Part 28

Marion went to Cheltenham when her sister Ethel was a baby two years old. She made many friends, for she was good at games and a creature of unusual spirit; but the principal feature of her life was a sudden and passionate friendship for one of her mistresses, a languid pre-Raphaelite young woman with a phthisical tendency who made her read a good deal of romantic literature of a sentimental kind. Miss Randall’s literary heroes were Parsifal and Galahad, and her fetish personal purity, the shame-faced purity of impotence. She was not fond of men, she said, although she allowed herself the licence of a spiritual flirtation with an advanced young priest of the Church of England, to whom she opened her soul.

In due course Marion’s adoration of her mistress went the way of all such passions; but her taste for letters remained. In her eighteenth year her mother suddenly died, and she returned to The Dyke to look after her father and her baby sister. Even in the excitement of her new activities she rebelled, feeling herself isolated, alien, condemned to an infinity of small-talk.

She became the hostess of her father’s friends; farmers of every age and type, who made love to her with varying degrees of rustic clumsiness but seemed to Mr Prosser the most desirable of suitors. Usually they drove up to The Dyke on Sunday evenings or after Ludlow market. Some, by their liquorish assumption of an easy conquest, offended her and caught the rough side of her tongue; but she soon found that with them her genteel shades of irony were so much waste of time, since they were not even understood.

The young men retired puzzled, and their sisters sympathised with them. ‘She isn’t natural,’ they said, ‘and you can’t go against nature like that. I never could think what you saw in her.’ In this way Marion Prosser got a reputation for shrewishness and conceit. The young men of the neighbourhood felt that even the possession of The Dyke would be a small compensation for that of such a difficult wife. They began to treat her with the instinctive respect of the terrier for the hedge-hog, leaving her to her books and to her fancies.

With these, for some years, she was content. The walls of her bedroom at the Dyke showed evidences of culture in as many strata as can be found in the coloured ribbon along the edge of a geological map of England. They ranged from the primary Rossettis of her Cheltenham period to reproductions of late impressionist pictures. Among books she groped her way determinedly. In Ludlow she found a branch of one of the London circulating libraries. Every week she would drive there in her pony trap and bring back the books that she had ordered, to the amazement of the stationer who kept the shop. Her father laughed at her tastes. Among his friends she gained the reputation of a bluestocking, which was enough to make any young man think twice before he spoke to her. And the years went by.

They were dull years, and for very boredom she tried to identify herself with the work of the farm. She threw herself violently into these new interests to the amazement of her father. Although he was still more than a little afraid of her, he could not help respecting her capability. During the lifetime of her mother he had been so infused with the spirit of this active woman that he had appeared to be a man of some determination. Her death annihilated him: he had relapsed into nonentity, caring nothing, as it seemed, for his crops or his herds, driving in regularly every week to Ludlow market like an automaton, driving back in the evening, morose and fuddled, with no clear idea of what he had been about. On these occasions he would talk piteously of his motherless girls, and his large, sentimental eyes would fill with tears. He confided to his friends that he himself was not long for this world, though, physically, he was as strong as a horse.

Marion’s determination changed all that. Subtly, without his knowledge, she pulled him together and made a man of him again, and, never having known the subjection with which her mother had entered the estate of marriage, she did what she liked with him, sometimes wounding his pride with her rather brutal frankness. Yet, even when he was wounded, he submitted to her; for she flattered him by pretending that he was the real head of the household. At root he was a lazy man, and dared not quarrel with his comforts. He realised, too, that the knowledge of practical farming, that was as deeply rooted in him as an instinct, was more essential to the success of their partnership than Marion’s acute and active mind.

He prospered, and in moments of exaltation would tell himself that she was only a girl after all and that he was the man who counted. He made a startling recovery of his self-possession and talked no more of death; but his greatest happiness he still found in the society of his younger daughter Ethel, a child whose nature was nearer to his own. Some day, he decided, Ethel should marry a solid husband of his choosing, some big man with many lowland acres, and when the grandchildren began to come along, he would pass a quiet old age among them. Marion should have The Dyke. Even if she were not the elder she had earned it. It seemed unlikely that she would ever marry, being so hard to please.

