffe. Mary felt tired as she washed her hands. Nothing
exciting ever happened. There had not even been a satisfactory lot of
butter.
Outside the starlings were chattering in the naked trees. The mild
evening air--it was warm for February--might blow away that jaded
feeling. She mentally reviewed her list of pensioners and invalids.
Mrs. Watts! The name flashed across her mind. She had not visited her
for several weeks.
Mrs. Watts, being completely crippled by rheumatism, lived in a
high-backed chair in the kitchen of her small cottage, attended by
Louie, her half-witted niece. But from her chair the old lady could
acquire in one day more intimate and extensive knowledge of village
gossip than Mary could collect in a week.
So to Mrs. Watts she went.
Mrs. Watts received her boisterously. For a cripple she possessed
remarkable vocal and mental energy.
"Come in, Mrs. Robson," she shouted. "Come in! Now wherever have
you been all t' time? I haven't set eyes on you since back end o'
Christmas. Has Mrs. Foster gone yet? When's baby coming, eh?"
"Oh, of course," laughed Mary. "I quite see it's no use my ever telling
you anything. I don't know why I come here. You always know all my news
before it's happened. The baby's coming in April if all goes well."
She drew off her gloves, laid a small packet of tea on the mantelpiece
and sat down to enjoy herself. She had a whole hour before tea. One
could learn a lot from Mrs. Watts in an hour.
"Well, and how are you?"
"I'se about middlin'. I haven't caught sight o' t' edge o' Peter's robe
yet, and they say you've got to see that before you come t' gowlden
gates."
"Well, I'm glad of that."
"Ay. I think you are. There's nowt goes well in t' village but I think
we are glad on't. I don't know what some on us would do without you."
"Oh, you'd do well enough."
Lately a sneaking fear had found its way to Mary's mind that the
village could do without her. It was comforting to be reassured.
"Nay now, would we? Just look at Mrs. Foster. What good d'ye think
comes of her in her parts o' t' Wold? My nephew works for Burrages out
Middlethorpe way, and I hear all goings on there. Why she didn't send
so much as a jelly to Middlethorpe cricket club dance!"
"Well, she has other interests."
Mary was guiltily conscious that she found criticism of Ursula pleasant.
"Yes, she had a lot of interest in your chair covers, hadn't she?"
"Now what on earth did you hear about them?"
The old woman chuckled and, bending forward, patted Mary's hand with
stiff fingers.
"Now don't you take on about that. Your Violet told her cousin, Mrs.
Jellaby, what lives down in Spring Cottages. And she came in here a bit
back for a talk and told me how young Mrs. Foster had been staying up
at Anderby, and how she'd been wanting you to get oyster satin cushions
with black borders. 'Ah've no notion what oyster satin covers is like,'
ah says, 'but t' my mind, it sounds a bit messy.'"
"Violet has no business to repeat things she hears in the house."
"Why, bless you, don't you know a lass will tell owt tiv' her friends
whether she's in service or not? Ye can't stop it, Mrs. Robson. Ye
might as well get butter out of a dog's throat as a bit of gossip back
from a lass who's once heard tell on't."
"I suppose so. But it's rather hard on me, isn't it, if I can't even
keep my chair covers to myself?"
Mary smiled half whimsically, unable to be as annoyed as her dignity
demanded.
"Now then don't you go fashin' yourself about your chair covers. If
Violet says owt, it's never but what it's to your credit. I'm sure lass
or lady, there's none better respected on whole o' t' woldside, seek
where you like."
"Don't be silly. There are lots better. What I do, I do for pleasure."
"Ay, but it's a kind o' pleasure that takes it out of you more than
you let on. What's happened to roses that used to be in your cheeks,
eh? You've been fretting yourself because Mr. Coast wouldn't let you
have Jack Greenwood for shepherd lad, ay. Mrs. Greenwood told me all
about yon business. And how ye'd got him away now and all. 'Of all fond
fools,' ah said, 'yon schoolmaster chap takes a lot o' beating.' As I
said to Mrs. Greenwood, 'Eddication's all very well,' ah says, 'but it
doesn't teach you to drive a waggon let alone a plough!'"
Mary sighed. So every one knew about Jack Greenwood too. Every one knew
about everything. The fierce light that beats upon a throne is only
a candle's flicker beside the searching glare of village criticism.
It consoled her, though, to think that publicity could only further
reveal her love for Anderby. And it was pleasant to sit in the dancing
firelight, while the dusk crept up the orchard outside, and listen to
Mrs. Watts telling her how wonderful she was.
Mrs. Watts knew that Mary found it pleasant. Mrs. Robson, she
considered, was a very fine young woman, but as she talked a thousand
past acts of kindness, of gratuitous attention, of charitable patronage
rose before her. Somehow by her crude flattery she seemed paying a
little of her debt back to the mistress of the Wold Farm, and holding
over her, if only for a moment, that suzerainty which belongs to people
who can give us what we need.
