Part 2

Difficult to say whether morality exists in a man like Bowden, whose blood is racy of the soil, and whose farmyard is so adjacent. That his son should run riot with the girl Pansy would have struck him more, perhaps, if Steer had not shot his dog--the affair so providentially put that fellow’s nose out of joint. It went far, in fact, to assuage his outraged sense of property, and to dull the feeling that he had betrayed his dog by not actively opposing village justice. As for the ‘Law,’ the Bowdens had lived for too many generations in a parish where no constable was resident to have any real belief in its powers. He often broke the law himself in a quiet way--shooting stray pheasants and calling them pigeons; not inspecting his rabbit traps morning and evening; not keeping quite to date in dipping his sheep, and so forth. The ‘Law’ could always be evaded. Besides, what law was Ned breaking? That was Steer’s gup!

He was contemptuously surprised therefore when, three weeks later, Ned received a document headed ‘High Courts of Justice. Winch _versus_ Bowden.’ It claimed five hundred pounds from him for breach of his promise of marriage. An outlandish trick, indeed--with the war on too! Couldn’t Ned please himself as to what girl he’d take? Bowden was for putting it in the fire. But the more the two examined the document the more hypnotised they became. Lawyers were no use except to charge money--but, perhaps, a lawyer ought to have a look at it.

On market day, therefore, they took it to Applewhite of Applewhite and Carter, who subjected them to a prolonged catechism. Had Ned engaged himself to the girl? Well, yes, he supposed he had. How had he broken off the engagement--had he written to the girl? No. Well, had he received letters from her asking him what was the matter? Yes; two. Had he answered them? No. Had he seen the girl and done it by word of mouth? No. He had not seen the girl for ten weeks. Was he prepared to see the girl or write to her? He was not. Was he ready to marry her? No. Why was that?

Ned looked at his father; and Bowden looked at Ned. The girl Pansy had never been mentioned between them.

Mr. Applewhite repeated his question. Ned did not know.

According to the lawyer, if Ned did not know, nobody knew. What had caused the change in his feelings?

It was Bowden who answered:

“He shot my dog.”

“Who?”

“Steer.”

Mr. Applewhite was unable to see the connection. If that was all, he was afraid young Mr. Bowden would either have to marry the girl or ‘stand to be shot at’ himself. And suddenly he looked at Ned. “Is there anything against this girl?” No, there was nothing against her.

“Then why not marry her?”

Again Ned shook his bullet head.

The lawyer smoothed his chin--he was a pleasant fellow, and a good fisherman.

“About this young lady, Miss Winch; excuse my asking, but I suppose you haven’t been putting the cart before the horse?”

For the third time Ned shook his head.

No, there had been nothing of that sort. He did not add that if there had he might not have been overmastered by the propinquity of the girl Pansy.

“There’s another girl in this, I suppose,” said the lawyer suddenly; “well, I don’t want to hear. It’s for you to decide what you’ll do--marry the girl or defend the action and get the damages reduced--it’s a stiff claim. You and your father had better go away, talk it over again, and let me know. If you defend, you’ll have to go up to London. In the box, least said is soonest mended. You’ll simply say you found you were mistaken, and thought it more honourable to break off at once than to go on. That sometimes goes down rather well with juries, if the man looks straightforward.”

The Bowdens went away. Steer passed them on the journey home. He was alone, driving that mare of his. The Bowdens grinned faintly as he went by. Then Bowden called out two words:

“Stickin’ plaster!”

If Steer heard he gave no sign, but his ears looked very red.

When his hurrying cart was a speck at the top of the steep rise, Bowden turned a little towards his son.

“I want to make that chap sweat,” he said.

“Ah!” answered Ned.

But how to make Steer sweat without sweating themselves? That was what exercised the Bowdens, each according to his lights and circumstances, which, of course, were very different. Even in this quandary they did not mention the girl Pansy. To do so would have been to touch on feeling; both felt it better to keep to facts and to devices. It was Bowden who put the finishing touch to a long and devious silence.

