Part 29

Abner saw nothing strange or pointed in the omission, and indeed he had no time to spare for ceremonies of this kind, having been bred in a country where feudal customs had long since died away under the new and harder influence of capitalism. But to the labourers at The Dyke, and particularly to older men such as Daniel Avery, the harvest home was a feast as religious as any ancient mystery. To them it was the crown of the year and its labours, more vital and more significant than any convention of the calendar. Mr Prosser, as a member of the older generation, was himself attached to the custom. It reminded him of his boyhood, of the days when his father was master of The Dyke and his grandfather sat watching the dances from the chimney corner, and in this way it comforted him with a sense of continuity and flattered those vestiges of family pride which were the deepest elements in his nature. The day always found him in the best of spirits, and Marion, who loved to see her father made happy even by the simplest things, caught a little of his joyful infection. The house was in a stir; the servants laughed and sang about their work; the oaken dresser was spread with holiday fare. Marion caught old Avery in the yard and made him promise to sing his mole-catcher’s song.

‘If I do sing it, I mun sing it right through,’ said the old man, with a wink. ‘I can’t mind the verses without I sing them in arder.’

She laughed; for many of his verses were indecent. ‘You shall sing just what you like, Dan,’ she said. As well quarrel with the indecency of the Bible as that of Avery’s songs.

Mr Prosser had told the men to leave their work at five o’clock instead of at six, in order that they might go home to clean themselves and fetch their families. Only Hayes, the cowman, who slept on the premises, was to be left behind. Abner, old Avery, and Harris set off down the drive together. The others moved too slowly for Abner, for he had seven miles in front of him. All day long Harris had taken a malicious pleasure in letting Abner know that his time was up and that The Dyke would soon be shut of him. There had been one or two ugly moments, softened by the good humour of old Dan. Now they walked alongside in silence, Abner setting the pace.

‘Hey, you do go too fast for old bones, my son!’ said Avery.

‘Wants to get home to his missus,’ said Harris.

‘Here, you’d better drop that!’ said Abner warningly.

But Harris would not be warned. He knew, as well as the others, that Mary Malpas had not been invited to The Dyke. ‘I reckon you’m going to leave her behind to-night,’ he said.

‘I reckon you’d better mind your own business. I’ve had a damn sight too much of your lip.’

Harris laughed. ‘Stands to reason they won’t have that kind of muck in the company of decent married women and innocent childer,’ he said.

Abner did not wait to answer him. He let out with his right, catching Harris on the temple, and sent him spinning toward the ditch.

‘Steady, lad, steady!’ cried old Avery.

Harris pulled himself together and made straight for Abner with his head low down like a bull. He was the older man, and, in spite of the iron strength of his arms, Abner always had the advantage. Harris fought desperately with his hob-nailed boots as well as his fists. They fought till their faces were bloody and their clothes torn. Old Avery whined at them to give over, but they took no notice of him. At last Abner drove Harris into the ditch, where he lay spluttering blood. ‘I reckon that’ll teach you to keep your bleedin’ mouth shut!’ said Abner savagely, and left him there with the old man trembling and shedding weak tears above him.

He washed in the Folly Brook and had made himself fairly presentable by the time he reached Wolfpits.

‘I thought you were going to the harvest home,’ said Mary.

‘Then you thought wrong,’ said Abner irritably. ‘Give us some tea.’

Neither Harris nor his family turned up at The Dyke that evening. Old Dan, who had kept his own counsel, was in the middle of his mole-catching song when one of the ploughman’s children came in with a message to say that her dad was in a fever, and the bed wringing wet under him.

‘Why didn’t your mother come?’ Prosser asked.

‘Dad wouldn’t let her,’ said the child.

Marion took her aside and gave her a piece of cake.

‘It never rains but it pours,’ Prosser grumbled. ‘Here’s Harris badly, and now Hayes tells me he’s got a poisoned finger. I don’t know what we’ll do for the milking to-morrow.’

‘There’s Fellows,’ said Marion.

‘Yes, it’s lucky we’ve got him. Why, he isn’t here either! What the devil’s the matter with them all?’