Now, at the age of twenty-eight, Marion found herself lonely. The farm work had become so intimate a part of her life that it served no longer to distract her. Life was slipping away from her. Ten years had passed almost without her knowing it. In another ten she would be nearly forty. A hidden fear possessed her that by separating herself from her own class and kind she had sacrificed the chance of living. Life was the thing that mattered, and she had exchanged her heritage for a few pitiful shreds of culture. The motherly cares that she lavished on Ethel were a poor substitute for veritable maternity, and she knew it. She began to see that by refusing all commerce with the men of her own class in the hope of realising a problematical grand passion she had sacrificed all opportunity of passion whatever.

For some years after leaving Cheltenham she had exchanged letters with a number of her college friends, but little by little this correspondence had grown more slender and at length it had ceased. In her growing apprehension she made an attempt to revive several of these ancient friendships. The result filled her with despair and vague envies. Most of her girl friends were married: many of them sent her photographs of their husbands and children. She alone, it seemed, of all their company was left alone. It was her own fault. She knew it was her own fault, for her mirror told her that she did not show her age and that she was still desirable. All things seemed to conspire in fostering her unrest. The sights and sounds of the great farm around her were full of insistence on the cycle of birth, fruitfulness, and decay. Her books helped her no more. Her old æsthetic idols had long since been broken, and her latest passion, Whitman, whom she had discovered through the anthologies, swamped her mind with an endless adoration of the body’s pride, the splendour of the flower no less than that of the fruiting.

In this distressful and desirous state, two incidents moved her deeply. The first was the dismissal of one of the farm girls who had been seduced by a clogger and had gone into the workhouse to have her baby. She was a puny, undesirable creature, with neither beauty nor health, yet she had found a lover. The second was the scandal of Mary Malpas, her old school friend, and the young lodger at Wolfpits, rehearsed with many winks by Mr Williams, whom her father had brought in for a glass of whisky on a Sunday evening.

‘A well set-up chap, that Fellows!’ said Williams to her father. ‘It’s no great wonder she’s took a fancy to him.’

‘Well, well, ’tis the way of the world!’ said Mr Prosser comfortably. ‘Fill Mr Williams’s glass, Marion!’

She did so, and then, furiously blushing, left the room.

‘What’s up with your maid?’ Williams asked. ‘I reckon I’ve shocked her. Did I say anything out of the way?’

‘Not you! She’s a rum ’un is Marion,’ Mr Prosser laughed.

And a few days later she had met Abner returning from his fruitless visit to The Dyke.

She had looked at him standing bare-headed in the level sunshine, and seen that he was well-favoured, but when she pulled up her horse and emerged from the dream state into which the rhythm of trotting hoofs had thrown her she had not thought that this meeting would be different from any other with a labourer out of work. She liked Abner’s face, and for this reason had taken the trouble to ask him where he lived. Then came the word ‘Wolfpits,’ and a sudden realisation that Fellows was the name that Mr Williams had mentioned in his scandalous tale. It thrilled her to find herself face to face with Mary’s lover. She lowered her eyes, not daring to look at him, and all the time her soul was consumed with a curiosity to see more of him, to find out what he was like. She knew that this curiosity was dangerous, that she was deliberately courting temptation, but she had had enough of prudence and felt that she was old enough to look after herself. And yet she knew that she had done a momentous thing when she told him to call next morning at The Dyke, and feared that trouble, indefinite trouble, might come of it.

Abner had not been working three days on the farm when Harris, his principal labourer, told Mr Prosser who the new workman was: ‘Young Mrs Malpas’s fancy man,’ he called him; and Mr Prosser, who set great store on the respectability of his farm, felt that he had made a mistake in employing him. The matter had been settled by Marion. No doubt if she had known all the circumstances of the case she would not have taken him on.