“If yu don’ du nothin’, Ned, I don’ see how they can ’ave yu. Yu’ve not putt nothin’ on paper. How’m they to tell yu don’ mean to marry her? I’d let ’em stew in their own juice. Don’t yu never admit it. Drop word to that lawyer chap that yu’m not guilty.”

Ned nodded, but underneath his stolidity he could not help feeling that it was not so simple as all that. By him, though not yet quite tired of the girl Pansy, his first choice had begun to be faintly desired again--her refinement ‘in the distance enchanted’ was regaining some of its attraction to his cooling blood. What would have been the course of events but for Steer’s next action is, indeed, uncertain.

V

In having the law of ‘those two fellers,’ Steer had passed through an experience with his niece which had considerably embittered feelings already acid. The girl had shown a ‘ladylike’ shrinking from pressing a man who had ceased to want her. There was an absolute difference between her wishes and her uncle’s. He would not have young Bowden marry her for anything; he just wanted revenge on the Bowdens. She wanted young Bowden still; but if she couldn’t get him, would cry quietly and leave it at that. The two points of view had been irreconcilable till Steer, taking the bit between his teeth, had assured his niece that to bring the action was the only way of dragging young Bowden back to her. This gave him a bad conscience, for he was fond of his niece, and he really felt that to bring the action would make that fellow Bowden stick his toes in all the more and refuse to budge. He thought always of Bowden and of the five hundred that would come out of _his_ pocket, not out of Ned’s.

Steer owned the local weed-sprayer, which, by village custom, was at the service of his neighbours in rotation. This year he fetched the sprayer back from Pethick’s farm just as it was on the point of going on to Bowden’s without reason given. Bowden, who would not have been above using ‘that chap’s’ sprayer so long as it came to him from Pethick in ordinary rotation, was above sending to Steer’s for it. He took the action as a public proclamation of enmity, and in ‘The Three Stars Inn,’ where he went nearly every evening for a glass of cider with a drop of gin and a clove in it, he said out loud that Steer was a ‘colley,’ and Ned wouldn’t be seen dead with that niece of his.

By those words, soon repeated far and wide, he committed his son just when Ned was cooling rapidly towards the girl Pansy, and beginning to think of going to church once more and seeing whether Molly wouldn’t look at him again. After all, it was he, not his father, who would have to go into the witness-box; moreover, he had nothing against Molly Winch.

Now that the feud was openly recognised by village tongues, its origin was already lost. No one--hardly even the Bowdens--remembered that Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer, and that Steer had shot it; so much spicier on the palate was Ned’s aberration with the girl Pansy, and its questionable consequences. Corn harvest passed, and bracken harvest; the autumn gales, sweeping in from the Atlantic, spent their rain on the moor; the birch-trees goldened and the beech-trees grew fox-red; and, save that Molly Winch was never seen, that Bowden and Steer passed each other as if they were stocks or stones, and for the interest taken in the girl Pansy’s appearance by anyone who had a glimpse of her (not often now, for she was seldom out of the farmyard) the affair might have been considered at an end.

The breach of promise suit was never mentioned--Steer was too secretive and too deadly in earnest; the Bowdens too defiant of the law, and too anxious to forget it; by never mentioning it, even to each other, and by such occasional remarks as: “Reckon that chap’s bit off more than he can chu,” they consigned it to a future which to certain temperaments never exists until it is the present. They had, indeed, one or two legal reminders, and Ned had twice to see Mr. Applewhite on market days, but between all this and real apprehension was always the slow and stolid confidence that the ‘Law’ could be avoided if you ‘sat tight and did nothin’.’

When, therefore, in late November Ned received a letter from the lawyer telling him to be at the High Courts of Justice in the Strand, London, at ten thirty in the morning on a certain day, prepared to give his evidence, a most peculiar change took place in that bullet-headed youth. His appetite abandoned him; sweat stood on his brow at moments unconnected with honest toil. He gave the girl Pansy black looks; and sat with his prepared evidence before him, wiping the palms of his hands stealthily on his breeches. That, which he had never really thought would spring, was upon him after all, and panic, such as nothing physical could have caused in him, tweaked his nerves and paralysed his brain. But for his father he would never have come up to the scratch. Born before the halfpenny Press, and unable to ride a bicycle, unthreatened moreover by the witness-box, Bowden--after a long pipe--gave out his opinion that it “widden never du to let that chap ’ave it all his own way. There wasn’t nothin’ to it if Ned kept a stiff upper lip. ’Twid be an ’oliday-like in London for them both.”

