Constance Holme

“ All she knew was that Crump folk had gone home, leaving Deborah Lyndesay behind, and that never in all her life would she find her way thither. At her father’s death she would have to go south, and that would be the end of things for her. If she married Christian, rightly or wrongly, she would still belong to Crump. It was the one way left; yet she fought hard, for she knew she was wronging him—and always the land cried to her in answer. The power stronger than herself drove her as she looked him in the face at last. ”

“ If you tried to bring a car up its twisting, cross-grained drive, the odds were you would find yourself in the river or a clump of clipped yews as old as Ernuin the Priest. And the roses at Watters would have died of sheer disgust in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a rose-show marquee. They grew and scrambled and climbed in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing cold stone with hearts of deep orange, flinging arches of tender pink or glowing crimson against opal skies, or lifting single, dewy heads like pale lamps in the hushed garden after sunset. ”

“ Human beings are never so happy, so soothed and so unafraid, as when they seem to identify themselves with the Ruling Mind. The soul, swerving blindly from fear to fear, clings thankfully to the least vestige of a plan, whether for good or ill. It was not often that Mrs. Clapham had felt afraid of life, but it seemed to her at this moment that she would never feel afraid again. It was muddle that frightened people, she thought to herself, torn edges and jagged ends, suddenly-twisted threads that on every count should have run straight, and meaningless blows from a vague dark. ”

“ You could not keep yourself away from people, no matter how you tried. Even if you shared nothing else with them, you shared the same countryside. Your life was marked by the milestones of their happenings, just as their lives were marked by yours. And when the time came to die, you lay down together to sleep in the same soil....
She was too old for Canada, she said to herself, accepting the fact calmly because as yet it had not come home to her. Not too old in body, perhaps, in spite of her age, but almost certainly in spirit. ”

“ This son of his was so lithe and strong, so full of life at its height, so healthy and fine-coloured and clean-drawn. There was nothing about him that was betrayed or made ashamed by the pure tones and line of marsh and sky. By comparison Kit felt himself and Bob to be broken and fusty like the trap, unbeautifully finished things blurring the exquisitely ending day. Not all the clean air and space could give them back that look, which belongs only to Nature and the young. They were blots on the landscape, he felt, an offence to the eye ... like an old boot flung away in a flowering hedge ... ”

“ Tibbie was a strength-giver, just as Emma was a strength-stealer, but she did a great deal more for Stephen than that. She drew out of him by degrees the courage that was in himself, as well as the graces and charm which make a man loved wherever he goes. The long-latent strength, crushed and shrivelled in youth, had gathered itself at last into that splendid battle-deed; but when the time came for her to lose him, as she had known it would have to come, it was the fact that he had been loved by his fellows that Tibbie had valued most. ”

“ And would they sit in the dark, alone and perfectly content, watching the lights of Crump across the black water as men watch shrine-candles in the dim church of their worship? These things, that made the life of his soul, were the natural heritage of a son of Kilne, who needed scant initiation into their mysteries. But there was no son at Kilne; only a daughter, into whose hands the birthright of love and service could never fall. ”

“ Its absence did not depress him, but its presence, sprung suddenly upon his cloistered walk, always made his heart leap, as at an unexpected promise of goodwill. He welcomed it to-day when he was weary and out of tune, and he leaned his arms on the weathered timber with a sense of rest, drawing his gaze slowly back from the far symbol to the country close at hand.
Four or five dropping fields away, Rakestraw stood in its sheath of woods, the new hay thick in the grey Dutch barns. There were rooks’ nests in the trees overhanging the house; even at that distance he could see them. ”

“ Bell. She could never have let herself go in that carping and sniffing presence, and half the pleasure consisted in letting herself go. Alone with the house, she could be as undignified as she chose; the house did not mind—the homely, welcoming house. In the thrill of the moment it seemed to her like a September-time Santa Claus, with herself, no more than a little child again, laughing and crying like a child....
It was like old Mr. T. to have seen to it that the kitchen had a wooden floor, and an elegant block floor of the best pitch-pine at that. ”

“ Oh, Christian, it’s a long fall from Heaven! I’m broken and wounded to this day. My dream shattered in my hands. I was my ancestors’ child, but I could not follow in their steps. I had all the love, all the courage, even the knowledge, but—I was a girl. I could not put my hand to the plough and drive a single foot in the Kilne furrow, though the heritage of desire was born in me as fiercely alive as in any son. Do people never think that a girl may feel these things, too—suffer and burn to follow in her fathers’ steps and make herself one with them in her quota of good work? ”