‘Do you know who this young chap is, Marion?’ he asked.

‘Yes. He comes from Wolfpits.’

‘Do you realise that he’s the chap Williams was talking about, the one that’s living with Mary Malpas?’

‘Yes, I do. Mr Williams himself said he didn’t blame her.’

‘I thought you yourself were put out a bit by his mentioning it.’

‘Put out? Of course I wasn’t. Why should I be put out?’

‘I think it’s bringing the scandal rather near home having him here.’

‘He’s a good workman, isn’t he?’

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him that way.’

‘Well, that’s all you want to know.’

‘Harris doesn’t speak well of him.’

‘Harris is jealous of every one who sets foot in the place. You’d think he owned it.’

‘And what’ll the vicar say?’ he joked.

‘I don’t know nor care. But I’m sure we’re doing right to employ him. I don’t know what would happen to poor Mary with that good-for-nothing Malpas in jail and this man out of work.’

‘Well, I suppose you know best,’ said Mr Prosser. He had not expected Marion to take the matter up so warmly. And Abner stayed.

He was not long in finding out who was the real ruler of The Dyke and that Mr Prosser, for all his commanding figure, stood for nothing. When the men knocked off for their dinner at midday and the two girls came down the field carrying ‘baggins’ of bread and cheese and great jugs of harvest beer, they would wink at each other and say: ‘Here comes the boss!’

Marion scarcely ever spoke to him more than a word, but her eyes were conscious of him, and he always felt that he was working under her scrutiny. Whenever they spoke together he was aware of the fact that it was she who had got him his job and that she could take it away from him as easily. When he came back from his work at night Mary would ask him questions about her old friend, but he could never satisfy her.

‘Does she know that you come from here?’ she would say.

‘Of course she knows. I told her at the first.’

‘But she’s never mentioned me? Never asked after me?’

‘We’ve never spoke ten words together.’

‘It’s funny, that! When you come to think of her and me having slept in the same bed. . . . She must know about me!’

‘She’s a rum ’un, Miss Marion. There’s no getting away from that.’

He and Mary never saw much of each other in those days, for Abner had to get up very early in the morning in time for his seven mile walk, and the harvest labour was severe. Severe, and yet pleasant, for the summer weather held and no rain fell. The sun shone pitilessly on the whitening stubbles, but the corn-fields of The Dyke were so lifted upon the back of the hills that they seemed to be part of a high cloudland and free from all heaviness. On the lower levels the whir of reaping machines might be heard, but higher up the fields were so unlevel, following the broken contour of the hills and bounded by the sloping ramparts of the dyke, that all the reaping must be done with sickles and the dry shocks carried to the head of a rough road. Abner had not the skill to wield a sickle, and so in this part of the labour he was useless. Harris, the labourer, who acted as foreman when Mr Prosser was not in the fields, resented this. Before Marion’s interest in the farm began he had been his master’s right-hand man. He had been present at the time when Abner was first employed by Mr Prosser, and knowing that the newcomer was a protégé of Miss Marion’s, was naturally jealous. When the men sat in the shade of a hedgerow for lunch he grumbled to his mates and grudged Abner his share of the food. The two casual labourers were inclined to take Harris’s side; but old Avery, a man of sixty who had worked at The Dyke all his life, stood up for Abner.

‘I don’t know what the place is coming to,’ Harris said. ‘We don’t want no navvies here. There’s too many about as it is. ’Tis a farming man’s job, reaping. I reckon you’re one of Miss Marion’s fancies. You’d a’ better look out!’

The men laughed, and Abner asked him what the hell he meant.

Harris was a dangerous-looking customer for all his years, strong as a bull, with a low, ape-like forehead, badger-gray hair, and long, ungainly arms that seemed to have been bowed by the carrying of trusses of hay.

‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing. We don’t want no bleedin’ outsiders here, snatching the bread out of our mouths.’

