George Alard’s death affected his brother Peter out of all proportion to his life. While George was alive, Peter had looked upon him rather impatiently as a nuisance and a humbug—a nuisance because of his attempts to thrust parochial honours on his unwilling brother, a humbug because religion was so altogether remote from Peter’s imagination that he could not credit the sincerity of any man (he was not so sure about women) who believed in it. But now that George was dead he realised that, in spite of his drawbacks, he had been a link in the Alard chain, and that link now was broken. If Peter now died childless, his heir would be Gervase—Gervase with his contempt of the Alard traditions and ungentlemanly attitude towards life. Gervase was capable of selling the whole place. It would be nothing to him if Sir Gervase Alard lived in a villa at Hastings or a flat at West Kensington, or a small-holding at his own park gates, whatever was the fancy of the moment—no, he had forgotten—it was to be a garage—“Sir Gervase Alard. Cars for hire. Taxies. Station Work.”
These considerations made him unexpectedly tender towards his sister-in-law Rose when she moved out of Leasan Parsonage into a small house she had taken in the village. Rose could not bear the thought of being cut off from Alard, of being shut out of its general councils, of being deprived of its comfortable hospitality half as daughter, half as guest. Also she saw the advantages of the great house for her children, the little girls. Her comparative poverty—for George had not left her much—made it all the more necessary that she should prop herself against Conster. Living there under its wing, she would have a far better position than if she set up her independence in some new place where she would be only a clergyman’s widow left rather badly off.
Peter admired Rose for these tactics. She would cling to Alard, even in the certainty of being perpetually meddled with and snubbed. He lent her his car to take her and her more intimate belongings to the new house, promised her the loan of it whenever she wanted, and gave her a general invitation to Starvecrow, rather to Vera’s disquiet. He had hated Rose while his brother was alive—he had looked upon her as a busybody and an upstart—but now he loved her for her loyalty, self-interested though it was, and was sorry that she had for ever lost her chance of becoming Lady Alard.
He made one or two efforts to impress Gervase with a sense of his responsibility as heir-apparent, but was signally unsuccessful.
“My dear old chap,” said his irreverent brother—“you’ll probably have six children, all boys, so it’s cruel to raise my hopes, which are bound to be dashed before long.”
Peter looked gloomy. Gervase had hit him on a tender, anxious spot. He had now been married more than a year, and there was no sign of his hopes being fulfilled. He told himself he was an impatient fool—Jewish women were proverbially mothers of strong sons. But the very urgency of his longing made him mistrust its fulfilment—Vera was civilised out of race—she ran too much to brains. She had, to his smothered consternation, produced a small volume of poems and essays, which she had had typed and sent expectantly to a publisher. Peter was not used to women doing this sort of thing, and it alarmed him. If they did it, he could not conceive how they could also do the more ordinary and useful things that were expected of them.
His father laughed at him.
“Peter—you’re a yokel. Your conception of women is on a level with Elias’s and Lambard’s.”
“No, it isn’t, Sir—that’s just what’s the matter. I can’t feel cocksure about things most men feel cocksure about. That’s why I wish you’d realise that there’s every chance of Gervase coming into the property——”
“My dear Peter, you are the heir.”
“Yes, Sir. But if I don’t leave a son to come after me....”
“Well, I refuse to bother about what may happen forty years after I’m dead. If you live to my age—and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, as you’re a healthy man—it’ll be time to think about an heir. Gervase may be dead before that.”
“He’s almost young enough to be my son.”
“But what in God’s name do you want me to do with him? Am I to start already preparing him for his duties as Sir Gervase Alard?”
“You might keep a tighter hand on him, Sir.”
“Damn it all! Are you going to teach me how to bring up my own son?”
“No, Sir. But what I feel is that you’re not bringing him up as you brought up George and me and poor Hugh—you’re letting him go his own way. You don’t bother about him because you don’t think he’s a chance of coming into the property. And two of the three of us have got out of his way since he was sixteen.... He’s precious near it now. And yet you let him have his head over that engineering business, and now you’ve given way about his religion.”
“The engineering business was settled long ago, and has saved us a lot of money—more than paid for that fool Mary’s fling. What we’ve spent on the roundabouts we’ve saved on the swings all right. As for the religion—he’ll grow out of that all the quicker for my leaving him alone. I got poor George to talk to him, but that didn’t do any good, so I’ve decided to let him sicken himself, which he’s bound to do sooner or later the way he goes at it.”
“The fact is, Sir—you’ve never looked upon Gervase as the heir, and you can’t do so now, though he virtually is the heir.”
“Indeed he isn’t. The heir is master Peter John Alard, whose christening mug I’m going to buy next Christmas”—and Sir John made one or two other remarks in his coarse Victorian fashion.