Marion said nothing. She had guessed long ago why Abner was not there. She had half suspected that he would not come to The Dyke without Mary, but her pride would not let her ask her father to invite the family from Wolfpits. In the bottom of her heart she doubted if she would dare to meet her old friend. It would be so difficult, and besides that she felt that the intuitions of the other woman might discover her own leaning toward Abner. It was too dangerous.

Next morning Abner arrived at his usual hour. During the night Dr Hendrie had been summoned to The Dyke and had found that the neglected splinter in the cowman’s finger threatened him with blood-poisoning, and the loss of his arm. At dawn Mr Prosser had driven him in to the infirmary at Shrewsbury. Marion received Abner on his arrival.

‘Why didn’t you come up last night?’ she said.

‘That sort of thing bain’t much in my line,’ he replied.

‘I wanted you to come,’ she said.

He only smiled awkwardly, and she wished that she had been more prudent. She told him that Hayes was in hospital and that Harris was laid up with influenza. It would be a convenience to them if he could take over Hayes’s work, which was the care and milking of the cows and the driving of milk-cans morning and night to Llandwlas station. He was astonished at this turn of luck, for he had expected to be dismissed with his harvest earnings in his pocket. For all that, he didn’t mean to take the job on false pretences.

‘So Harris has caught the influenza, has he?’ he said.

‘Yes, he sent up his little girl with a message last night.’

‘Well,’ said he, ‘it wasn’t true. What Harris got was a damned good hammering from me—one that he won’t forget.’

She thrilled to hear him. In her eyes he had become a hero. She knew already that he could be gentle. It gave her a curious, almost physical pleasure to realise him as a fighting man, for every one in the district was aware of Harris’s iron strength.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.

‘He only got what he asked for,’ said Abner, ‘with his dirty talk about young Mrs Malpas.’

‘Mary Malpas . . .’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, I’m sick of hearing her name.’

She did not pass on to her father what Abner had told her. He came back from Shrewsbury that evening tired and depressed. ‘The doctors reckon that we were only just in time with poor Hayes,’ he said. ‘It’s a near shave for his left arm. They’ve had to open it right up to the shoulder and he’ll be lucky if he’s out of hospital by Christmas. I don’t know what we can do, with Harris ill as well.’

‘There’s Fellows,’ she said.

‘Yes, there’s Fellows,’ he repeated, thinking of other things. He stared at her vaguely, but it seemed to her that his eyes were searching her, and she left him, blushing.

Abner’s new work kept him almost exclusively on the farm premises, and for this reason he and Marion often crossed each other’s paths. They met so often that Marion lost a little of her shame in speaking with him. She handled him cleverly, so that in the end he lost a good deal of the awkwardness that she herself had created. She was frank and kind, helping him in many small things. He came to take her for granted, and even to like her. In a little time he became accustomed to the cowman’s job and took a pride in it. To all intents and purposes he was his own master; for the dairy was Marion’s province, and Mr Prosser rarely interfered with its management.

Within a week of his hammering, Harris returned, apparently not much the worse for it. Nobody but old Avery knew what had happened, and the ploughman kept to himself a story that was hardly flattering. Abner had been prepared to treat him friendlily; but he soon saw that Harris had no intention of doing the same, maintaining a surly silence that was never to be broken, since their work now lay in different directions.

So autumn passed, the first frosts of winter whitened the upland, and the first ploughing began. Abner kept to his own work. The Prossers’ dairy was a small one, for their pasture land was limited, but he found that with the two station deliveries, the milking, and the care of the cows, his hands were pretty full. He saw less and less of Wolfpits, for it had been arranged that he should take his evening meal at the farm on his return from the station, and Mary was not altogether sorry for this, since it freed her from many embarrassing moments.