So, dressed in their darkest and most board-like tweeds, with black bowler hats, they drove in to catch the London train, with a small boy bobbing on a board behind them to drive the mare back home. Deep within each was a resentful conviction that this came of women; and they gave no thought to the feelings of the girl who was plaintiff in the suit, or of the girl who watched them drive out of the yard. While the train swiftly bore them, stolid and red-faced, side by side, the feeling grew within them that to make a holiday of this would spite that chap Steer. He wanted to make them sweat; if they did not choose to sweat--it was one in the eye for him.

They put up at an hotel with a Devonshire name in Covent Garden, and in the evening visited a music-hall where was a show called the ‘Rooshian ballet.’ They sat a little forward with their hands on their thighs, their ruddy faces, expressionless as waxworks, directed towards the stage, whereon ‘Les Sylphides’ were floating white and ethereal. When the leading danseuse was held upside down, Bowden’s mouth opened slightly. He was afterwards heard to say that she had ‘got some legs on her.’ Unable to obtain refreshment after the performance, owing to the war, they sought the large flasks in their bedroom, and slept, snoring soundly, as though to express even in their slumbers a contempt for the machinations of ‘that chap.’

VI

Though sorely tried by the ‘pernicketty’ nature of his niece, Steer had been borne up by the thought that he had only to hold on a little longer to obtain justice. How he had got her to the starting-post he really did not know, so pitiably had she ‘jibbed.’ The conviction that good solid damages would in the end be better for her than anything else had salved and soothed a conscience really affected by her nervous distress. Her pale face and reddened eyes on the way to the court disturbed him, and yet, he knew they were valuable--she was looking her best for the occasion! It would be all over--he told her--in an hour, and then she should go to the seaside--what did she say to Weston-super-Mare (with one syllable)? She said nothing, and he had entered the Law Courts with his arm through hers, and his upper lip very long. The sight of the two Bowdens seated on a bench in the corridor restored the burning in his heart. He marked his niece’s eyes slide round as they passed young Bowden. Yes! She would take him even now! He saw Ned shuffle his feet and Bowden grin, and he hurried her on--not for anything would he forego the five hundred out of that fellow’s pocket. At that moment the feud between him and his neighbour showed naked--those young people were but the catspaw of it. The custom of the court compelled them all presently to be sitting in a row, divided faction from faction by not more than the breadth of a pig. Steer’s thin face, racked by effort to follow the patter of the chap in a wig, acquired a sort of maniacal fixity; but he kept hold of his niece’s arm, squeezing it half-consciously now and again, and aware of her shrinking faint look. As for ‘those two fellers,’ there they sat, like as at an auction, giving nothing away, as if they thought--darn them--that the case must fail if they sat tight and did nothing. It seemed unjust to Steer that they should seem unmoved while his niece was wilting beside him. When she went up, trembling, into the ‘dock,’ a strong scent of camphor floated from Steer, stirred from his clothes by the heat within him. He could hardly hear her, and they kept telling her to speak up. He saw tears roll down her cheeks; and the ginger in his greying hair and beard brightened while he glared at those Bowdens, who never moved. They didn’t ask her much--not even Bowden’s counsel--afraid to, he could see! And, vaguely, through his anger and discomfort, Steer felt that, with her ‘ladylikeness,’ her tears, her shrinking, she was making a good impression on judge and jury. It enraged him to see her made to shrink and weep, but it delighted him too.