Peter knew he was a fool to be thinking about his heir. His father, though an old man, was still hale—his gout only served to show what a fighter he was; and he himself was a man in the prime of life, healthy and sound. Was it that the war had undermined his sense of security?—He caught uneasy glimpses of another reason, hidden deeper ... a vague sense that it would be awful to have sacrificed so much for Alard and Starvecrow, and find his sacrifice in vain—to have given up Stella Mount (who would certainly not have given him a book instead of a baby) only that his brother Gervase might some day degrade Alard, sell Starvecrow and (worst of all) marry Stella.
For in his heart Peter too expected Gervase to marry Stella. He knew there was a most unsuitable difference in their ages, but it weighed little against his expectation. He expected Gervase to marry Stella for the same reason that he expected to die without leaving an heir—because he feared it. Besides, his family talked continually of the possibility, and here again showed that obtuseness in the matter of Gervase that he deplored. They had no objection to his marrying Stella Mount, because he was the younger son, and it wasn’t imperative for him to marry money, as it had been for Peter. Another reason for Peter’s expectation was perhaps that he could not understand a man being very much in Stella’s society and not wanting to marry her. She was pretty, gentle, capable, comfortable, and oh! so sweet to love—she would make an excellent wife, even to a man many years younger than herself; she would be a mother to him as well as to his children.
This did not mean that Peter was dissatisfied with Vera. His passion for her had not cooled at the end of a year. She was still lovely and desirable. But he now realised definitely that she did not speak his language or think his thoughts—the book of poems was a proof of it, if he had required other proof than her attitude towards Starvecrow. Vera was all right about the family—she respected Alard—but she was remarkably out of tune with the farm. She could not understand the year-in-year-out delight it was to him. She had even suggested that they should take a house in London for the winter—and miss the ploughing of the clays, the spring sowings, and the early lambing! “The country’s so dreary in winter,” she had said.
This had frightened Peter—he found it difficult to adjust himself to such an outlook ... it was like the first morning when he had found she meant always to have breakfast in bed.... Stella would never have suggested that he should miss the principal feasts of the farmer’s year.... But Stella had not Vera’s beauty or power or brilliance—nor had she (to speak crudely) Vera’s money, and if he had married her Starvecrow would probably now have been in the auction market.
Besides, though loyal to Starvecrow, Stella had always been flippant and profane on the subject of the family, and in this respect Vera was all that Peter could wish. She was evidently proud of her connection with Alard—she kept as close under its wing as Rose, and for more disinterested reasons. She had her race’s natural admiration for an ancient family and a noble estate, she felt honoured by her alliance and her privileges—she would make a splendid Lady Alard of Conster Manor, though a little unsatisfactory as Mrs. Peter Alard of Starvecrow Farm.
As part of her lien with Alard, Vera had become close friends with Jenny. It was she who told Peter that Jenny had broken off her engagement to Jim Parish.
“I didn’t know she was engaged to him.”
“Oh, Peter, they’ve been engaged more than three years.”
“Well, I never knew anything about it.”
“You must have—you all did, though you chose to ignore it.”
“I always thought it was just an understanding.”
“Indeed it isn’t!”—At that rate he had been engaged to Stella and had behaved like a swine.
“Well, whatever it was, she’s through with it now.”
“What did she turn him down for?”
“Oh, simply that there was no chance of their marrying, and they were getting thoroughly tired of each other.”
“A nice look-out if they’d married.”
“That would have been different. They might not have got tired of each other then. It’s these long engagements, that drag on and on without hope of an ending. I must say I’m sorry for poor Jenny. She’s been kept hanging about for three years, and she’s had frightfully little sympathy from anyone—except perhaps Mary. They were all too much afraid that if they encouraged her she’d dash off and get married on a thousand a year or some such pittance.”
“I’ve always understood Parish paid three hundred a year towards the interest on the Cock Marling mortgages—that would leave him with only seven hundred,” said Peter gravely.
“Impossible, of course. They’d have been paupers. But do you know that till I came down here I’d no idea how fashionable mortgages are among the best county families?”
Peter did not meet Jenny till some days later. She had been to see Vera, and came out of the house just as Peter was talking to young Godfrey, the farmer of Fourhouses. This farm did not belong to the Alards—it stood on the southern fringe of their land in Icklesham parish. At one time Sir William Alard had wanted to buy it, but the owners held tight, and his grandchildren lived to be thankful for the extra hundred acres’ weight that had been spared them. Now, the situation was reversed, and the Godfreys were wanting to buy the thirty acres of Alard land immediately adjoining Fourhouses.
Sir John was willing to sell, and the only difficulty was the usual one of the mortgage. Godfrey, however, still wished to buy, for he believed that the land would double its value if adequate money was spent on it, and this he was prepared to do, for his farm had prospered under the government guarantees. For generations the Godfreys had been a hard-working and thrifty set, and the war—though it had taken Ben Godfrey himself out to Mesopotamia—had made Fourhouses flourish as it had never done since the repeal of the Corn Laws.