Abner was now earning a good wage, and the household was relatively prosperous. He was even able to replace the watch that had been stolen at Bran. In this peaceful interlude the only thing that really disquieted Mary’s mind was George’s letter. She had never yet dared to show it to Abner, but she had not destroyed it, and from time to time a cruel fascination compelled her to take it from the drawer where she had hidden it and to read it again. It seemed strange to her that she had received no other word from him. If he could write once he could surely write again, and though she did not dare to confide its contents to Mrs Mamble, she induced the old woman to question the wife of a policeman at Lesswardine whom she had attended in a confinement as to the conditions under which a prisoner in the county jail might receive visitors or write letters. A prisoner in George’s condition, Mrs Mamble told her, was entirely separated from the outside world for the first three months of his sentence. After that, if his conduct were good, he might write and receive one letter every month, and invite one visitor to see him during the same period. This knowledge amazed her; for George had now been in jail more than nine months but had only written her this one, disturbing letter and had never once asked her to visit him. The fact filled her with an inexplicable pang of jealousy; but what troubled her more deeply was to know that Mrs Mamble was conscious of her humiliation.

‘The less you think about him the better,’ said the old woman stoutly. ‘He was never no good to you, and never will be.’

But Mary could not put the matter out of her mind. Once again she commissioned Mrs Mamble to make inquiries in Chapel Green and find out if old Mrs Malpas had visited George in prison. The answer was definite. Mrs Malpas had never left the village since the day of the trial, although she had received several letters from George, as the postman, who lodged with one of Mrs Mamble’s friends, could vouch.

Then Mary hardened her heart; for she guessed that George was choosing for his only visitor the widow woman from Lesswardine, whom she had seen at the trial. Re-reading George’s letter she burned with anger. What right had he to dictate to her how she should behave? Her soul was full of hatred and contempt, so that she almost wished that she had given him real cause for suspicion. In this state she allowed her memory to dwell with tenderness on the surprising moment that had come to her and Abner by the sea-crows’ pool. She felt that she had been foolish to shrink from it. And yet she dared not let Abner see what she was thinking; knowing for certain, that if she did so something violent and terrible must happen to them. For herself she had no fear; but the thought of what the children might suffer chilled her. And she released her surfeit of feeling in a more passionate devotion to these small creatures, determining, whatever might happen, to hold on for the remaining eight months of George’s imprisonment. This artificial resolution made her harden herself more than ever against Abner.

One day Mrs Mamble brought her the news that Susan Hind was being married in less than a week to Badger, the keeper. She now saw so little of Abner that she could not be sure that his old relations with Susie had ceased, but she found herself snatching eagerly at an occasion for wounding him.

‘I hope you’re going to your old friend’s wedding, Abner,’ she said.

‘I don’t know nothing about one,’ he said. ‘I’ve no friends in these parts that I know to.’

‘Susie Hind . . . she’s marrying Mr Badger next Monday.’

She watched him carefully.

‘Well, he’s welcome!’ said Abner, with a laugh.

And then, instead of being relieved, she found herself overwhelmed by a new suspicion. He would not have spoken like that unless he had been entangled with some other woman. She wondered who it could be, and a few days later began to ply him with deliberate questions about Marion Prosser. He did not guess what she was driving at; imagined that she was still brooding over her old slight.

‘I know naught about her,’ he said.

‘Do you like her any better than you did?’

‘I don’t mind her,’ said Abner. ‘At any rate she don’t werrit me with questions about you.’

One day in October Marion renewed her proposal that Abner should sleep at The Dyke. She told him that she didn’t like to think of him walking to and from Wolfpits every day. If she had substituted ‘Mary Malpas’ for ‘Wolfpits’ she would have been nearer to the truth.

‘We can make you quite comfortable in the little loft above the harness-room,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in your wearing yourself out.’

He said nothing; but told Mary of her proposal. Listening, she held her breath.

‘I don’t want to keep you,’ she compelled herself to say. ‘You’d better go.’

‘No fear!’ said he. ‘You don’t catch me losing my liberty that way! A man that sleeps over his work’s no better than a slave.’

She felt a sudden relief. ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ She spoke as if it were the matter of principle that interested her.

Next day he refused Marion’s offer, and she left him in a huff. She was miserable, for she could not overcome the attraction which he had exercised over her from the first, yet was too bashful to declare herself more openly. She tried to tell herself that Abner was only a labouring man and her inferior in station, but she could not pretend that physically he was not her equal, nor deny his influence. She hoped that he would notice the change in her attitude, see that she was avoiding him, and, perhaps, miss her; but he went on with his work as usual and did not seem to care whether she came near him or sent him messages by Ethel or Agnes, the maid, and so, gradually, with a feeling of shame, she was driven back to his company.

