Chapter 11

“Yes, I love him.”

“Good!” he said.

This silenced her for a while.

“Here, among his things, I love him,” she said.

His conceit would not let him be silent.

“It needs this setting?” he asked.

“It does,” she cried. “You were always making me to be not myself.”

He laughed shortly.

“But is it a matter of surroundings?” he said. He had considered her all spirit.

“I am like a plant,” she replied. “I can only grow in my own soil.”

They came to a place where the undergrowth shrank away, leaving a bare, brown space, pillared with the brick-red and purplish trunks of pine trees. On the fringe, hung the sombre green of elder trees, with flat flowers in bud, and below were bright, unfurling pennons of fern. In the midst of the bare space stood a keeper’s log hut. Pheasant-coops were lying about, some occupied by a clucking hen, some empty.

Hilda walked over the brown pine-needles to the hut, took a key from among the eaves, and opened the door. It was a bare wooden place with a carpenter’s bench and form, carpenter’s tools, an axe, snares, traps, some skins pegged down, everything in order. Hilda closed the door. Syson examined the weird flat coats of wild animals, that were pegged down to be cured. She turned some knotch in the side wall, and disclosed a second, small apartment.

“How romantic!” said Syson.

“Yes. He is very curious—he has some of a wild animal’s cunning—in a nice sense—and he is inventive, and thoughtful—but not beyond a certain point.”

She pulled back a dark green curtain. The apartment was occupied almost entirely by a large couch of heather and bracken, on which was spread an ample rabbit-skin rug. On the floor were patchwork rugs of cat-skin, and a red calf-skin, while hanging from the wall were other furs. Hilda took down one, which she put on. It was a cloak of rabbit-skin and of white fur, with a hood, apparently of the skins of stoats. She laughed at Syson from out of this barbaric mantle, saying:

“What do you think of it?”

“Ah—! I congratulate you on your man,” he replied.

“And look!” she said.

In a little jar on a shelf were some sprays, frail and white, of the first honeysuckle.

“They will scent the place at night,” she said.

He looked round curiously.

“Where does he come short, then?” he asked. She gazed at him for a few moments. Then, turning aside:

“The stars aren’t the same with him,” she said. “You could make them flash and quiver, and the forget-me-nots come up at me like phosphorescence. You could make things _wonderful_. I have found it out—it is true. But I have them all for myself, now.”

He laughed, saying:

“After all, stars and forget-me-nots are only luxuries. You ought to make poetry.”

“Aye,” she assented. “But I have them all now.”

Again he laughed bitterly at her.

She turned swiftly. He was leaning against the small window of the tiny, obscure room, and was watching her, who stood in the doorway, still cloaked in her mantle. His cap was removed, so she saw his face and head distinctly in the dim room. His black, straight, glossy hair was brushed clean back from his brow. His black eyes were watching her, and his face, that was clear and cream, and perfectly smooth, was flickering.

“We are very different,” she said bitterly.

Again he laughed.

“I see you disapprove of me,” he said.

“I disapprove of what you have become,” she said.

“You think we might”—he glanced at the hut—“have been like this—you and I?”

She shook her head.

“You! no; never! You plucked a thing and looked at it till you had found out all you wanted to know about it, then you threw it away,” she said.

“Did I?” he asked. “And could your way never have been my way? I suppose not.”

“Why should it?” she said. “I am a separate being.”

“But surely two people sometimes go the same way,” he said.

“You took me away from myself,” she said.

He knew he had mistaken her, had taken her for something she was not. That was his fault, not hers.

“And did you always know?” he asked.

“No—you never let me know. You bullied me. I couldn’t help myself. I was glad when you left me, really.”

“I know you were,” he said. But his face went paler, almost deathly luminous.

“Yet,” he said, “it was you who sent me the way I have gone.”

“I!” she exclaimed, in pride.

“You _would_ have me take the Grammar School scholarship—and you would have me foster poor little Botell’s fervent attachment to me, till he couldn’t live without me—and because Botell was rich and influential. You triumphed in the wine-merchant’s offer to send me to Cambridge, to befriend his only child. You wanted me to rise in the world. And all the time you were sending me away from you—every new success of mine put a separation between us, and more for you than for me. You never wanted to come with me: you wanted just to send me to see what it was like. I believe you even wanted me to marry a lady. You wanted to triumph over society in me.”