“ But no child born on the marsh would ever be such as they; the house would prevent it—the peaceful, noble house. They would be friends all right, he and those real children bred to the sound of the sea. Thomas and Agnes could trust them to him all right. All day he and the fiddle would hear their feet, pattering after them on the garden path, and climbing laboriously up the uncarpeted stair. All day the little shrill voices would follow the curlews out to sea, and at night the house would be filled with the hush of a house where children sleep. ”

“ And then he saw Gardner, with his hatchet-face over the pew-front as if he meant to leap it—Gardner and the other dear old watchdog!—and the sickening nervousness changed to a freakish joy, a mischievous delight. Edgar looked upset; he had forgotten poor old Edgar. There were the children, too—but it didn’t do to think of them. Edgar would understand. He would have done the same himself. He sent a brilliant smile to the men in the front pew, a smile so gaily defiant that Lancaster, far behind, wondered. ”

“ Tibbie would never come. She fretted for her mother sometimes, just as her mother fretted for her, but as long as a certain person remained alive, Tibbie would never come.
In all the history of mankind there could never have been anybody more free than Mrs. Clapham to take what her heart desired, and just at the moment when it was most accessible to her reach. All the ties and burdens of life seemed to fall away from her as she sat waiting there, looking for the news that was certain to come, with the happy expectancy of a trustful child. ”

“ The marsh was lonely, of course, but Nature was always there, growing her grass and plants and flowers, her acorns and cones fashioning into trees, her thorn hedges throwing up every year their close and towering screens; and, after Nature, man, with his cattle and thin ploughs, his barns and shippons, his clustered chimney-stacks. But out on the sand there were only sand and lost shells, and the goalless footprints of flown birds. It was enemy ground, where neither blown seed nor human hearth might take hold. The marsh had a peace of its own as well as its fear ”

“ With another scarcely-breathed whistle he released her, and turned to hasp the gate and give a final look up the soaring fell, skirted with bracken, crowned by sullen rocks. Rain sprang round—sprang to meet a devil’s galloper of satin panels and shining brass, hurled at a criminal speed along the narrow, curving road—sprang and disappeared. She was quite dead when Dixon and the chauffeur drew her out from between the heavy wheels.
A group of those children who always appear miraculously at every untoward occurrence, thrust frightened faces through a break in the hedge. ”

“ From all the districts round folk had come to see what the storm had made of the marsh, and the wreck of Lancaster’s Lugg had sped on wire and rail through the country. On all hands men were at work saving what they could of the remnant of stock; here, a sheep crawled on a fence within a few inches of the reaching water; there, cattle still deep in it long after noon had struck. Pippin Hall was completely surrounded, but friends had crossed the swollen river with food, and from an upper window Holliday asked shakingly for news of the Pride. ”

“ It was real shrewdness of character which had led her to choose for a husband the tamest youth in the place, whom everybody knew now to have been a hero in disguise. And she was so clever with her fingers that each one of them was worth at least the whole of another person’s hand. Young as she was, she had been the village dressmaker par excellence before she married Stephen Catterall, and Mrs. Clapham’s memories of Tibbie’s youth were always shot through by the colours in which she had worked. Her bright head, gleaming about the cottage, had always a background of coloured cottons and silks. ”

“ There was a stir on the platform, heads turning to the inner door framing the illuminated countenance of the old butler; and then Christian ran down into the ring, his nerves thrilling to the affectionate recognition flung him from all sides. He wore the pale orange they all knew, his fair head shining against the black Crump cedar embroidered on the chest; and as he stood, waiting, the full light falling upon his bright, frank expression and clean-limbed grace, Harker, approaching, was conscious of unwilling and deeply heretical admiration. ”

“ Lancaster’s trap, long lost in the myriad turns of the Lane, had emerged into the open road, and the horse’s hoofs, quickened to a sharp trot, rang from hill to hill. There are things to be read from a hoof-beat in the country quiet. Up in the Dales, when a man gallops, the farmers come to their doors, knowing he rides for succour. Lanty’s trot spelt urgency, and more than one voice hailed him as he passed. ”

“ Kit held to his talking-ground for a while, but after one dreadful episode he gave way. Sometimes people asked if the old man were dead, the old man with the fiddle beside the wall.
He liked the meadow best of all in the dawn, when it took on the look of parkland wrapped in early mist. Right across, through a break in the chestnuts, he could see another tree stand up, a tree that, because of the haze, looked tiny as a toy. The shadow of it, black when the sun got up, was at first no more than a darker veil of mist along the sward. ”

“ It seemed to her it was the sort of thing you would expect in an old woman’s house, an idle old woman who had grown too ancient to care. Each time that she came across it she stopped to mutter and frown. For the time being she allowed Mrs. Tanner’s kindness to slip utterly out of her mind, choosing only to remember that she had forgotten the promised clout.
There came a moment at last when she could bear it no longer, and, finding the back kitchen empty, she stealthily limped in. Presently she emerged with brush, pail and mat, and an expression of furtive excitement upon her face. ”

