V. Sackville-West

“ It wasn’t likely that even Miss Warrener would care to dabble in a mess of worms, or to get her fingers covered with scales, slime, and cold blood. No, nor to have the troublesome job of killing a pike, who of all the animal creation surely clung the most tenaciously to life. What they did not know of was the Down-life shared by Clare and Lovel; for on those splendid, solitary heights they could meet and meet again, unobserved by any save the sheep, the larks, and the circling hawks, indifferent to the pacing side by side of the two horses over the bitten turf. ”

“ Clare began to catch the infection of this idealisation of Lovel; she saw him through Olver’s eyes: humane where he need only have been conscientious; generous where he need only have been just; yet preserving always that aloofness and detachment which safeguarded him from all true contact with sordid things. When she had met him on the highway, or on the Downs, she had not wondered much about the background of his life; she had accepted him as an isolated and romantic figure, organic with the Downs themselves; to her, he was the rider on the skyline, the shepherd of the folds. ”

“ Clare followed him, light on her pony. They did not become him well, she thought, those great horses; he demanded the slimmer, swifter animals of creation, hares, Arabs, or deer. But it amused him to play the plough-boy. How indifferent he seemed, she thought,—scarcely looking at her, riding on with his gaze held towards the sunset; how different from Mr. Calladine’s eagerness to propitiate her; and a tiny sore of feminine vanity was pricked. Then she laughed at herself, immediately; what was she expecting from Lovel, her Lovel? expecting him to be different from himself? ”

“ She couldn’t tell herself why she had so set her heart on Lovel, if it wasn’t for that air of his,—so set her heart on him that she was ready to take on the zany and the old witch and all, if only she could get him. He had never looked twice at her, for all she had tried hard enough to attract his attention; yet she preferred him to any young man in the village, even to Peter Gorwyn, the smith’s son, with his muscular six foot two, with whom she had made so merry on the day of the Scouring, or Job Lackland, who played the fiddle and whose appearance of fair girlishness was so misleading. ”

“ Calladine is not the poor creature you think him,” said Clare on an impulse. “Years ago he loved a woman, still unforgotten. That is not the fidelity of a weak man. I tell you this, in order that you should think better of him, and knowing that you will keep it to yourself.”
“A woman he never got?” said Lovel. “And brooded over her ever since? Do not doubt—Miss Warrener, he coaxed himself into loving her more, during all those years of brooding, than ever he did when he had her before his eyes. ”

“ But it was a hard, cruel world that they saw, the hard red of the snow where the sunset did not catch it. The line of the beech-clump curved already across the slowly sinking sun, and presently hid it altogether from sight; the tops of the hills lost their flush, and only a few red bars lingered still in the sky.
“What a desolate spot!” exclaimed Mr. Warrener, impressed, “and what a spot,” he went on, “for a shepherd to study the courses of the stars, for such has been the tradition of shepherds since the days when the known world was not one tithe of the size we now learn it to be. ”

“ Did the sense of enclosure give you strength? Would the Downs have compelled you to be more honest? I believe it was that. One can lie better,—can’t one?—in a room; and as you had no room you took the shelter of the trees. You couldn’t tell me lies out on the Downs?”
“Is that why Calladine prefers a room?” he enquired.
“Mr. Calladine tells me no lies,” she said, with a small flicker of pride.
“Oh, no,” said Lovel easily; “he only tells lies to himself. Through and through. Or are they lies? Romances, perhaps. Only romances. And you are part of them. But they couldn’t thrive in sunshine.” ”

“ Often he would be the only man to leave the village of a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. ”

“ It had seemed to Clare that the intervening centuries between their age and the present day had been blank,—that she inherited the Downs direct from their hands,—those Downs which revealed themselves to her eyes unchanged from the hour when the stone men had passed away from them. The barrows, the dew-ponds, the Grey Wethers, the green tracks, the hawks and the larks, the space,—all unaltered; the stone men, returning, would find no change. What had she said, long ago, to Calladine, “an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are, are bleached bones by now, dry and clean. ”

“ The olive and the myrtle were alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat; the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both represented their own particular aspect of [Pg 65] romance, each to the other. “Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.
It was some days after this that Clare received from Calladine an invitation to visit him at Starvecrow. ”

“ Olver laughed at him. “Lost? They?”
“They are only human!” cried Calladine, afraid. He got up and stood over Olver. “Tell me, they are human, aren’t they?”
Olver laughed again.
Calladine went to the door. He opened it and looked out; the cold met him, and the stars in the blackness. “Clare!” he cried. “Clare!”
“I am going mad,” he said to himself. “I am going out of my mind.”
Looking back into the hut, he saw Olver still on his knees on the floor, prodding at the meat over the lamp. He went back, bent down, and cried close to Olver’s ear, “What are we doing here? they are keeping us waiting.” ”