Violence would surely have followed, but at the most dangerous moment the farmer and his daughters arrived. The reaping of the twelve-acre field was almost finished, a huge expanse of stubble lay gleaming under the noon-day sun, and crackled with heat. In the midst of the field a square of barley stood unreaped and shimmering, and within it cowered a secret multitude of field-mice, hares, and rabbits that the destruction of their homes had driven inwards. Mr Prosser and Marion carried guns, and Ethel was playing with three dogs that sniffed and trembled with eagerness for this annual pastime of slaughter.

‘Now, Harris, let’s get a move on!’ said the farmer.

The horses, that had stood stamping and swishing their tails and flicking flies from their ears in the shade of an elder-bush, were brought round with cries of encouragement, and the machine rolled clanking over the stubble towards the standing corn. Prosser and his daughters stayed behind in the hedgerow, the day’s work went on, and as the square diminished, narrowing with each turn of the machine, the dogs sniffed along the edge of that narrow sanctuary until the guns were ready.

‘Give Miss Marion a hand with her loading, Fellows,’ Prosser shouted. ‘Tell the men to get their sticks ready, Harris, and we’ll put the dogs in on the far side.’

Abner and Marion stood together with the sun beating on their backs. The dogs ran barking into the corn. Above them, in the eye of the sun, a kestrel hovered. Three frightened rabbits bolted from the farther edge. Prosser fired two barrels and killed one. Another was wounded, and Harris ran after it with ungainly strides and stick uplifted. He brought down the stick with a savage cry and dashed out the animal’s brains. ‘I got him, the varmint!’ he shouted.

The multitude within the square of corn trembled. One by one, terror drove them out into the open. Marion fired twice and missed. Her hands shook as she gave the gun to Abner to reload. She could not see her pitiful target; she saw nothing but the young man at her side with his sun-bleached hair, his red chest and neck, and the milk-white skin above the roll of his shirt sleeves.

‘Quick! You’m missing of them!’ he cried.

She fired again, and missed. She could hit nothing.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve been too long in the sun. You’d better take the gun yourself.’

And she stood watching the sureness of his aim as he fired, knocking over the pitiful, bright-eyed, furry creatures one by one. She watched him, fascinated, conscious only of his health and strength and the perfect co-ordination of his body. She saw it as that of her friend’s lover, and in a yearning tenderness she thought of that hidden life away in Wolfpits. She could stand it no longer.

‘Give me the gun,’ she said. ‘Don’t shoot any more.’

She took the weapon from him and went over to join her sister in the hedge, where she sat watching the scene of slaughter in a dream. Then she got up suddenly, telling Ethel that the sun was too much for her, and went straight home to her bedroom. All afternoon she lay on her bed in the green light of a venetian blind. Her eyes burned and her head was splitting, but she knew that this was not altogether because of the sun. Later, when she had bathed her eyes in cold water and done her hair, she pulled out an old album in which there was a photograph taken at the Ludlow school where Mary Malpas had been her friend. It was a group ranged round the central figures of the two precise spinsters who kept the academy. She and Mary Condover were standing side by side: two solemn, self-conscious, childish faces with eyes staring straight at the photographer. Now Mary Condover was Mary Malpas, and had this man for a lover. Over in the secrecy of Wolfpits they loved. Ethel came knocking at the door with a cup of tea. The sound of her knock made Marion jump. It was not like her to be nervous.

‘They’ve counted the rabbits,’ said Ethel. ‘Thirty-two! That’s two more than last year. Dad’s ever so pleased. Is your headache better?’

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ said Marion. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

For several days she saw next to nothing of Abner. One morning, however, her father sent him up to her with a message. She was making pastry in the kitchen; her hands and arms were white with flour and the heat of the range had flushed her face. Again she found that in his presence she lost her self-possession, and falling on an awkward silence she blurted out:

‘Well, how does it suit you?’

‘Well enough,’ he replied. ‘Thanks to you, miss.’

‘Oh, don’t thank _me_!’ she said, with a laugh.

He was going, but she called him back to the kitchen door.

‘Don’t you find the walk to Wolfpits rather tiring?’ she asked.