The days were now drawing in rapidly, and it was after sunset when the cows came to be milked. It had been Marion’s custom to carry the scoured pails to the byre and stand by Abner’s side while he milked. When he drove the cows into the shed he would light a stable lantern and hang it from a nail in the wall before he found his stool and took the pail from her hands. These were the moments when she felt herself nearest to him. Standing in the doorway of the shippon she would watch him as he sat with his fair head pressed to the cows’ flanks and listen to the milk swishing into the pails. It was a moment of most soothing silence. Neither of them spoke, nor was there any other sound but that of the cows snatching hay from the racks above them with their lips and filling the shed with their sweet breath. Marion stood very still in that slow-breathing quietude, and thither, like shadows, came the cats that lived in the lofts and roofs of the granary, shy, half-savage creatures. It was part of Abner’s ritual to set a tin basin of milk frothing-warm on the floor for them, and round this they would walk, five or six of them, with sidelong gait and tails uplifted. Every night at milking-time they came. But if she stirred a muscle they were gone. She watched them, quiet, hallucinated; and when they were gone she stayed on in the silence, while Abner strained the milk into her scalded buckets and passed from stall to stall.

One evening she found him troubled.

‘I don’t half like the look of Daisy here,’ he said.

Daisy was a red Devon cow, the only one of her breed in Prosser’s herd of white-nosed Herefords. Some weeks before she had calved; but the calf had been feeble and had died, and though they had given her a calf-skin stuffed with straw to lick she had pined, and the milk had failed in quality. Now she stood miserably in her stall with her ears turned back and her sleek coat staring.

‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’ Marion asked.

‘She was coughing a good bit when I drove her in—seemed to have no heart in her either—and you can see she’s breathing quicker than the others. You put your ear to her and hearken. It’s like a lot of bubbles going off inside of her.’

He put his arm over the animal’s neck and listened. Marion did as he told her. They listened together, but she could hear nothing but Abner’s own deep, placid breath. He seemed very near to her. She could see his serious eyes shining with pin-points of lantern-light. Her heart began to beat so violently that she feared he must hear it. She felt a choking sensation in her breast, as though her heart was bursting and she must cry out or weep. It was intolerable.

‘Do you catch it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I hear,’ she said.

‘I reckon she’s worse than she seemed,’ said Abner. ‘I think she’s got the bronchitis. You’d best let the gaffer know.’

‘He’s gone down to Craven Arms for the sales to-morrow,’ she replied. ‘He’s booked a bed at the Railway Hotel.’

‘Like our luck!’ Abner grumbled. ‘Well, we’d better give her a drench of gruel and poultice her when we’ve finished the milk.’

When he came back from the station she was ready with a draught of oatmeal gruel. Then she set herself to making a poultice of linseed meal and brought it out to him.

‘I reckon I can’t leave her to-night,’ he told her.

‘Hadn’t we better send for Harris?’ she asked.

He flared up at once. ‘Harris? . . . I don’t want that Harris poking his nose in my shippon!’

‘Very well,’ she said mildly. She watched him adjust the poultice over Daisy’s throat. The animal was now coughing painfully, and the chill of the night air seemed to strangle her breathing. Marion found it difficult to leave him.

‘There’s no call for you to go catching your death of cold,’ Abner said.

Again she submitted. ‘But I think we’d better take turns with her,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and tell Agnes.’

She left him, and though she could not persuade him to let her take his place she returned from time to time to the byre. He scarcely spoke to her, for the animal’s condition made him more and more anxious. At one o’clock in the morning she came out in her dressing-gown with her dark hair braided down her back for the night. The cow was now a terrible sight. She had sunk down upon the floor of the shed and was breathing in desperate, quick gasps, with her brown eyes piteously upturned.

‘I don’t like the look of her,’ said Abner, ‘not half.’

‘We shall have to send for Harris. He understands them,’ she said.

‘All right,’ he returned, grudgingly.