She came back to his side and sat down all shrunk into herself. Bowden’s counsel began outlining the defence, and Steer listened with his mouth a little open--an outrageous defence--for what did it amount to but a confession that the feller had played fast and loose! His client--said counsel--came into court not to defend this action but to express his regret as an honourable man for having caused the plaintiff distress, though not, he would submit, any material damage; for, now that they had seen her in the box, it would be absurd to suppose that what was called her ‘value in the marriage market’ had deteriorated. His client had come there to tell them the simple truth that, finding his feelings towards the plaintiff changed, he had considered it more honourable, wise and merciful to renounce his engagement before it was too late, sooner than enter into a union from the start doomed to an unhappiness, which, the gentlemen of the jury must remember, would, in the nature of men and things, fall far more heavily on the plaintiff than on the defendant himself. Though fully admitting his responsibility for the mistake he had made and the hastiness of which he had been guilty, the defendant believed they would give him credit for his moral courage in stopping before it was too late, and saving the plaintiff from the fiasco of a miserable marriage....

At the words ‘moral courage’ Steer had righted himself in his seat so suddenly that the Judge was seen to blink. ‘Moral courage!’ Wasn’t anybody going to tell those dodos there that the feller had been playing the rip with that cross-bred slut? Wasn’t anybody going to tell them that Bowden had put his son up to this to spite him--Steer? A sense of mystification and falsity muddled and enraged him; it was all bluff and blarney, like selling a horse....

With the robust common-sense characteristic--counsel went on--of plain and honest men, the jury would realise that one could not have things both ways in this world--however it might be in the next. The sad records of the divorce court showed what was the outcome of hasty and ill-considered marriages. They gave one to think furiously, indeed, whether these actions for breach of promise, with their threat of publicity, were not responsible for much of the work of that dismal tribunal. He would submit that where you had, as here, a young man, admitting his error and regretting it, yet manly enough to face this ordeal in order to save the plaintiff, and in less degree himself, of course, from a life of misery, that young man was entitled if not to credit, at least to just and considerate treatment at the hands of his fellow-citizens, who had themselves all been young and perhaps not always as wise as Solomon. Let them remember what young blood was--a sunny lane in that beautiful Western county, the scent of honeysuckle, a pretty girl--and then let them lay their hands on their hearts and say that they themselves might not have mistaken the emotions of a moment for a lifelong feeling.

“Don’t let us be hypocrites, gentlemen, and pretend that we always carry out that to which in moments of midsummer madness we commit ourselves. My client will tell you quite simply, for he is a simple country youth, that he just made a mistake which no one regrets more than he, and then I shall leave it in your hands--confident that, sorry as we all are for the disappointment of this charming girl, you will assess the real values of the case with the instinct of shrewd and understanding men.”

“Well, I’m darned!”

“H’sh! Silence in the court!”

The mutter which had been riven from Steer by counsel’s closing words, by no means adequately expressed feelings which grew with every monosyllable from that ‘young ruffian’ answering the cunning questions of his advocate.

With his sleek, bullet head he looked sheepish enough, but the thing was being made so easy for him--that was what seemed villainous to Steer, that and the sight of Bowden’s face, unmoved, the breadth of two pigs away. When his own counsel began to cross-examine, Steer became conscious that he had made a hideous mistake. Why had he not caused his lawyer to drag in the girl Pansy? What on earth had he been about to let his natural secretiveness, his pride in his niece, prevent his using the weapon which would have alienated every sympathy from that young rascal. He tingled with disappointed anger. So the fellow was not to be shown up properly! It was outrageous. And then suddenly his ears pricked. “Now, young man,” counsel was saying, “don’t you think that in days like these you can serve your country better than by going about breaking girls’ hearts?... Kindly answer that question!... Don’t waste his lordship’s time. Yes? Speak up, please!”

“I’m workin’ the land--I’m growin’ food for you to eat!”

“Indeed! The jury will draw their own conclusions as to what sort of leniency they can extend to a young man in your position.”

And Steer’s lips relaxed. That was a nasty one!