“ Lovel should ever hope to get Miss Warrener, he, a village boy when all was said and done, with an old bed-ridden witch for a mother and a daft hobgoblin for a brother; but her own feelings for Lovel stepped in to destroy this consolation: wasn’t he a proper strong young man, as difficult to catch as a colt turned loose on the Downs, with his wild dark air, enough to touch the fancy of a girl? ”

“ He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she were a nymph,—a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. ”

“ The life that she had planned for herself was not falling out according to her design. She was cheated; a person who has tried to take in the dark a step that was never there. Let her keep her sense of proportion,—her refuge now, her only refuge,—and she would not even yet be wholly lost. Then she could laugh at the futility of her plans; she could see, as from without, their derision, and their full pitifulness. Her life at Starvecrow had not fallen out according to her design. What of it?
A woman spending thirty, forty, wasted years in a forgotten corner of the Downs. ”

“ But in the winter the splendour was gone, only an austerity like stone remained; grey disillusioned Downs, shaven by the winds, shelterless, inconsolable. Then came the snow; and up here, where no trees but the beech-clumps broke the white, where no hedges strove with their little maudlin pretence of security to lessen the rigour of the country towards the softness of man, here no flinching availed ”

“ And she was in the right frame of mind for such brooding, feeling herself oppressed and full of foreboding, as she sat in the kitchen big with the child, and big with the failure of her life, waiting indeed for deliverance from the child, but seeing no solution to the greater oppression, which she might expect to continue until she should grow as spiritless and broken as Lovel and their existence should dwindle to a grey twilight of apathy unenlivened even by anger or revolt. ”

“ Clare remembered then,—what Martha Sparrow, gossiping, had told her,—that Olver Lovel sometimes made himself very unpopular by creeping up noiselessly behind some pair just as they were circling round the most critical stages of their courtship, either to shout loudly in their ears or else to tickle the backs of their necks with a straw, so that it had even been discussed in the Waggon of Hay whether he should be ostracised from the festival of the scouring. ”

“ A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view.
“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,—not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. ”

“ She would endure anything rather than disappoint Lovel. More: even in his absence, even though he should know nothing of it, she kept herself constantly up to the level of his standards. She winced at any thought of his possible disapproval. She had not for him, nor could she imagine herself having, the indulgent and,—school herself to reverence as she would,—contemptuous pity she had for Calladine; what had she told Calladine to do? to grow lupin and iris, tulips and honesty, sweet sultan and snapdragons, in a walled patch of what had once been Down-land! ”

“ Yet it seemed to her that she had, indeed, a silence at the core of her being, still and inviolate against his ineffectual clamour, like the stillness in the heart of a cyclone, where birds poise and sing. At this core, this kernel, this patch of peace, she dwelt apart; Lovel was there, and so was Olver, Olver with the urgent hands and fanatical eyes, passing from Lovel to her and from her to Lovel, almost crushing them up against one another by the force of his urgency, Olver’s determination was like a menace, becoming almost malevolent by virtue of its very violence. ”

“ She had dreaded to find Daisy still at Starvecrow when she returned there after her marriage. It would have been simple for her to find out, but she lacked the courage to ask. And would Calladine know? would he know if one girl rather than another slept in the attic at the top of his house? She could have asked Martha Sparrow, but pride withheld her from making enquiries as to Lovel’s wedding. True, Mrs. Quince had mentioned a fortnight, but she did not trust Mrs. Quince; the elderly woman would relish laying a trap for her. ”

“ Since the strenuousness of life’s work was over,—the early winter rising, the trudges after a lost ewe across snow-swept Downs, the unearthing of mangolds from the frosted ridge, the hours of scything swathe by swathe under burning midday,—what could remain better to do than to sit upon a bench in the sun, with companions who in colour and outlook were the very spit of oneself, to grumble against new-fangled notions, and to wet one’s gizzard with a long pull of ale, which, at all events, however ignominious to admit it, had not deteriorated in quality since one’s youth? ”

“ Lovel was thinking only of how he might best delude his brother’s shrewdness, and how discover whether the girl was scattering this gossip broadcast over the village. He had always disliked the girl,—her red hair, pale blue eyes, loose mouth, and freckles,—nor was it likely that he would turn to civility now in order to coax her into discretion. He was inexpressibly concerned, perplexed and discouraged, and the longer did he remain brooding over the fire, the more convinced did Olver grow that Daisy’s hysterical theory was the true one. ”