“And I am responsible,” she said, with sarcasm.

“I distinguished myself to satisfy you,” he replied.

“Ah!” she cried, “you always wanted change, change, like a child.”

“Very well! And I am a success, and I know it, and I do some good work. But—I thought you were different. What right have you to a man?”

“What do you want?” she said, looking at him with wide, fearful eyes.

He looked back at her, his eyes pointed, like weapons.

“Why, nothing,” he laughed shortly.

There was a rattling at the outer latch, and the keeper entered. The woman glanced round, but remained standing, fur-cloaked, in the inner doorway. Syson did not move.

The other man entered, saw, and turned away without speaking. The two also were silent.

Pilbeam attended to his skins.

“I must go,” said Syson.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then I give you ‘To our vast and varying fortunes.’” He lifted his hand in pledge.

“‘To our vast and varying fortunes,’” she answered gravely, and speaking in cold tones.

“Arthur!” she said.

The keeper pretended not to hear. Syson, watching keenly, began to smile. The woman drew herself up.

“Arthur!” she said again, with a curious upward inflection, which warned the two men that her soul was trembling on a dangerous crisis.

The keeper slowly put down his tool and came to her.

“Yes,” he said.

“I wanted to introduce you,” she said, trembling.

“I’ve met him a’ready,” said the keeper.

“Have you? It is Addy, Mr Syson, whom you know about.—This is Arthur, Mr Pilbeam,” she added, turning to Syson. The latter held out his hand to the keeper, and they shook hands in silence.

“I’m glad to have met you,” said Syson. “We drop our correspondence, Hilda?”

“Why need we?” she asked.

The two men stood at a loss.

“_Is_ there no need?” said Syson.

Still she was silent.

“It is as you will,” she said.

They went all three together down the gloomy path.

“‘_Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l’espoir_,’” quoted Syson, not knowing what to say.

“What do you mean?” she said. “Besides, _we_ can’t walk in _our_ wild oats—we never sowed any.”

Syson looked at her. He was startled to see his young love, his nun, his Botticelli angel, so revealed. It was he who had been the fool. He and she were more separate than any two strangers could be. She only wanted to keep up a correspondence with him—and he, of course, wanted it kept up, so that he could write to her, like Dante to some Beatrice who had never existed save in the man’s own brain.

At the bottom of the path she left him. He went along with the keeper, towards the open, towards the gate that closed on the wood. The two men walked almost like friends. They did not broach the subject of their thoughts.

Instead of going straight to the high-road gate, Syson went along the wood’s edge, where the brook spread out in a little bog, and under the alder trees, among the reeds, great yellow stools and bosses of marigolds shone. Threads of brown water trickled by, touched with gold from the flowers. Suddenly there was a blue flash in the air, as a kingfisher passed.

Syson was extraordinarily moved. He climbed the bank to the gorse bushes, whose sparks of blossom had not yet gathered into a flame. Lying on the dry brown turf, he discovered sprigs of tiny purple milkwort and pink spots of lousewort. What a wonderful world it was—marvellous, for ever new. He felt as if it were underground, like the fields of monotone hell, notwithstanding. Inside his breast was a pain like a wound. He remembered the poem of William Morris, where in the Chapel of Lyonesse a knight lay wounded, with the truncheon of a spear deep in his breast, lying always as dead, yet did not die, while day after day the coloured sunlight dipped from the painted window across the chancel, and passed away. He knew now it never had been true, that which was between him and her, not for a moment. The truth had stood apart all the time.

Syson turned over. The air was full of the sound of larks, as if the sunshine above were condensing and falling in a shower. Amid this bright sound, voices sounded small and distinct.

“But if he’s married, an’ quite willing to drop it off, what has ter against it?” said the man’s voice.

“I don’t want to talk about it now. I want to be alone.”

Syson looked through the bushes. Hilda was standing in the wood, near the gate. The man was in the field, loitering by the hedge, and playing with the bees as they settled on the white bramble flowers.

There was silence for a while, in which Syson imagined her will among the brightness of the larks. Suddenly the keeper exclaimed “Ah!” and swore. He was gripping at the sleeve of his coat, near the shoulder. Then he pulled off his jacket, threw it on the ground, and absorbedly rolled up his shirt sleeve right to the shoulder.