‘I’ll send Agnes down to the village. And then I’ll bring you some tea.’

‘Don’t you worry about that!’

‘Agnes is making it now.’

She sent the maid running off at once. The kitchen fire was nearly out and the kettle would not boil. It seemed to her an age before she could get it boiling. Then she filled a jug with tea and prepared to take it to him. At the door a shadow startled her and she gave a cry. Abner was standing on the step.

‘It’s a bad job,’ he said. ‘She’s gone. She went off quite sudden.’

She did not realise what he was saying. She gave a nervous laugh.

‘Oh, what a start you gave me!’ she said, putting down the jug on the table. And then, suddenly, she put her hands to her face and started sobbing hysterically.

‘Don’t take on like that!’ he said. ‘It’s no fault of yourn.’

‘Oh, it’s not that!’ she cried. ‘It’s not that!’

He put his hand on her shoulder, trying to soothe her, and the next moment she was clinging in his arms and he was covering her face and neck with kisses. Harris, who had run up from his cottage as fast as he could travel, stood panting and gazing at them in the doorway, but neither Abner nor Marion saw him, and when he had stared at them for a moment he moved quietly across the yard into the byre.

The Twenty-Second Chapter

WHEN Mr Prosser returned from Craven Arms next evening he was in a bad temper. At the Railway Hotel on the night before he had fallen in with a number of cattle dealers from North Bromwich and Manchester. He had drunk more than he could stand, and had sat up playing cards in the commercial room till three o’clock in the morning, losing the price of a bullock in the process. Marion, who met him at Llandwlas station, told him that the Devon cow had died in the night.

‘Died?’ said he, ‘what do you mean “died”? She was all right yesterday.’

‘Fellows says it was bronchitis. It was awful to see her breathing.’

‘Bronchitis! They don’t die that quick with bronchitis. What the hell does Fellows know about it?’

‘He couldn’t have done more than he did,’ she replied. ‘He sat up with her till she went.’

‘I’ve never known such an unlucky year,’ he grumbled. ‘Hayes’s wife says that he won’t be out of hospital for another month or more. Fellows means well enough, but he’s not like an experienced cowman.’ He sat broodily in the trap for a few moments. ‘Why didn’t you send for Harris?’ he asked at length.

‘We did, but Daisy died before he could get up.’

‘I shall advertise for a cowman,’ he said, with a show of determination that gave him a better opinion of himself.

‘Fellows did his best. It wasn’t his fault.’

‘What do you know about it, anyway?’ said Mr Prosser roughly.

Reaching The Dyke in the worst of tempers, he had not even time to give Ethel the kiss for which she stood waiting. He went straight into the dining-room and mixed himself a stiff whisky and water, then, feeling masterful and businesslike, he went straight out into the fields to look for Harris. He found him driving in his team from the plough.

‘Did you see Daisy last night?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I see’d her, but not afore she was wellnigh cold.’

‘How did she come to go off sudden like that, eh?’

‘If you want to know what I thinks, Mr Prosser, I’ll tell you. That cow she died of violent neglect. I’ve had my eye on her some days now.’

‘Then why the devil didn’t you say so?’

‘Me and Fellows don’t speak to one another, and you was gone off to the sales.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Miss Marion, then?’

‘It’s no good talking to Miss Marion about he. Her wouldn’t hear a word against Fellows, though he be no more fit to look after cows than rabbits, and I know for why.’ Harris shook his head knowingly.

‘What do you mean by that? Why don’t you speak plain?’

‘And I will speak plain, Mr Prosser, though I don’t know where your eyes have been if you haven’t seed it for yourself. Miss Marion’s soft on that Fellows, and he knows it and takes advantage on it.’

Prosser gave an uneasy laugh. ‘You don’t get me to believe that,’ he said.

‘You can believe it or not, gaffer,’ said Harris. ‘It’s all the same to me. I’m only telling you of what I knows, and what I’ve seen with my own eyes. When Daisy was dying that Fellows was in your own kitchen and the two of them kissing one another, so took up they never saw me coming. And that’s the truth, as I’m standing here!’

Prosser could only stare at him.