An hour later, when Mary opened the front door and entered her
lamplit hall, she recalled with a faint sensation of disgust her calm
acceptance of the old woman's praise. But after all if people liked her
why shouldn't they say so? And if they spoke why shouldn't she listen?
"It isn't as if it was likely to turn my head," she thought as she drew
the curtains across the dining-room windows. "I'm not a little fool to
be taken in by that sort of thing."
She really thought she wasn't.
At the same time she was glad that John had to attend a vestry meeting
that evening, for she had suddenly remembered the orange-covered book.
Mr. David Rossitur's acid comments on capitalist farmers were likely to
prove an effective antidote to the cloying sweetness of Mrs. Watts's
adulation.
She produced the book from a drawer and sat down in John's arm-chair
before the fire.
At first, she read with knit brows; then her eyes opened wide; then she
sat up straight in the arm-chair, her lips parted in a half-amused,
half-incredulous smile. It really was an outrageous book! Mary was
unacquainted with any political or social theories more violent than
those expounded in the columns of the _Yorkshire Chronicle_. The
only excuse for this tirade against capitalism, patronage and "the
dependence of the proletariat upon the self-interested solicitude of
a bourgeois minority," lay in the youth of its author. Of course he
must be a mere boy--a student at Oxford, according to the preface.
And they were always very young, Mary was sure. A footnote explained
that the writer had spent one summer vacation on a walking tour,
investigating the conditions in which agricultural labourers of the
South Country lived and worked. It added that he hoped to continue his
researches in the North at an early date, for the conclusions he had
reached after his Southern pilgrimage had convinced him that the only
hope for England lay in social revolution. Anything less drastic--the
extension of trades unionism, or the political ascendancy of the Labour
Party--was merely a sop thrown to the proletarian Cerberus.
"He's very fond of that word 'proletarian'" thought Mary. She was not
absolutely certain what it meant.
There followed a scornful rejection of the passive optimism of the
Constitutionalists. Darwin was denounced as a traitor to the cause
of progress. "Society," declared Mr. Rossitur, "is perishing from
senile decay, awaiting the fabled miracle of evolution." Reform could
only follow destruction: destruction of empty loyalties, destruction
of cowardly compromise, of a tyranny based on material advantage and
sentimentalism that masked rapacity.
Quotations abounded. In his zeal to carry conviction the author rarely
expressed an opinion without the support of some famous authority,
as if his own cheques would not hold good unless backed by a great
financier.
It was all bewildering, and ridiculous and intriguing. Certainly
Mary had never encountered anything of the kind before. She became
entangled in a labyrinth of obscure reasoning. She was belaboured by
pages of savage rhetoric. She stumbled over unfamiliar phrases that
recurred here with unremitting urgency--"Living Wage," "Standard of
comfort," "Private capitalists." Quite half of it was wholly beyond
her comprehension.
"Perhaps I'm tired," she thought. "I shall be able to take it in better
to-morrow."
When John returned from the meeting, she rose regretfully and hid the
book in the sideboard drawer.
Of course, it was all nonsense; but what amusing nonsense! And somehow,
for all its extravagance, it was really rather refreshing. Some grace
of youth and burning sincerity relieved its ugliest violence and
crudest rhetoric. She wished she could talk to the author. It really
was amazing that anyone clever enough to go to Oxford should know so
little about farms. Mary would like to explain exactly why one had
to look after people who weren't capable of looking after themselves
and why one paid labourers' wages instead of every one sharing the
profits. It was all so self-evident when one knew anything at all about
agriculture. Of course Mr. Rossitur didn't. He was only a boy, whose
tempestuousness was too childish to be dangerous, and whose idealism
was too unselfconscious to be sentimental. Quite a dear, Mary thought,
but terribly ignorant of what things were really like.
"I wonder whatever John will think," she mused as she undressed
that night. The prospect of John's inevitable comment was highly
entertaining.
Mary had only two days to wait before his birthday, when she handed him
her present after the usual ceremonial kiss. My word, at least here was
something to make him talk! All day she looked forward eagerly to his
reception of the social theories of David Rossitur.
After tea she produced her sewing and, handing John his pipe and the
book, sat down to await his verdict.
For three hours she sat silently sewing. The black hands of the clock
crawled forward. The room was silent except when, every few minutes,
John's hand flicked over another page. It was a quarter past ten.
A coal, crashing suddenly from the grate to the hearth, aroused John.
He looked at the clock and put down his book.
"Bedtime I think, missus," he said.
Mary began to fold her work. Now was the time when he must speak. He
must really. Even if he had very little to say about most things, at
least he must have some sort of an opinion about this.
John was poking the largest lumps of coal out of the fire. It was his
favourite habit of economy.
Mary could bear it in silence no longer.
"Well, John," she remarked as casually as she could, "what do you think
of it? How far have you got?"
"Page 121," said John and, knocking the ashes out of his pipe against
the fender, he went upstairs to bed.
Next morning Mary walked up to Littledale to see the foreman's latest
baby. Coming home through the fields she recovered for the first time
from her husband's rebuff of the previous night.