“Ah!” he said vindictively, as he picked out the bee and flung it away. He twisted his fine, bright arm, peering awkwardly over his shoulder.

“What is it?” asked Hilda.

“A bee—crawled up my sleeve,” he answered.

“Come here to me,” she said.

The keeper went to her, like a sulky boy. She took his arm in her hands.

“Here it is—and the sting left in—poor bee!”

She picked out the sting, put her mouth to his arm, and sucked away the drop of poison. As she looked at the red mark her mouth had made, and at his arm, she said, laughing:

“That is the reddest kiss you will ever have.”

When Syson next looked up, at the sound of voices, he saw in the shadow the keeper with his mouth on the throat of his beloved, whose head was thrown back, and whose hair had fallen, so that one rough rope of dark brown hair hung across his bare arm.

“No,” the woman answered. “I am not upset because he’s gone. You won’t understand....”

Syson could not distinguish what the man said. Hilda replied, clear and distinct:

“You know I love you. He has gone quite out of my life—don’t trouble about him....” He kissed her, murmuring. She laughed hollowly.

“Yes,” she said, indulgent. “We will be married, we will be married. But not just yet.” He spoke to her again. Syson heard nothing for a time. Then she said:

“You must go home, now, dear—you will get no sleep.”

Again was heard the murmur of the keeper’s voice, troubled by fear and passion.

“But why should we be married at once?” she said. “What more would you have, by being married? It is most beautiful as it is.”

At last he pulled on his coat and departed. She stood at the gate, not watching him, but looking over the sunny country.

When at last she had gone, Syson also departed, going back to town.

Second Best

“Oh, I’m tired!” Frances exclaimed petulantly, and in the same instant she dropped down on the turf, near the hedge-bottom. Anne stood a moment surprised, then, accustomed to the vagaries of her beloved Frances, said:

“Well, and aren’t you always likely to be tired, after travelling that blessed long way from Liverpool yesterday?” and she plumped down beside her sister. Anne was a wise young body of fourteen, very buxom, brimming with common sense. Frances was much older, about twenty-three, and whimsical, spasmodic. She was the beauty and the clever child of the family. She plucked the goose-grass buttons from her dress in a nervous, desperate fashion. Her beautiful profile, looped above with black hair, warm with the dusky-and-scarlet complexion of a pear, was calm as a mask, her thin brown hand plucked nervously.

“It’s not the journey,” she said, objecting to Anne’s obtuseness. Anne looked inquiringly at her darling. The young girl, in her self-confident, practical way, proceeded to reckon up this whimsical creature. But suddenly she found herself full in the eyes of Frances; felt two dark, hectic eyes flaring challenge at her, and she shrank away. Frances was peculiar for these great, exposed looks, which disconcerted people by their violence and their suddenness.

“What’s a matter, poor old duck?” asked Anne, as she folded the slight, wilful form of her sister in her arms. Frances laughed shakily, and nestled down for comfort on the budding breasts of the strong girl.

“Oh, I’m only a bit tired,” she murmured, on the point of tears.

“Well, of course you are, what do you expect?” soothed Anne. It was a joke to Frances that Anne should play elder, almost mother to her. But then, Anne was in her unvexed teens; men were like big dogs to her: while Frances, at twenty-three, suffered a good deal.

The country was intensely morning-still. On the common everything shone beside its shadow, and the hillside gave off heat in silence. The brown turf seemed in a low state of combustion, the leaves of the oaks were scorched brown. Among the blackish foliage in the distance shone the small red and orange of the village.

The willows in the brook-course at the foot of the common suddenly shook with a dazzling effect like diamonds. It was a puff of wind. Anne resumed her normal position. She spread her knees, and put in her lap a handful of hazel nuts, whity-green leafy things, whose one cheek was tanned between brown and pink. These she began to crack and eat. Frances, with bowed head, mused bitterly.

“Eh, you know Tom Smedley?” began the young girl, as she pulled a tight kernel out of its shell.

“I suppose so,” replied Frances sarcastically.

“Well, he gave me a wild rabbit what he’d caught, to keep with my tame one—and it’s living.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Frances, very detached and ironic.

“Well, it _is!_ He reckoned he’d take me to Ollerton Feast, but he never did. Look here, he took a servant from the rectory; I saw him.”

“So he ought,” said Frances.