The problem became entirely one of price, and Peter had done his best to persuade his father not to stand out too stiffly over this. The family badly needed hard cash—the expenses of Mary’s suit had been heavy, and as their money was tied up in land it was always difficult to put their hand on a large sum. Here was a chance which might never happen again—for no one was likely to want the Snailham land under its present disabilities, except Godfrey, whose farm it encroached on. If they did not sell it now, it might become necessary (and this was Peter’s great fear) to sell the free lands of Starvecrow. Therefore if the Snailham land brought in the ready money they wanted, they must try to forget that it was going for little more than half what Sir William had given for it seventy years ago.
“Well, I’ll talk it over with Sir John,” he said to Godfrey, who was on horseback in the drive. It was then he saw Jenny coming towards them out of the house.
“Wait a minute,” he said to her—“I want to speak to you.”
He was uncertain whether or not he ought to introduce the young farmer to his sister. Godfrey did not call himself a gentleman farmer—indeed he was inclined to despise the title—but he came of good old yeoman stock, and his name went back nearly as far as Alard into the records of Winchelsea.
“Jenny, this is Mr. Godfrey of Fourhouses—my sister, Miss Jenny Alard.”
Godfrey took off his soft hat. He had the typical face of the Sussex and Kent borders, broad, short-nosed, blue-eyed; but there was added to it a certain brownness and sharpness, which might have come from a dash of gipsy blood. A Godfrey had married a girl of the Boswells in far-back smuggling days.
He and Peter discussed the Snailham snapes a little longer—then he rode off, and Peter turned to Jenny.
“I didn’t know you’d come over,” he said, “and I wanted to talk to you a bit—it’s an age since I’ve seen you.”
He was feeling a little guilty about his attitude towards her and Jim Parish—he had, like all the rest of the family, tried to ignore the business, and he now realised how bitter it must have been to Jenny to stand alone.
“Vera told me that you’d broken off your engagement,” he added as they walked down the drive.
“So it was an engagement, was it?” said Jenny rather pertly.
“Well, you yourself know best what it was.”
“I should have called it an engagement, but as neither his family nor mine would acknowledge it, perhaps it wasn’t.”
“There was no chance of your getting married for years, so it seemed better not to make it public. I can’t tell you I’m sorry you’ve broken it off.”
“I should hardly say it’s broken off—rather that it’s rotted away.”
Her voice sounded unusually hard, and Peter felt a little ashamed of himself.
“I’m frightfully sorry, Jenny”—taking her arm—“I’m afraid we’ve all been rather unsympathetic, but——”
“Gervase hasn’t. It was he who advised me to end things.”
“The deuce it was!”
“Yes—he saw it as I did—simply ridiculous.”
“So it was, my dear—since you couldn’t get married till the Lord knows when.”
“That wasn’t what made it ridiculous. The ridiculous part was that we could have got married perfectly well if only I hadn’t been Jenny Alard of Conster Manor and he Jim Parish of Cock Marling Place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s got over seven hundred a year. Most young couples would look upon that as riches, but it’s poverty to us—partly because he has to pay away half of it in interest on mortgages, and partly because we’ve got such an absurd standard of living that we couldn’t exist on anything less than two or three thousand.”
“Well, I hope you’d never be such a fool as to marry on seven hundred.”
“That’s just it—I’m refusing to marry on seven hundred. But I’ll tell you, Peter—I’d do it like a shot for a man who didn’t look upon it as a form of suicide. If ever I meet a man who thinks it enough for him, I promise you it’ll be enough for me.”
“That’s all very well, Jenny. But Parish must think of Cock Marling.”
“He is thinking of it. It’s Cock Marling that’s separated us just as Conster separated you and Stella.”
Peter was annoyed.
“You’ve no right to say that. What makes you think I wanted to marry Stella? It’s not fair to Vera to suggest such a thing.”
“I’m sorry, Peter. I oughtn’t to have said it. But I did once think.... But anyhow, I’m glad you didn’t.”
“So am I.”
“And I’m glad I’m not going to marry Jim.”
“Then you needn’t be angry with Cock Marling.”
“Yes, I am—because I know I could have been happy with Jim if there’d been no Cock Marling. It’s all very well for you to talk, Peter—but I think.... Oh, these big country houses make me sick. It’s all the same—everywhere I go I see the same thing—we’re all cut to a pattern. There’s always the beautifully kept grounds and the huge mortgaged estate that’s tumbling to pieces for want of money to spend on it. Then, when you go in, there are hothouse flowers everywhere, and beautiful glass and silver—and bad cooking. And we’re waited on badly because we’re too old-fashioned and dignified to employ women, so we have the cheapest butler we can get, helped by a footman taken from the plough. Upstairs the bedrooms want painting and papering, but we always have two cars—though we can’t afford motor traction for our land. We’re falling to pieces, but we hide the cracks with pots of flowers. Why can’t we sell our places and live in comfort? We Alards would be quite well-to-do if we lived in a moderate sized house with two or three women servants and either a small car or none at all. We could afford to be happy then.”
