I. A. R. Wylie

“ The tragedy had isolated them from the ordinary village life. Jimmy bore a double burden, and when his work was done there was the gloomy home to face and the endless care of Robert. And Kate's life was hard, too. She was all alone, and for some reason or other the young men fought shy of her as though they felt there was no hope for them.
So I can imagine that their quiet walks through the darkness were a great comfort to these two. They must have grown to look forward to them—and from thence to loving one another. And all the while there was Robert in the background like an accursed spirit. ”

“ And in a blind, unreasoning, and most un-Christian way, I grew to hate Robert with his hideous desire of life.
Then came a wonderful summer. We English are a hard and stoic people. Our climate, like a stern monitor, stands at our backs, bracing us to meet bitter winds and leaden, dripping skies with an untroubled courage. But when such a summer comes, it is like the lifting of a burden. Every day is an intoxicating wonder. We look out at the world with new eyes. We feel that nothing is beyond us, and all our deep reserves of courage are freed for the sheer joy of life. ”

“ Robert Martin followed her, not like a dog, but like a man driven by an instinct which there was no gainsaying. I saw him often enough in the congregation, with his burning eyes on her face. It was impossible to forget him. He was dynamic, a slow unreasoning force moving to its appointed end.
As to Kate herself—I do not know. You see, I got to read and understand the two men, inarticulate as they were; but women, though they talk easily of their superficial emotions, have reserves which no one penetrates. ”

“ I went on blunderingly:
"God knows I don't grudge you two happiness. You deserve it. And you have a right to marry each other. There's no one who can say a word against it. I'm thinking of Robert. It would have been better if it had been any man but you, Jimmy."
"I know," he said. "But it's got to be, sir." And he looked at me steadily, but with a kind of despair. "It's no good for any one to say aught to us," he went on. "Kate and me we've wanted each other these two years and haven't so much as said a word. ”

“ There was not a more austere living man in the whole village. But he was elemental. I do not think in all my dealings with human beings—some of them the most violent and uncivilised—I have ever come across any one who had his roots so deep in the earth, or who came so near to the animals in the directness and simplicity of his emotions. His very austerity was animal. You know the animals are neither so promiscuous nor so bestial as we choose to think them. They have their austerity—unconscious and effortless. They await their mate.
Robert Martin was like that. ”

“ He was too young. He was one of those men who mature late, and who, indeed, remain undeveloped all their lives unless some big event comes to them. He had light-hearted firtations with half the girls in the village, but they meant nothing. He seemed at that time as incapable of a serious emotion as he was incapable of a mean act. He was just Jimmy—good-natured, contented, and hard-working, with a muddle-headed belief in God and the general rightness of ordained things.
Two days after the betrothal Martin came to me to arrange about the wedding. ”

“ In the early morning, before he went to his work, Jimmy set his brother right for the day, and often a neighbour would drop in—a pure act of charity, for Robert knew no gratitude—and I helped when I could. Once I came in the evening, and there the three of them were in the grey dusk, not looking at each other, not speaking, and Robert Martin with his face turned to the wall and the savage tears rolling down his cheeks. ”

“ I tore myself free from him.
"You're talking wickedly, Robert Martin," I said. "Because a great misfortune has befallen you, you have no right to blast the lives of others. Kate is young If you really love her you will hope that one day a happiness will come to her that will atone to her for her loss." ”

“ It was useless to talk to him, and I was sick with the misery and shame of it all.
You know how sometimes it seems that things are working to a crisis, and then instead they fall back and nothing happens. It was like that. After the harvest festival we went on with the old life. The weather broke in a grey and dismal autumn, and we crept back into ourselves and were a dour, stern people again. As far as I could see, there was no change in the relations of Kate and the two Martins. If anything, it seemed to me that Kate and Jimmy avoided one another. ”

“ Nothing ever happens. The people are very ordinary people. They sit under me on Sunday, and if they keep awake they feel, I think, that they have offered God an honest and sufficient sacrifice. No one to rub wits with—no one to sit with me by a roaring study fire and quarrel with me over a translation. Just sometimes a stray visitor like yourself. And then, of course, I grew garrulous.
Well, I am growing old, too.
When I say that nothing happens, I mean nothing that does not happen everywhere in the world at some time or other. People die and people are born. They quarrel and make it up. ”

“ But the strong cannot choose for the weak. Unconsciously we grow to look upon the sick as people of another world. We forget. And one day in my reading I came upon a simple love scene, and Martin tore the book from me and crushed it between his hands till it was a shapeless mass. ”

“ In the gentle rains and long, mellow days of sunshine everything flourished. The crops ripened unchecked. The sheep and cattle multiplied. A blessing seemed on the land. The old wiseacres shook their heads, threatening disaster, but none came. ”

“ The attributes which she had worshipped in Robert Martin were paralysed, and her love for him was dead.
Men and women fall by the wayside, but life goes on. Jimmy went back to work and toiled for both of them. Kate hid away the unused wedding-dress and the poor little wreath. Every day she went out to one or other of the farms and sometimes they paid her with a shilling and sometimes with a little produce. ”

“ Then there was Kate Richards. Hers was the next cottage to the Martins', though half a mile divided them: a single-roomed, miserable place where she lived with a bedridden grandmother in grim hand-to-mouth poverty. Kate worked for the neighbouring farmers' wives whenever the stress was great; but they were poor themselves, and could give her little.
On the whole, the country, contrary to popular belief, does not breed pretty women The work is too hard, the housing conditions too wretched. Women wither and grow weather-beaten almost before they reach womanhood. Kate Richards was not beautiful. ”

“ You see, that gap in the hills lets in a tearing north wind, and sometimes for weeks together the snow lies so thick on the ground that some of the outlying farms are completely cut off. And the people are poor. They have nothing to fall back upon, and there is much suffering. ”