The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself,
to Upthorne.
Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself. She had no
very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something
about the road to Upthorne that repelled her. A hundred yards or so
above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green
bottom and winding up toward the naked moor. To the north, on her
right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A
thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further
hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On
her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls,
the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three
chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and
high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and
sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow
winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks
showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines.
At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in
hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged
by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne
lay unseen.
And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to
Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the
house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face,
its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for
Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living;
it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.
But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become
callous in every other.
* * * * *
Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in
the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot
thickness of the house wall.
Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head
over her shoulder to call to him.
"There's a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!"
There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex
knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set,
blue, pathetic eyes. Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her
drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had
hardened with her thirty-five years.
"Well yo' coom?"
Maggie called again and waited. Courageous in her bright blue Sunday
gown, she waited while her master rose, then, shame-faced as if driven
by some sharp sign from him, she slunk into the scullery.
Jim Greatorex appeared on his threshold.
On his threshold, utterly sober, carrying himself with the assurance
of the master in his own house, he would not have suffered by
comparison with any man. Instead of the black broadcloth that Alice
had expected, he wore a loose brown shooting jacket, drab corduroy
breeches, a drab cloth waistcoat and brown leather leggings, and he
wore them with a distinction that Rowcliffe might have envied. His
face, his whole body, alert and upright, had the charm of some shy,
half-savage animal. When he stood at ease his whole face, with all
its features, sensed you and took you in; the quivering eyebrows were
aware of you; the nose, with its short, high bridge, its fine, wide
nostrils, repeated the sensitive stare of the wide eyes; his mouth,
under its golden brown moustache, was somber with a sort of sullen
apprehension, till in a sudden, childlike confidence it smiled. His
whole face and all its features smiled.
He was smiling at Alice now, as if struck all of a sudden by her
smallness.
"I've come to ask a favor, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
"Ay," said Greatorex. He said it as if ladies called every day to ask
him favors. "Will you coom in, Miss Cartaret?" It was the mournful
and musical voice that she had heard sometimes last summer on the road
outside the back door of the Vicarage.
She came in, pausing on the threshold and looking about her, as if
she stood poised on the edge of an adventure. Her smallness, and the
delicious, exploring air of her melted Jim's heart and made him smile
at her.
"It's a roough plaace fer a laady," he said.
"It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its
white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle;
not because of these things but because it was on the border of her
Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there. Jim Greatorex had glamour
for her, less on his own account than as a man in whom Rowcliffe was
interested.
"You'd think it a bit loansoom, wouldn' yo', ef yo' staayed in it
yeear in and yeear out?"
"I don't know," said Alice doubtfully. "Perhaps--a little," she
ventured, encouraged by Greatorex's indulgent smile.
"An' loansoom it is," said Greatorex dismally.
Alice explored, penetrating into the interior.
"Oh--but aren't you glad you've got such a lovely fireplace?"
"I doan' knaw as I've thought mooch about it. We get used to our own."
"What are those hooks for in the chimney?"
"They? They're fer 'angin' the haams on--to smoak 'em."
"I see."
She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was
holding open the door of an inner room.
"Yo'd better coom into t' parlor, Miss Cartaret. It'll be more
coomfortable for you."
She rose and followed him. She had been long enough in Garth to know
that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go. Otherwise you
risk offending the kind gods of the hearth and threshold.
The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house
to its southern end. One wide mullioned window looked east over the
marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of
dwarfed and twisted trees.
To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its
boundary.
Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair
with the white antimacassar.
"Sit yo' down and I'll putt a light to the fire."
"Not for me," she protested.
But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire.
"You'll 'ave wet feet coomin' over t' moor. Cauld, too, yo'll be."
She sat and watched him. He was deft with his great hands, like a
woman, over his fire-lighting.
"There--she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his
hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.
"Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret."
There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even
when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But
his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was
said.
"Please don't trouble."
"It's naw trooble--naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."
He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he
called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."
Alice looked about her while she waited.
Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable
place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered
its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a
rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The
wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight
barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period
of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room,
the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere
enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper
an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between
parallel stripes of blue.
There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the
grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures,
the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink;
and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue
and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak
cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the
other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare
save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups,
the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from
vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties--faces defiant, stolid
and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.
All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering
to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and
importance.
* * * * *
She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of
Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie.
"Theer--that's t' road. Gently, laass--moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now
t' tray--an' a clane cloth--t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road."
Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations:
"Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?"
"T' best coops, Maaggie."
Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white
and gold). At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak
table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth
before the visitor. Humbly, under her master's eye, yet with a sort of
happy pride about her, she set out the tea-things and the glass dishes
of jam and honey and tea-cakes.
Greatorex waited, silent and awkward, till his servant had left the
room. Then he came forward.
"Theer's caake," he said. "Maaggie baaked un yesterda'. An' theer's
hooney."
He made no servile apologies for what he set before her. He was giving
her nothing that was not good, and he knew it.
And he sat down facing her and watched her pour out her tea and help
herself with her little delicate hands. If he had been a common man, a
peasant, his idea of courtesy would have been to leave her to herself,
to turn away his eyes from her in that intimate and sacred act of
eating and drinking. But Greatorex was a farmer, the descendant of
yeomen, and by courtesy a yeoman still, and courtesy bade him watch
and see that his guest wanted for nothing.
That he did not sit down at the little table and drink tea with her
himself showed that his courtesy knew where to draw the dividing line.
"But why aren't you having anything yourself?" said Alice. She really
wondered.
He smiled. "It's a bit too early for me, thank yo'. Maaggie'll mak' me
a coop by and bye."