John Greatorex did not die that night. He had no mind to die: he was a
man of stubborn pugnacity and he fought his pneumonia.
The long gray house at Upthorne looks over the marshes of the high
land above Garth. It stands alone, cut off by the marshes from the
network of gray walls that links the village to the hill farms.
The light in its upper window burned till dawn, a sign to the brooding
and solitary land. Up there, in the low room with its sunken ceiling,
John Greatorex lay in the big bed and rallied a little as the clean
air from the moors lapped him like water. For the doctor had thrown
open all the windows of the house before he left. Presently Mrs. Gale,
the untrained village nurse, would come and shut them in terror, and
John Greatorex's pneumonia would get the upper hand. That was how the
fight went on, with Steven Rowcliffe on John Greatorex's side and Mrs.
Gale for the pneumonia. It was ten to one against John Greatorex and
the doctor, for John Greatorex was most of the time unconscious and
the doctor called but once or twice a day, while Mrs. Gale was always
there to shut the windows as fast as he opened them. In the length and
breadth of the Dale there wasn't another woman who would not have done
the same. She was secure from criticism. If she didn't know how to
nurse pneumonia, who did? Seeing that her own husband had died of it.
Young Rowcliffe was a dalesman and he knew his people. In six months
his face had grown stiff in the struggle with them. It was making his
voice stern and his eyes hard, so that they could see nothing round
him but stupidity and distrust and an obstinacy even greater than his
own.
Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. In his
big provincial hospital he had had it practically his own way. He had
faced a thousand horrible and intractable diseases with a thousand
appliances and with an army of assistants and trained nurses under
him. And if in his five years' private practice in Leeds he had come
to grips with human nature, it had been at any rate a fair fight. If
his work was harder his responsibility was less. He still had trained
nurses under him; and if a case was beyond him there were specialists
with whom he could consult.
Here he was single-handed. He was physician and surgeon and specialist
and nurse in one. He had few appliances and no assistant beside naked
and primeval nature, the vast high spaces, the clean waters and clean
air of the moors.
Yet it was precisely these things that his romantic youth had cried
for--that solitary combat and communion, that holy and solitary aid.
At thirty Rowcliffe was still in his romantic youth.
He had all its appearances about him. A life of continual labor
and discomfort had kept his body slender; and all the edges of
his face--clean-shaven except for its little dark moustache--were
incomparably firm and clear. His skin was bronzed and reddened by sun
and wind. The fine hard mouth under the little dark moustache was not
so hard that it could not, sometimes, be tender. His irreproachable
nose escaped the too high curve that would have made it arrogant. And
his eyes, keen and hard in movement, by simply keeping quiet under
lowered brows, became charged with a curious and engaging pathos.
Their pathos had appealed to the little red-haired, pink-skinned,
green-eyed nurse who had worked under him in Leeds. She was clever and
kind--much too kind, it was supposed--to Rowcliffe. There had been one
or two others before the little red-haired nurse, so that, though he
was growing hard, he had not grown bitter.
He was not in the least afraid of growing bitter; for he knew that his
eyes, as long as he could keep them quiet, would preserve him from all
necessity for bitterness.
Rowcliffe had always trusted a great deal to his eyes. Because of them
he had left several young ladies, his patients, quite heart-broken in
Leeds. The young ladies knew nothing about the little red-haired nurse
and had never ceased to wonder why Dr. Rowcliffe did not want to marry
them.
And Steven Rowcliffe's eyes, so disastrous to the young ladies in
Leeds, saw nobody in Morfe whom he could possibly want to marry. The
village of Morfe is built in a square round its green. The doctor's
house stands on a plot of rising ground on the north side of the
square, and from its front windows young Rowcliffe could see the
inhabitants of Morfe coming and going before him as on a stage, and he
kept count of them all. There were the three middle-aged maiden ladies
in the long house on the west side of whom all he knew was that they
ate far too many pikelets and griddle cakes for tea. There were the
two old ladies in the white house next door who were always worrying
him to sound their chests, one for her lungs and the other for her
arteries. In spite of lungs and arteries they were very gay old
ladies. The tubes of Rowcliffe's queer, new-fangled stethescope,
appearing out of his coat pocket, sent them into ecstacies of mirth.