“Jenny, you’re talking nonsense. You’re like most women and can’t see the wood for the trees. If we gave up the cars tomorrow and sacked Appleby and Pollock and Wills, and sold the silver and the pictures, it wouldn’t do us the slightest good in the world. We’d still have the estate, we’d still have to pay in taxes more than the land brings in to us. You can’t sell land nowadays, even if it isn’t mortgaged. Besides—damn it all!—why should we sell it? It’s been ours for centuries, we’ve been here for centuries, and I for one am proud of it.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m ashamed. I tell you, Peter, our day is over, and we’d better retire, while we can retire gracefully—before we’re sold up.”
“Nonsense. If we hang on, the value of the land will rise, we’ll be able to pay off the mortgages—and perhaps some day this brutal government will see the wickedness of its taxation and——”
“Why should it? It wants the money—and we’ve no right to be here. We’ve outlived our day. Instead of developing the land—we’re ruining it, letting it go to pieces. We can’t afford to keep our tenants’ farms in order. It’s time we ceased to own half the country, and the land went back to the people it used to belong to.”
“I see you’ve been talking to Gervase.”
“Well, he and I think alike on this subject.”
“I’m quite sure you do.”
“And we’ve made up our minds not to let the family spoil our lives. It’s taken Jim from me—but that was his fault. It’s not going to smash me a second time. If I want to marry a poor man, I shall do so—even if he’s really poor—not only just what we call poor.”
“Well, you and Gervase are a precious couple, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
The next moment he softened towards her, because he remembered that she was unhappy and spoke out of the bitterness of her heart. But though he was sorry for her, he had a secret admiration for Jim Parish, who had refused to desert the Squires.
He was intensely worried that his sister and brother could take up such an attitude towards the family. They were young socialists, anarchists, bolsheviks, and he heartily disapproved of them. He brooded over Jenny’s words more than was strictly reasonable. She wasn’t going to let the family spoil her life, she said—she wasn’t going to sacrifice herself to the family—she wasn’t going to let the family come between her and the man she loved as he had let it come between him and Stella. She’d no right to say that—it wasn’t true. He couldn’t really have loved Stella or he wouldn’t have sacrificed her to Alard and Starvecrow. Yes, he would, though—yes, he had. He had loved her—he wouldn’t say he hadn’t, he wouldn’t deny the past. He had loved her, but he had deliberately let her go because to have kept her would have meant disloyalty to his family. So what Jenny had said was true.
This realisation did not soothe, though he never doubted the rightness of what he had done. He wondered how much he had hurt Stella by putting her aside ... poor little Stella—she had loved him truly, and she had loved Starvecrow. He had robbed her of both.... He remembered the last scene between them, their goodbye—in the office at Starvecrow, in the days of its pitch-pine and bamboo, before he had put in the Queen Anne bureau and the oak chests. He wondered what she would think of it now. She would have fitted into Starvecrow better than Vera ... bah! he’d always realised that, but it was just as well to remind himself that if he had married her, there would have been no Starvecrow for her to fit into. He hadn’t sacrificed her merely to Alard but also to Starvecrow—and she had understood that part of the sacrifice. He remembered her saying, “I understand your selfish reason much better than your unselfish one.”
Well, there was no good brooding over her now. If he had loved her once, he now loved her no longer ... and if she had loved him once, she now loved him no longer. She was consoling herself with Gervase. She might be Lady Alard yet, and save Starvecrow out of the wreck that her husband would make of the estate. Peter felt sick.
The next day he met her at tea at Conster Manor, whither he had been asked with Vera to meet George’s successor, the new Vicar of Leasan. She was sitting on the opposite side of the room beside the Vicar’s wife—a faded little woman, in scrappy finery, very different from her predecessor who was eating her up from her place by Lady Alard. Peter had met Stella fairly often in public, but had not studied her closely till today. Today for some reason he wanted to know a great deal about her—whether she was still attractive, whether she was happy, whether she was in love with Gervase, though this last was rather difficult to discover, as Gervase was not there. On the first two points he soon satisfied himself. She was certainly attractive—she did not look any older than when he had fallen in love with her during the last year of the war. Her round, warmly coloured face and her bright eyes held the double secret of youth and happiness—yes, he saw that she was happy. She carried her happiness about with her. After all, now he came to think of it, she did not lead a particularly happy life—dispensing for her father and driving his car, it was dull to say the least. He could not help respecting her for her happiness, just as he respected her for her bright neat clothes contrasting so favourably with the floppy fussiness of bits and ends that adorned the Vicar’s wife.
He could not get near her and he could not hear what she was saying. The floor was held by Mr. Williams, the new Vicar. The Parsonage couple were indeed the direct contrast of their predecessors—it was the husband who dominated, the wife who struggled. Mr. Williams had been a chaplain to the forces, and considered Christianity the finest sport going. A breezy, hefty shepherd, he would feed his flock on football and billiards, as George had fed them on blankets and Parochial Church Councils. It was inconceivable that anyone in Leasan should miss the way to heaven.
“I believe in being a man among men,” he blew over Sir John, who was beginning to hate him, though he had chosen him out of twenty-one applicants—“that’s what you learnt in France—no fuss, no frills, just playing the game.”