“ But always he came back doggedly to his first impression of her in the Lane. She was not of his world—the world of the soul, where it walks alone until the silver fingers of its eternal mate make music on the thrilling door. She did not speak his language, or love his loves; and sometimes he would leave the beauty of Watters with a queer relief, to talk shop with Harriet under a shippon wall.
The latter drove in now, in her smart, new milk-float, affecting the farmer’s jog-trot which would soon ruin the brisk little cob he had bought for her, he reflected, with a shrug. ”

“ There were bright flowers up above, mere flecks of colour high and far away, when the sun was standing over the slanting beds. The door made a picture for him as he sat, a vivid shimmer of gold and scarlet and green, yet it was too far off to trouble his old eyes. Sometimes he stared at it until he slept, with the polished fiddle gleaming across his knee. The silent knitter would watch the fiddle with an anxious eye, waiting to catch it when it slipped. ”

“ Sooner or later, however, they always began to run, racing hither and thither, without hope and without goal. It was only she who could not begin to run. All she could do was to stand there, helpless and bound, until that deepest of tides had swung itself over her head.
The cottage was small enough, as she knew, far smaller than the House of Dreams, but it did not seem small enough to her now. It fretted her that she could not draw the walls close enough to her on every side. She wanted a place smaller still, darker and closer—more like the grave into which they would put Tibbie. ”

“ But, as a matter of fact, there was plenty of sympathy for the son, the supposed victim of forced loyalty to a weak employer and an arrogant parent, the creature of destiny, bound to take the course he did, a helpless, doomed sheep, like all the other martyrs of the marsh. There were certain well-meaning souls who pursued Lanty with such comforting extracts, but even these smug blunderers did not do it twice. Only Lup and Francey, over the sea, and Hamer, sadly silent, knew what he really felt about it all; and not they fully. There are debts a man pays in himself alone. ”

“ Thomas, trained in sound methods on a well-kept farm, seemed already to have changed the character of this. It was almost as if it had pulled itself together under the mere glance of his disapproving eye. Roots looked healthy, the corn was even and getting ahead; the hedgerows were clear of nettles and the meadows of thistles—on the whole. The hay was doing well and was thick at the roots; they hoped to be cutting in a week. The old man would be pleased with the new machines, the cutter and tedder in their brilliant coats of blue. There were the horses, too, bargains and rare good beasts. ”

“ Halsted, for instance, had cared nothing for weather. When [59] the sun burned, you drew the blinds, and, within, the luxury grew cool and fragrant; and when storm held sway without, again the blinds were drawn, shutting you into soft comfort, where electric light, silver, and china, laughter and the click of balls or the slur of dancing feet, struck always the same note of lapped pleasure. But, at Watters, when the sun shone, the old house stirred dreamily and smiled, and half-forgotten pictured faces looked alive from the dim walls, and threads of hot gold ran molten along the dark floors. ”

“ He went into the shadow as he went up the stair, and met it when he opened the door. Through the windows, when he looked out, there was no sun on the marsh, only the faint rising of a moon. Somewhere out in the uncertain dark was the quiet plashing of the sea. It was the hour when the world is nothing and some one person is all; when Heaven comes easily, and earth as easily goes. So would death come, he thought, his own good death. Some day he would enter the house for the last time, and climb the stair and open and shut the door. ”

“ All the way behind her as she went the bells clanged and clamoured Miss Marigold’s joy, and Mrs. Clapham smiled as she listened to them, and then wept as well, because of that note of finality in the wedding-peal which is almost all that the married woman hears. The passion of its rejoicing speaks so vehemently of something brought to an end, a road closed, a door shut, a sharp cutting as with a knife. The joy of the wedding-peal must needs be emphatic and loud, because it is a joy that demands utter fearlessness if it is to remain joy at all. ”

“ Still, he need not have snubbed Helwise so brutally. It was partly Bluecaster’s own fault that she looked upon him less as an employer than as a free emporium and family asset. He could see him buying her the car without a murmur. He had to admit, too, that the padded elegance of the limousine fitted her to a nicety, just as the luxury of Watters seemed her natural setting. There was no doubt you couldn’t expect the best of people out of their special environment—certainly not weak creatures like Helwise, formed for others to pity and sustain. ”

“ As he sat waiting for them to come and take him away, he was conscious of the discomfort and even terror of change. He felt both the reluctant weariness of the old—for whom every shift on the road may be the last—and the fear of the dreamer that his dream may prove untrue. The idealist always shrinks from fulfilment just at the last, and Kit was shrinking and suffering all through. ”