They always made the same little joke about it; they called the
stethescope his telephone. But of course he didn't want to marry them.
There was the very old lady on the east side, who had had one stroke
and was expecting another every day. There were the two unmarried
daughters of a retired manufacturer on the far side of the Green. They
were plump and had red cheeks, if he had cared for plumpness and
red cheeks; but they had no conversation. The only pretty girl whose
prettiness appealed to Rowcliffe had an "adenoid" mouth which he held
to be a drawback. There was the daughter of his predecessor, but she
again was well over forty, rigid and melancholy and dry.
All these people became visibly excited when they saw young Rowcliffe
starting off in his trap and returning; but young Rowcliffe was never
excited, never even interested when he saw them. There was nothing
about them that appealed to his romantic youth.
As for Morfe Manor, and Garth Manor and Greffington Hall, they were
nearly always empty, so that he had not very much chance of improving
his acquaintance there.
And he had nothing to hope for from the summer visitors, girls with
queer clothes and queer manners and queer accents; bouncing, convivial
girls who spread themselves four abreast on the high roads; fat, lazy
girls who sat about on the Green; blowsed, slouching girls who tramped
the dales with knapsacks and no hats. The hard eyes of young Rowcliffe
never softened as he looked at the summer visitors. Their behavior
irritated him. It reminded him that there were women in the world and
that he missed, quite unbearably at moments, the little red-haired
nurse who had been so clever and so kind. Moreover it offended his
romantic youth. The little publicans and shop-keepers of Morfe did not
offend it; neither did the peasants and the farmers; they were part
of the place; generations of them had been born in those gray houses,
built from the gaunt ribs of the hills; whereas the presence of the
summer visitors was an outrage to the silent and solitary country that
his instincts inscrutably adored. No wonder that he didn't care to
look at them.
* * * * *
But one night in September, when the moon was high in the south, as
he was driving toward Garth on his way to Upthorne, the eyes of
young Rowcliffe were startled out of their aversion by the sudden and
incredible appearance of a girl.
It was at the bend of the road where Karva lowers its head and sinks
back on the moor; and she came swinging up the hill as Rowcliffe's
horse scraped his way slowly down it. She was in white (he couldn't
have missed her) and she carried herself like a huntress; slender
and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts. She looked at him as she
passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon. Her
lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands
tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to
speak to him. But of course she did not speak.
He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva. A
flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and
looked at her, and she went driving them before her. They trailed up
Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight. Their mournful,
musical voices came to him from the hill.
He saw her again late--incredibly late--that night as the moon swept
from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from
her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and
waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high
road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his
horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he
drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him. She
flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on
her forehead. From the turn of her head and the even falling of her
feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness
was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of
noticeable things.
The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to
himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at
night and isn't afraid?"
* * * * *
He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the
high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect
and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when
he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses
as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved.
And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."
The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts
and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs,
half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm
getting on. She's aware of me all right."
She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from
Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at
dawn.
The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the low close room
was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of
mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough
to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew. And in his
eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable.
She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer
extravagant ardor and energy of life. His tempestuously romantic youth
rose up and was troubled at the sight of her. And his eyes, that
had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest,
followed her now with that queer pathos that they had. It was the look
that he relied on to move desire in women's eyes; and now it traveled,
forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray
moorgrass where she went.
* * * * *
That was on Wednesday the fourteenth. On Friday the sixteenth he saw
her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house.
He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to
Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes,
waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.
In the east the broken shoulders of the hills receded, winding with
the dale like a coast line of gray cliffs above the mist that was
their sea. Tortured, mutilated by the jagged cloud that held her, the
moon struggled and tore her way, she lifted and freed herself high and
struck the marshes white. Defaced and sinister, above her battlements,
she looked at the house and made it terrible, moon-haunted. Its door,
low lighted, stood open to the night.
Rowcliffe drew back from the threshold to let a woman pass out.
Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it
was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer
morbid whiteness.
She went by without seeing him, clenching her hands and carrying her
young head high; and he saw that her eyes still held the tears that
she was afraid to spill.
Mrs. Gale stood behind her with a lamp, lighting her passage.
"Who is that young lady?" he asked.
"T' Vicar's laass, Gwanda."