“No, he oughtn’t! and I told him so. And I told him I should tell you—an’ I have done.”

Click and snap went a nut between her teeth. She sorted out the kernel, and chewed complacently.

“It doesn’t make much difference,” said Frances.

“Well, ’appen it doesn’t; but I was mad with him all the same.”

“Why?”

“Because I was; he’s no right to go with a servant.”

“He’s a perfect right,” persisted Frances, very just and cold.

“No, he hasn’t, when he’d said he’d take me.”

Frances burst into a laugh of amusement and relief.

“Oh, no; I’d forgot that,” she said, adding, “And what did he say when you promised to tell me?”

“He laughed and said, ‘he won’t fret her fat over that.’”

“And she won’t,” sniffed Frances.

There was silence. The common, with its sere, blonde-headed thistles, its heaps of silent bramble, its brown-husked gorse in the glare of sunshine, seemed visionary. Across the brook began the immense pattern of agriculture, white chequering of barley stubble, brown squares of wheat, khaki patches of pasture, red stripes of fallow, with the woodland and the tiny village dark like ornaments, leading away to the distance, right to the hills, where the check-pattern grew smaller and smaller, till, in the blackish haze of heat, far off, only the tiny white squares of barley stubble showed distinct.

“Eh, I say, here’s a rabbit hole!” cried Anne suddenly. “Should we watch if one comes out? You won’t have to fidget, you know.”

The two girls sat perfectly still. Frances watched certain objects in her surroundings: they had a peculiar, unfriendly look about them: the weight of greenish elderberries on their purpling stalks; the twinkling of the yellowing crab-apples that clustered high up in the hedge, against the sky: the exhausted, limp leaves of the primroses lying flat in the hedge-bottom: all looked strange to her. Then her eyes caught a movement. A mole was moving silently over the warm, red soil, nosing, shuffling hither and thither, flat, and dark as a shadow, shifting about, and as suddenly brisk, and as silent, like a very ghost of _joie de vivre_. Frances started, from habit was about to call on Anne to kill the little pest. But, today, her lethargy of unhappiness was too much for her. She watched the little brute paddling, snuffing, touching things to discover them, running in blindness, delighted to ecstasy by the sunlight and the hot, strange things that caressed its belly and its nose. She felt a keen pity for the little creature.

“Eh, our Fran, look there! It’s a mole.”

Anne was on her feet, standing watching the dark, unconscious beast. Frances frowned with anxiety.

“It doesn’t run off, does it?” said the young girl softly. Then she stealthily approached the creature. The mole paddled fumblingly away. In an instant Anne put her foot upon it, not too heavily. Frances could see the struggling, swimming movement of the little pink hands of the brute, the twisting and twitching of its pointed nose, as it wrestled under the sole of the boot.

“It _does_ wriggle!” said the bonny girl, knitting her brows in a frown at the eerie sensation. Then she bent down to look at her trap. Frances could now see, beyond the edge of the boot-sole, the heaving of the velvet shoulders, the pitiful turning of the sightless face, the frantic rowing of the flat, pink hands.

“Kill the thing,” she said, turning away her face.

“Oh—I’m not,” laughed Anne, shrinking. “You can, if you like.”

“I _don’t_ like,” said Frances, with quiet intensity.

After several dabbling attempts, Anne succeeded in picking up the little animal by the scruff of its neck. It threw back its head, flung its long blind snout from side to side, the mouth open in a peculiar oblong, with tiny pinkish teeth at the edge. The blind, frantic mouth gaped and writhed. The body, heavy and clumsy, hung scarcely moving.

“Isn’t it a snappy little thing,” observed Anne twisting to avoid the teeth.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Frances sharply.

“It’s got to be killed—look at the damage they do. I s’ll take it home and let dadda or somebody kill it. I’m not going to let it go.”

She swaddled the creature clumsily in her pocket-handkerchief and sat down beside her sister. There was an interval of silence, during which Anne combated the efforts of the mole.

“You’ve not had much to say about Jimmy this time. Did you see him often in Liverpool?” Anne asked suddenly.

“Once or twice,” replied Frances, giving no sign of how the question troubled her.

“And aren’t you sweet on him any more, then?”

“I should think I’m not, seeing that he’s engaged.”

“Engaged? Jimmy Barrass! Well, of all things! I never thought _he’d_ get engaged.”