Really John's stupidity mattered very little on a morning like this.
She wanted to race with the wind, to jump, to shout, to sing.
The freshly turned ploughland gleamed purple in the sunlight. A faintly
pink haze caressed the stubble.
What did anything matter?
It was good land. What nonsense that writer person talked all about
handing over property to the State to be run by syndicates of working
men. As though just anyone could farm who thought it would be rather
nice to walk about and watch the crops grow! Why, a hundred years ago
this height of the wold had been covered by gorse and short-cropped
turf. The sixty-acre and its neighbouring fields were still known as
the "Sheep Walk." To produce this fertile soil her grandfather and
her father and John had marled and manured and watched and waited as
though nothing else in the world was of any importance. Even in her own
day hundreds of tons of burnt chalk must have been scattered on the
hill-side to make those turnips swell so gallantly.
Mr. Rossitur, if you please, thought the land was easy to own. Mary
wanted to tell him that to care for it as she cared one had to give up
everything--even the chance of ever hearing anyone say something more
intelligent than "Page 121!"
From the other side of the hedge rose a sharp cry, half pain, half
terror.
Mary looked at the thick interlacing of hawthorn, but could see
nothing. Then came voices--a man's hoarse and angry, a boy's shrill
with fear.
She began to run along the uneven road.
The hedge was broken by a strip of fence across the stump of a tree.
Beyond, near a "pie" of turnips, stood a half-filled cart. Near it,
crouching in the road, knelt the boy, Jack Greenwood, whom Mary had
prematurely wrested from the Council School. Bending over him, with a
short whip in his hand, stood Waite, the beast man.
"Stop that! What are you doing, Waite?" called Mary. She climbed the
fence with greater speed than elegance, slipping a little on the damp
wood.
The man looked up, with surly defiance.
"I warn't doing nowt, Mrs. Robson. This lad's an idler. He needs a bit
o' stick now and then to keep him up ti'd mark."
"Come here, Jack," commanded Mary.
The boy rose and limped towards her sobbing, not at all unwilling to
make capital out of his misfortunes. A furrow of pink, washed clean by
tears, ran down his muddy face. He held one hand across his bleeding
ear.
"What has he been doing, Waite?"
"He's an idle, good-for-nowt. Back end o' ten o'clock I sent him up
to get the cart forked up wi' swedes, and as he never comed and never
comed, I had t' come up mysen and see what's wrong, and here he was,
with nowt to say, and nowt done."
"Did you ask him why?"
"Ay. That I did and all." Waite plucked a turnip from the pie with his
long handled fork and flung it into the cart.
Mary was quietly examining the boy's injuries. His shoulder was bruised
and his ear inflamed, but her opportune arrival had prevented further
damage.
For a little while she did not speak. Her mind was again with Mr.
David Rossitur, and his plea for the independence of the labouring
class, and for a wider recognition of the innate dignity of human
nature. Then she spoke slowly, almost as though addressing herself
alone.
"Oh. So you sent a boy up to do work you are supposed to do yourself,
and expect him to manage a horse, and to fork turnips into a cart he is
too small to reach and, because he couldn't do it, you came and beat
him, did you? And thought that no one would see? You know we don't beat
boys at Anderby. Jack has only just started to work. I wonder what sort
of opinion he has of farm life."
Waite continued to throw turnips into the cart. They fell from his fork
with dull little thuds, punctuating Mary's speech.
"I didn't know Jack was going to work for you," she continued. "It
isn't the first time you've done this sort of thing, you know. I can't
let you go on working together because you obviously don't know how to
treat a boy. And even if I take Jack away, you'll be up to the same
tricks with some one else, sooner or later. So I'm afraid you'll have
to go. I'm sorry--but I don't know what else to do. You shall have a
week's wages, but I can't allow this sort of thing here, don't you
see? Jack, come along with me and I'll give you something for your
ear. No, don't cry, because you're not much hurt really, you know. I'm
ashamed of you, Waite, and I hope you're ashamed of yourself. I shall
tell Foreman and my husband of the step I have taken. You can consider
yourself dismissed."
The man continued phlegmatically to throw turnips into the cart,
his body swaying loosely from the hips as he stooped and lifted. He
might never have heard Mary's voice, but as she went down the road she
sighed, conscious that she had made another enemy. First Coast, now
Waite....
The government of a kingdom was not always easy. Mary hated to be
disliked. She loved to imagine herself the idolized champion of the
poor and suffering, the serene mistress of bountiful acres, where the
season was always harvest and the labourers worthy of their hire. Coast
and Waite were somehow out of the picture.
Then she heard the squelch of Jack's boots on the road behind her. At
least, in dismissing Waite, she had fulfilled her rôle as champion of
the oppressed. She saw herself for a moment as she hoped Jack saw her,
calm mistress of his destiny snatching him from peril, and she smiled
again at the vision.
Then she wondered how John would take it when she told him she had
dismissed the beast man. But even this, she decided, did not matter,
and so went down to Anderby.