“You’d better have a few words with my youngest son,” said Sir John, resolving to give him a hard nut to crack—“he’s turned what used to be called a Puseyite in my young days, but is now called a Catholic, I believe.”
“A Zanzibarbarian—what? Oh, he’ll grow out of that. Boys often get it when they’re young.”
“And stay young all their lives if they keep it,” said Stella—“I’m glad Gervase will be always young.”
The Vicar gave her a look of breezy disapproval. Peter was vexed too—not because Stella had butted into the conversation and thrown her opinion across the room, but because she had gone out of her way to interfere on behalf of Gervase. It was really rather obvious ... one couldn’t help noticing ... and in bad taste, too, considering Peter was there.
“Here he is,” said Sir John, as the Ford back-fired a volley in the drive—“you can start on him now.”
But Gervase was hungry and wanted his tea. He sat down beside his mother and Rose, so that he could have a plate squarely set on the table instead of balancing precarious slices of cake in his saucer. Peter watched him in a manner which he hoped was guarded. There was no sign of any special intelligence between him and Stella—Gervase had included her in his general salutation, which he had specialised only in the case of the Vicar and his wife. At first this reassured Peter, but after a while he realised that it was not altogether a reassuring sign—Gervase should have greeted Stella more as a stranger, shaken hands with her as he had shaken hands with the strangers, instead of including her in the family wave and grin. They must be on very good terms—familiar terms....
Stella rose to go.
“Have you got the car?” asked Gervase.
“No—Father’s gone over to Dallington in her.”
“Let me drive you back—I’ve got Henry Ford outside.”
“But have you finished your tea? You’ve only eaten half the cake.”
“I’ll eat the other half when I come back—it won’t take me more than a few minutes to run you home.”
“Thanks very much, then,” said Stella.
She had never been one to refuse a kindness, or say “No, thanks,” when she meant “Yes, please.” None the less Peter was angry. He was angry with her for accepting Gervase’s offer and driving off in his disreputable lorry, and he was angry with her for that very same happiness which he had admired her for earlier in the afternoon. It was extremely creditable of her to be happy when she had nothing to make her so, when her happiness sprang only from the soil of her contented heart; but if she was happy because of Gervase....
“He’s an elegant fellow, that young son of mine,” said Sir John, as the lorry drove off amidst retchings and smoke—“No doubt the day will come when I shall see him drink out of his saucer.”
The woman Peter loved now left Conster more elegantly than the woman he had loved once. The Sunbeam floated over the lane between Conster and Starvecrow, and pulled up noiselessly outside the house almost directly it had started. Peter was beginning to feel a little tired of the Sunbeam—he had hankerings after a lively little two-seater. An eight-cylindered landaulette driven by a man in livery was all very well for Vera to pay calls in, or if they wanted to go up to town. But he wanted something to take him round to farms on business, and occasionally ship a bag of meal or a load of spiles. He couldn’t afford both, and if they had the two-seater Vera could still go out in it to pay her calls—or up to London, for that matter. But she refused to part with the Sunbeam—it was her father and mother’s wedding present, and they would be terribly hurt if she gave it up. Two-seaters were always uncomfortable. And why did Peter want to go rattling round to farms?—Couldn’t he send one of his men?—Vera never would take him seriously as a farmer.
This evening, thanks to the Sunbeam, they reached home too early to dress for dinner. Peter asked Vera to come for a stroll with him in the orchard, but she preferred the garden at the back of the house. The garden at Starvecrow used to be a plot of ragged grass, surrounding a bed of geraniums from the middle of which unexpectedly rose a pear-tree. Today it was two green slips of lawn divided by a paved pathway shaded by a pergola. The April dusk was still warm, still pricked with the notes of birds, but one or two windows in the house were lighted, orange squares of warmth and welcome beyond the tracery of the pergola.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” murmured Peter, taking Vera’s arm under her cloak—“Oh, my dear, you surely wouldn’t be in London now.”
“No,” said Vera—“not when it’s fine.”
“What did you think of Williams?”
“Oh, he seemed all right—I didn’t talk to him much. But his wife’s a bore.”
“I felt sorry for poor Rose, having to welcome her.”
“You needn’t worry—she didn’t do much of that.”
“She had to sit there and be polite, anyhow.”
“I didn’t notice it. But I tell you what really interested me—and that was watching Stella Mount and Gervase.”
“Oh!”
“They were most amusing.”
“I never noticed anything.”
“No, my dear old man, of course you didn’t, because you never do. But it’s perfectly plain that it’s a case between them. I’ve thought so for a long time.”
“He may be in love with her, but I’m sure she isn’t in love with him.”
“Well, she seemed to me the more obviously in love of the two. She had all the happy, confident manner of a woman in love.”
“She couldn’t be in love with him—he’s a mere boy.”
“Very attractive to women, especially to one past her early youth. Stella must be getting on for thirty now, and I expect she doesn’t want to be stranded.”