Then came the speeches from counsel on both sides, and everything was said over again, but Steer had lost interest; disappointment nagged at him, as at a man who has meant to play a fine innings--and gets out for seven. Now the Judge was saying everything that everybody had said and a little more besides. The jury must not let themselves this, and let themselves that. Defendant’s counsel had alluded to the divorce court--they must not allow any such consideration to weigh with them. While the law was what it was breach of promise actions must be decided on their merits. They would consider this, and they would consider that, and return a verdict, and give damages according to their consciences. And out the jury filed. Steer felt lonely while they were absent. On one side of him were those Bowdens whom he wanted to make sweat, on the other his niece whom, to judge from her face, he _had_ made sweat. He was not a lover of animals, but a dog against his legs would have been a comfort during that long quarter of an hour, while those two enemies of his so stolidly stared before them. Then the jury came back, and the sentiment in his heart stuttered into a form he could have sent through the post: ‘O Lord! make them sweat. Your humble servant, J. Steer.’

“We find for the plaintiff with damages three hundred pounds.”

Three hundred! And costs--with costs it would come to five! And Bowden had no capital; he was always on the edge of borrowing to get through--yes, it would push him hard! And grasping his niece’s arm Steer rose and led her out by the right-hand door, while the Bowdens sought the left. In the corridor his lawyer came up. The fellow hadn’t half done his job! And Steer was about to say so, when those two fellers passed, walking as though over turnips, and he heard Bowden say:

“Think he’ll get that stickin’ plaster--let ’im wait an’ see!”

He was about to answer, when the lawyer laid hold of his lapel.

“Get your niece away, Mr. Steer; she’s had enough.” And without sense of conquest, with nothing but a dull irritable aching in his heart, Steer took her arm and walked her out of the precincts of the law.

VII

The news that New Bowden had ‘joined up’ reached the village simultaneously with the report that Steer had ‘shot’ him in London for three hundred pounds and costs for breaking his promise to Molly Winch. The double sensation was delicious. Honours seemed so easy that no one could see which had come off best. It was fairly clear, however, that Molly Winch and the girl Pansy had come off worst. And there was great curiosity to see them. This was not found possible, for Molly Winch was at Weston-super-Mare and the girl Pansy invisible, even by those whose business took them to Bowden’s yard. Bowden himself put in his customary appearance at ‘The Three Stars,’ where he said quite openly that Steer would never see a penny of that money; Steer his customary appearances at church, where he was a warden, and could naturally say nothing. Christmas passed, and the New Year wore on through colourless February and March, when every tree was bare, the bracken’s russet had gone dark-dun, and the hedgerows were songless.

Steer’s victory had lost him his niece; she had displayed invincible reluctance to return as a conquering heroine, and had gone into an office. Bowden’s victory had lost him his son, whose training would soon be over now, and whose battalion was in Flanders. Neither of the neighbouring enemies showed by word or sign that they saw any connection between gain and loss; but the schoolmistress met them one afternoon at the end of March seated in their carts face to face in a lane so narrow that some compromise was essential to the passage of either. They had been there without movement long enough for their mares to have begun grazing in the hedge on either hand. Bowden was sitting with folded arms and an expression as of his own bull on his face. Steer’s teeth and eyes were bared very much like a dog’s when it is going to bite.

The schoolmistress, who had courage, took hold of Bowden’s mare and backed her.

“Now, Mr. Steer,” she said, “pull in to your left, please. You can’t stay here all day, blocking the lane for everybody.”

Steer, who after all prized his reputation in the parish, jerked the reins and pulled in to the hedge. And the schoolmistress, without more ado, led Bowden’s mare past, foot by foot. The wheels scraped, both carts jolted slightly; the two farmers’ faces, so close together, moved no muscle, but when the carts had drawn clear, each, as if by agreement, expectorated to his right. The schoolmistress loosed the head of Bowden’s mare and said:

“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, Mr. Bowden; you and Mr. Steer.”

“How’s that?” said Bowden.

“How’s that indeed? Everybody knows the state of things between you. No good can come of it. In war-time too, when we ought all to be united. Why can’t you shake hands and be friends?”

Bowden laughed.

“Shake ’ands with that chap? I’d suner shake ’ands with a dead pig. Let ’im get my son back out o’ the Army.”

The schoolmistress looked up at him.