“ Sudden surprises are wonderful in their way, opening the doors of fairylands and heavens, but they do not create security or make for peace. On the contrary, they, too, suggest chaos after their own magnificent fashion. The highest pinnacle is that which is reached after earnest endeavour, patient provision, humble yet certain hope. The charwoman felt satisfied in every inch, seeing life and the justice of things fitting each other like lock and key. ”

“ Lancaster shook his head without lifting it from his hand where he had leaned it, listening.
“I took the responsibility from you. I need not have done it. I could have refused it. But I didn’t refuse. This is my work.”
And, as at Ladyford, so here, he saw clearly that, in every crisis, one particular soul holds the scale. Bluecaster was right, as Lup and Francey had been right, but there was a more stringent law beyond. The words that had haunted him all day came back to him now with redoubled force. “It is always one man’s work—always and everywhere.” ”

“ Out of the blotted dusk soft, nebulous shapes arose. Faint colour came into the grass, faint silver into a stream. Life flowed into the faintly-living earth, and grew fuller and faster as it moved. He saw the cattle stand up, and the sheep come away from the hedges that were full of the questioning twitter of the birds. The larks went up from the still-shadowy fields, racing the sun for the earliest word with God. There was a gleam of marsh-marigolds in the dykes, though still unburnished and dim. ”

“ Clapham more uneasy than ever. She had allowed herself that one hit at Tibbie’s mother, that one scratch, so to speak, at Tibbie’s corpse; but when once that fundamental demand of her queer nature had had its way, her whole procedure altered subtly. Her hands ceased to twitch as if she were being torn in twain by some inward strife. Even her colour faded a little, that pronounced flush which seemed to speak of triumph rather than grief, and into her black eyes came an expression which was obviously meant to convey pity.
“Nay, now, you can’t think I meant anything against the poor lass!” ”

“ I can’t talk to you like Brack. I reckon I’m not sorry, neither, but I’m not that sort, anyway. I’ve my mind a deal on my work, as you don’t need telling, but it’s my heart as really learns me the things that matter. They’re few enough—ay, but they’re big enough too! Just trust in the morning and quiet in the evening, our own folk, and work, and food and sleep—seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night—the things the folks behind us knew afore we were born. The real things are the old things. ”

“ Thomas said, “Ay, make it a reel!” in a gruff, shy voice, the voice of the youth whose only way of expression was through his dancing feet. All of them felt the thrill of the word each [Pg 270] time that it was said, the lilt and beat of the tune in their brains and heels. The old feeling came back that life was only lived from dance to dance. The ecstasy came back, the almost insolent sense of power; the passion of motion, the thrill of mutual purpose and touch. The very air of the kitchen seemed to change and become mistily lamp-lit, throbbing to many hearts. ”

“ This horrible travesty of motherly tenderness had frightened Tibbie Clapham as nothing else had frightened her in life, turning her, even in its recital, into a bitter, white-faced woman whom her mother hardly knew. Evil is never so sinister as when it touches the beautiful natural things and makes them strange. The story of those nights had impressed Tibbie with such cruel force that there was a time when she was almost afraid to approach her own children as they lay and slept....
The nights had been hardest to bear, so Stephen had said, but Emma had watched him everywhere else as well. ”

“ In the dark well where it was so difficult to see he felt always about him creeping fingers and prying eyes. In the narrow room which had neither corners nor dreaming-places for the old, there seemed always a host of spies that crouched and peered. When he drowsed in spite of himself on a hot afternoon, he would start awake to find stealthy hands grasping at the treasure on his knee. Instinct told him, as a rule, when the enemy was about, but sometimes the fiddle warned him with a speaking string. ”

“ A fresh spasm, evidenced by pursed lips, went round the shocked throng, exactly as if they had been drilled by some rapped-out word of command. Mrs. James looked at Mrs. Tanner, and Mrs. Airey at Mrs. Dunn. Martha Jane went furiously red, and tossed her head so violently that a hairpin flew out. Only in the background Emma went on smiling her Mona Lisa smile.... “Lordships and suchlike have their own way o’ doing things,” said her expressionless voice. “Seems to me calling on such as you is more a parson’s job than a lord’s.... But there, no doubt he knows his own business best....” ”

“ Suddenly the little kitchen would be full of battering, brazen-sounding speech, carrying so far along the street that folk would hear it and come out. When Marget emerged with her bone between her teeth, they would be standing in little knots or edging towards the door. Little boys came out of nowhere as they always do, and sometimes a passing carriage would be brought to a halt. Through it all Marget would swim on a powerful stream of abuse, while he went quiet in her clutch, his fiddle gathered close. ”