For some reason Peter could not bear to hear her talked of in this way.
“I know she’s not in love with him,” he said doggedly.
“How can you know?”
“By the way she looks and behaves and all that—I know how Stella looks when she’s in love.”
“Of course you do. But since she couldn’t get you perhaps she’d like to have Gervase.”
Peter felt angry.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. Stella isn’t that sort at all—and she didn’t love me any more than I loved her.”
“Really!”
“You all talk—I’ve heard Doris and Rose at it as well as you—you all talk as if Stella had been running after me and I wouldn’t have her. But that isn’t the truth—I loved her, and I’d have had her like a shot if it had been possible, but it wasn’t.”
He felt a stiffening of Vera’s arm under his, though she did not take it away. He realised that he had said too much. But he couldn’t help it. There in the garden of Starvecrow, which Stella had loved as well as he, he could not deny their common memories ... pretend that he had not loved her ... he had a ridiculous feeling that it would have been disloyal to Starvecrow as well as to Stella.
“You needn’t get so angry,” Vera was saying—“I had always been given to understand that the affair wasn’t serious—a war-time flirtation which peace showed up as impossible. There were a great many like that.”
“Well, this wasn’t one of them. I loved Stella as much as she loved me.”
“Then why didn’t you marry her?”
“I couldn’t possibly have done so—and anyhow,” shamefacedly, “I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Then I still say you didn’t really love her. If you had, you’d have married her even though the family disapproved and she hadn’t a penny. She’d have done it for you—so if you wouldn’t do it for her, it shows that you didn’t love her as much as she loved you.”
“I did”—almost shouted Peter.
Vera took her arm away.
“Really, Peter, you’re in a very strange mood tonight. I think I’ll go indoors.”
“I’m only trying to make you understand that though I don’t love Stella now, I loved her once.”
“On the contrary—you’re making me understand that though you didn’t love her once, you love her now.”
“How can you say that!”
“Because you’re giving yourself away all round. You’re jealous of your brother, and you’re angry with me because I don’t speak of Stella in a way you quite approve of. Don’t worry, my dear boy. We’ve been married over a year, and I can hardly expect your fancy never to stray. But I’d rather you weren’t quite such a boor over it.”
She walked quickly into the house.
Peter felt as if he had been struck. He told himself that Vera was unjust and hard and cynical. How dare she say he was jealous of Gervase? How dare she say he had never really loved Stella?—that was her own infernal jealousy, he supposed. How dare she say he loved Stella now?—that again was her infernal jealousy. He took one or two miserable turns up and down the path, then went in to dress for dinner.
A wood fire was burning sweetly in his dressing-room, and his clothes had been laid out by the parlourmaid, who was as good a valet as only a good parlourmaid can be. Under these combined influences Peter learned how material comforts can occasionally soothe a spiritual smart, dressing there in warmth and ease, he began to slip out of those distressing feelings which had raged under the pergola. After all, Vera had made him supremely happy for a year. It was ungrateful to be angry with her now, just because she had taken it into her head to be a little jealous. That was really a compliment to him. Besides, now he came to think of it, he had not spoken or behaved as he ought. What a fool he had been to kick up such a dust just because Vera had doubted the reality of his dead love for Stella. No wonder she had drawn conclusions ... and instead of trying to soothe and reassure her, he had only got angry.
He made up his mind to apologise at once, and paused at her door on his way downstairs. But he heard the voice of the maid inside, and decided to wait till they were alone in the drawing-room before dinner. She was nearly always down a few minutes before eight.
However, tonight, perversely, she did not appear. The clock struck eight, and to Peter’s surprise, Weller, the parlourmaid, came into the room.
“Dinner is served, sir.”
“But your mistress isn’t down yet.”
“She has ordered her dinner to be sent up to her room, Sir.”
Peter was not to be let off so easily as in the simplicity of his heart he had imagined. He had transgressed the laws of matrimony as Vera understood them, by refusing to say that he had never really loved Stella. He ought properly to have said that he had never really loved anyone until he met his wife, but that, Peter told himself, was nonsense in a man of his age. He told it to himself all the more vehemently because he had an uneasy feeling that a year ago he would have said what Vera wanted, that he himself would have believed she was the only woman he had really loved.
The next morning he went into her room as usual while she was having her breakfast, and they said the usual things to each other as if nothing had happened. But Peter felt awkward and ill at ease—he wanted, childishly, to “make it up,” but did not know how to get through the invisible wall she had built round herself. Also he knew that she would accept nothing less than a recantation of all that he had said yesterday—he would have to tell her that he had never loved Stella, that all that part of his life had been dreaming and self-deception. And he would not say it. With a queer obstinacy, whose roots he would not examine, he refused to deny his past, even to make the present happier and the future more secure.
“What are you doing today?” asked Vera coolly, as she stirred her coffee.
“I’m going over to an auction at Canterbury—they’re selling off some old government stuff.”
As a matter of fact, he had not meant to go, but now he felt that he must do something to get himself out of the house for the day.