‘It’s a fair step,’ he said. ‘But I don’t take much count of it.’

‘Why don’t you stay up here till harvest’s over?’ she said. ‘You could make up some sort of a bed in the loft.’

He thanked her, but refused. ‘I find a good bit to do when I get home nights,’ he said. ‘They can’t get on in the house without me.’

‘They?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘Ah, well, it won’t be for long.’

While they were speaking together at the door Harris passed them with his basket slung over his stooping shoulders. He touched his cap to Marion, and gave Abner a wry smile as he passed. Marion returned to the kitchen without another word, and Abner, on his way back to the field began to puzzle his head as to what she had meant by her sudden change of front when he had excused himself from sleeping at The Dyke. The scorn that she had put into her repetition of the word ‘they’ made him think that perhaps there was more justification than he had imagined in Mary’s feeling of resentment against Marion Prosser. But if she felt sore with Mary for any reason, there was no need for her to practise on him. He wasn’t going to be lugged in to any petty feminine quarrel, they might be sure of that! He had quite enough to do on his own keeping even with that leering devil Harris. Mr Harris was going to cop it one of these days, and no mistake!

He dismissed Marion Prosser from his mind. And yet, all through the hot harvest season the two of them were meeting and passing with a sense of something desired but unspoken on the part of Marion; and whenever they met there came into Abner’s mind a grudging recognition of her physical presence. He decided that he did not like this strong, dark, almost boyish creature who, without even speaking, could so thrust herself upon his consciousness. She was too secret for him. He wished that she would speak out what she had to say so that they might know where they were and be finished with it, and since she would not do so he avoided her.

Meanwhile the harvest season was drawing to a close. The later crops were marred by the long-awaited rain. From every corner of the uplands came the same story: straw so weak as to be worthless and wheat sprouting in the ear. Prosser, who could well stand these losses and many more, picked up an infection of grumbling at the Ludlow market ordinary. Not only were the standing crops ruined but the extra hands were eating their heads off. Harris echoed his lamentations, and Abner, together with the two other outsiders who had been engaged for the harvest, would have been paid off but for the intervention of Marion.

He knew nothing of this. Through all that dead, wet season, when the baked hill-sides steamed with rain and morning skies were heavy with autumnal mist, he busied himself with odd jobs about the farm. It was important for him if he were to find work in the neighbourhood when the job at The Dyke was over, that he should learn as much as he could of the farm-labourer’s craft. He learned to milk, to brush the horses and to bed them down, helped with the lifting of the main-crop potatoes and dug them into the immense buries, shaped like the barrows of the stone-men on Castel Ditches, in which they were stored for winter.

Then, sudden, unheralded, came a September summer. The mists disappeared; the drowned crops stood up golden in a hot and level sunshine; the work of the fields began again. They laboured incessantly, for the sunshine and drought were now more precious than gold. They worked so hard from the light of dawn until the stunted sheaves threw gigantic shadows, that there was no room in his mind for the foibles of Marion or the growing jealousy of Harris. Prosser and his girls came down into the fields to aid them. The sheaves ripened against time, and Prosser watched the sky and tapped his glass all day long. He held on as long as he dared; but on the eighth day of the drought the glass began to fall, and the last sheaves were carted from the fields by moonlight.

At one o’clock in the morning they knocked off, exhausted, and strangely happy in the consciousness of a work well done; but the sense of happiness departed from Abner as he walked home through the owl-haunted twilight, for he knew that the job at The Dyke was over, and he had nothing else before him. At the end of the week, he supposed, he would draw his money and be faced with a new search for employment.

Next day, in accordance with the ancient custom of The Dyke, a harvest home was held in the long kitchen of the house. All morning Marion, her sister, and Agnes the maid were busy baking cakes and boiling hams for the festival. The wives and children of the labourers were asked to share in these rejoicings, and more than twenty usually sat down to the long table at night. Abner and the other extra hands were expected to come, but Mary Malpas was not invited.