“Why not, he’s as much right as anybody else?” snapped Frances.

Anne was fumbling with the mole.

“’Appen so,” she said at length; “but I never thought Jimmy would, though.”

“Why not?” snapped Frances.

“_I_ don’t know—this blessed mole, it’ll not keep still!—who’s he got engaged to?”

“How should I know?”

“I thought you’d ask him; you’ve known him long enough. I s’d think he thought he’d get engaged now he’s a Doctor of Chemistry.”

Frances laughed in spite of herself.

“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked.

“I’m sure it’s got a lot. He’ll want to feel _somebody_ now, so he’s got engaged. Hey, stop it; go in!”

But at this juncture the mole almost succeeded in wriggling clear. It wrestled and twisted frantically, waved its pointed blind head, its mouth standing open like a little shaft, its big, wrinkled hands spread out.

“Go in with you!” urged Anne, poking the little creature with her forefinger, trying to get it back into the handkerchief. Suddenly the mouth turned like a spark on her finger.

“Oh!” she cried, “he’s bit me.”

She dropped him to the floor. Dazed, the blind creature fumbled round. Frances felt like shrieking. She expected him to dart away in a flash, like a mouse, and there he remained groping; she wanted to cry to him to be gone. Anne, in a sudden decision of wrath, caught up her sister’s walking-cane. With one blow the mole was dead. Frances was startled and shocked. One moment the little wretch was fussing in the heat, and the next it lay like a little bag, inert and black—not a struggle, scarce a quiver.

“It is dead!” Frances said breathlessly. Anne took her finger from her mouth, looked at the tiny pinpricks, and said:

“Yes, he is, and I’m glad. They’re vicious little nuisances, moles are.”

With which her wrath vanished. She picked up the dead animal.

“Hasn’t it got a beautiful skin,” she mused, stroking the fur with her forefinger, then with her cheek.

“Mind,” said Frances sharply. “You’ll have the blood on your skirt!”

One ruby drop of blood hung on the small snout, ready to fall. Anne shook it off on to some harebells. Frances suddenly became calm; in that moment, grown-up.

“I suppose they have to be killed,” she said, and a certain rather dreary indifference succeeded to her grief. The twinkling crab-apples, the glitter of brilliant willows now seemed to her trifling, scarcely worth the notice. Something had died in her, so that things lost their poignancy. She was calm, indifference overlying her quiet sadness. Rising, she walked down to the brook course.

“Here, wait for me,” cried Anne, coming tumbling after.

Frances stood on the bridge, looking at the red mud trodden into pockets by the feet of cattle. There was not a drain of water left, but everything smelled green, succulent. Why did she care so little for Anne, who was so fond of her? she asked herself. Why did she care so little for anyone? She did not know, but she felt a rather stubborn pride in her isolation and indifference.

They entered a field where stooks of barley stood in rows, the straight, blonde tresses of the corn streaming on to the ground. The stubble was bleached by the intense summer, so that the expanse glared white. The next field was sweet and soft with a second crop of seeds; thin, straggling clover whose little pink knobs rested prettily in the dark green. The scent was faint and sickly. The girls came up in single file, Frances leading.

Near the gate a young man was mowing with the scythe some fodder for the afternoon feed of the cattle. As he saw the girls he left off working and waited in an aimless kind of way. Frances was dressed in white muslin, and she walked with dignity, detached and forgetful. Her lack of agitation, her simple, unheeding advance made him nervous. She had loved the far-off Jimmy for five years, having had in return his half-measures. This man only affected her slightly.

Tom was of medium stature, energetic in build. His smooth, fair-skinned face was burned red, not brown, by the sun, and this ruddiness enhanced his appearance of good humour and easiness. Being a year older than Frances, he would have courted her long ago had she been so inclined. As it was, he had gone his uneventful way amiably, chatting with many a girl, but remaining unattached, free of trouble for the most part. Only he knew he wanted a woman. He hitched his trousers just a trifle self-consciously as the girls approached. Frances was a rare, delicate kind of being, whom he realized with a queer and delicious stimulation in his veins. She gave him a slight sense of suffocation. Somehow, this morning, she affected him more than usual. She was dressed in white. He, however, being matter-of-fact in his mind, did not realize. His feeling had never become conscious, purposive.