“Then you won’t be in for lunch?”
“No—not much before dinner, I expect.”
“Shall you go in the car?”
“Only as far as Ashford—I’ll take the train from there.”
It was all deadly. Going out of her room, going out of the house, he was conscious of a deep sense of depression and futility. Vera was displeased with him because he would not be disloyal to the past.... After all, he supposed it was pretty natural and most women were like that ... but Vera was different in the way she showed her displeasure—if only she’d say things!—become angry and coaxing like other women—like Stella when he had displeased her. He remembered her once when she had been angry—how differently she had behaved—with such frankness, such warmth, such wheedling.... Vera had just turned to ice, and expressed herself in negations and reserves. He hated that—it was all wrong, somehow.
He fretted and brooded the whole way to Ashford. It was not till he was nearly there that he remembered he had an appointment with Godfrey at Starvecrow that afternoon. Vera was making him not only a bad husband but a bad farmer.
Godfrey did not forget his appointment. He arrived punctually at three o’clock, and not finding Peter at home, waited with the patience of his kind. A further symptom of Peter’s demoralization was his forgetting to tell anyone at Starvecrow when he would be back, so Godfrey, who was really anxious to have his matter settled and could scarcely believe that anything so important to himself should seem trivial in the stress of another’s life, felt sure that Mr. Alard would soon come in, and having hitched his reins and assured himself that Madge would stand for ever, went into the office and waited.
Here Jenny Alard found him at about half-past three, just wondering whether it would be good manners for him to smoke. She had come up to see Vera, but finding she had gone out in the car, looked in at the office door in hopes of finding Peter. Godfrey was sitting rather stiffly in the gate-backed chair, turning his box of gaspers over and over in his large brown hands. Jenny came into the room and greeted him at once. She and her family always took pains to be cordial to their social inferiors. If the man in the office had been an acquaintance of her own rank, she would probably have bowed to him, made some excuse and gone out to look for her brother—but such behaviour would never do for anyone who might imagine it contained a slight.
“Good afternoon. Are you waiting for my brother? Do you know when he’ll be in?”
He rose to greet her, and as they shook hands she realised what a shadow his inferiority was. He stood before her six feet high, erect, sun-burned—his thick hair and bright eyes proclaiming his health, his good clothes proclaiming his prosperity, a certain alert and simple air of confidence speaking of a life free from conflict and burden.
“Mr. Alard made an appointment for three. But they tell me he’s gone to Canterbury.”
“It’s a shame to keep you waiting. You’re busy, I expect.”
“Not so terrible—and it’s the first time he’s done it. I reckon something’s gone wrong with the car.”
“He hasn’t got the car—Mrs. Alard is out in it. Perhaps he’s missed his train.”
“If he’s done that he won’t be here for some time, and I can’t afford to wait much longer. I’ve a man coming to Fourhouses about some pigs after tea.”
“I expect there’s a time-table somewhere—let’s look.”
She rummaged among the papers at the top of the desk—auction catalogues, advertisements for cattle foods and farm implements—and at last drew out a local time-table. Their heads bent over it together, and she became conscious of a scent as of straw and clean stables coming from his clothes. She groped among the pages not knowing her way, and then noticed that his hands were restless as if his greater custom were impatient of her ignorance.
“No—it’s page sixty-four—I remember ... two pages back ... no, not there—you’ve missed it.”
His hands hovered as if they longed to turn over the leaves, but evidently he forbade them—and she guessed that he shrank from the chance of touching hers. She looked at his hands—they were well-shaped, except for the fingers which work had spoiled, they were brown, strong, lean—she liked them exceedingly. They were clean, but not as Peter’s or Jim’s or her father’s hands were clean; they suggested effort rather than custom—that he washed when he was dirty in order to be clean rather than when he was clean in order to prevent his ever being dirty.... What a queer way her thoughts were running, and all because of his hands—— Well, she would like to touch them ... it was funny how he held back even from such a natural contact as this—typical of his class, in which there was always consciousness between the sexes ... no careless, casual contacts, no hail-fellow and hearty comradeship, but always man and woman, some phase of courtship ... romance....
“I can’t find it.”
She thrust the book into his hands, and their fingers touched· He begged her pardon—then found the page. She did not notice what he said—her pulses were hammering. She was excited not so much by him as by herself. Why had her whole being lit up so suddenly?—What had set it alight? Was it just this simple deferential consciousness of sex between them, so much more natural than the comradeship which was the good form of her class? Sex-consciousness was after all more natural than sex-unconsciousness, the bridling of the flirt more natural than the indifference of the “woman who has no nonsense about her.” She felt a deep blush spreading over her face—she became entirely conscious before him, uneasy under his alert, dignified gaze.
He was picking up his hat—he was saying something about the two-forty-five being in long ago and his having no time to wait till the four-forty.
“I’ll call in tomorrow—I’ll leave word with Elias that I’ll call in at twelve tomorrow.”
“I’m so sorry you’ve come all this way for nothing,” she faltered.
“Oh, it’s no matter. I’m not busy today. Mr. Alard must have missed his train.”
She found herself going out of the room before him. His smart gig stood outside the door—the mare whinnied at the sight of him. Jenny thought how good it must be to drive horse-flesh instead of machinery.
“You haven’t taken to a motor-car yet, I see.”
“I don’t think I ever shall. It ud feel unfriendly.”
“Yes, I expect it would after this”—and she patted the mare’s sleek neck.
“A horse knows you, you see—and where you go wrong often he’ll go right—but a car, a machine, that’s got no sense nor kindness in it, and when you do the wrong thing there’s nothing that’ll save you.”
Jenny nodded. He warmed to his subject.
“Besides, you get fond of an animal in a way you can’t of a machine. This Madge, here. I’ve raised her from a filly, and when I take her out of the shafts she’ll follow me round the yard for a bit of sugar—and you heard her call to me just now when I came out? That’s her way. You may pay three thousand pounds for a Rolls Royce car but it won’t never say good evening.”
He laughed at his own joke, showing his big splendid teeth, and giving Jenny an impression of sweetness and happiness that melted into her other impressions like honey.
“Did she recognise you when you came back from the war?—You were in Mesopotamia weren’t you?”
“Yes—three years. I can’t say as she properly recognised me, but now I’ve been back a twelve-month I think she fits me into things that happened to her before I left, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I understand.”
He had been talking to her with his foot on the step, ready to get into his gig. Then suddenly he seemed to remember that she did not live at Starvecrow, that she too had a journey before her and no trap to take her home.
“Can I give you a lift, Miss Alard?—I’m passing Conster.”
“Yes—thank you very much,” said Jenny.
That evening, sitting at dinner with her family, she felt vaguely ashamed of herself—she had let herself go too far. As she watched her mother’s diamond rings flashing over her plate, as she listened to her father cynically demolishing the Washington conference, as she contemplated Doris eating asparagus in the gross and clumsy manner achieved only by the well-bred, the afternoon’s adventure took discreditable colours in her mind. What had made her feel like that towards Godfrey? Surely it was the same emotion which draws a man towards a pretty housemaid. The young farmer was good-looking and well-built—he had attracted her physically—and her body had mocked at the barriers set up by her mind, by education, birth, breeding and tradition.
She wondered guiltily what Jim would think of her if he knew. He would probably see a fresh reason for congratulating himself on the rupture of those loose yet hampering ties which had bound them for so long. She had never felt like that towards Jim, though she had accepted the physical element in their relation—thought, indeed, sometimes, that it was unduly preponderating, holding them together when ideas and ambitions would have drawn them apart. Was it possible after all that Godfrey’s attraction had not been merely physical—that there had been an allure in his simple, unaccustomed outlook on life as well as in his splendid frame?
Gervase came in late to dinner, and being tired did not talk much. After the meal was over, and Jenny was playing bridge with her parents and Doris, he sat in the window, turning over the pages of a book and looking out between the curtains at the pale Spring stars. When Lady Alard’s losses made her decide she was too tired to play any more and the game was broken up, Jenny went over and sat beside him. It had struck her that perhaps his life at the works, his association with working men, might enable him to shed some light on her problem. Not that she meant to confide in him, but there seemed to be in Gervase now a growing sanity of judgment; she had a new, odd respect for the experiences of the little brother’s mind.
“Gervase,” she said—“I suppose you could never make friends with anyone at the shop?”
“No—I’m afraid I couldn’t. At least not with anyone there now. But we get on all right together.”
“I suppose it’s the difference in education.”
“Partly—but chiefly the difference in our way of looking at things.”
“Surely that’s due to education.”
“Yes, if by education you mean breeding—the whole life. It’s not that we want different things, but we want them in a different way.”
“Do all men want the same things?”
He smiled.
“Yes—we all want money, women, and God.”
Jenny felt a little shocked.
“Some want one most, and some want another most,” continued Gervase—“and we’re most different in our ways of wanting money and most alike in our ways of wanting God.”
“How do you want money in different ways?”
“It’s not only the fact that what’s wealth to them is often poverty to us—it’s chiefly that they get their pleasure out of the necessities of life and we out of the luxuries. It’s never given you any actual pleasure, I suppose, to think that you’ve got a good house to live in and plenty to eat—but to those chaps it’s a real happiness and I’m not talking of those who’ve ever had to go without.”
Jenny was silent a moment. She hesitated over her next question.
“And what’s the difference in your ideas about women?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Their talk about women makes me sick—I feel in that matter we’ve got the pull over them. When men of our own set get on the subject, it’s different altogether, even at its worst. But I sometimes think that this is because their ideal of women is really so high that they don’t look upon a certain class of them as women at all.”
“You think their ideal of women in general is high?”
“Yes, that’s why their women are either good or bad. They won’t stand the intervening stages the way we do. They expect a great deal of the women they make their wives.”
“I suppose that a friendship between a woman of our class and a man of theirs would be much more difficult than a friendship between two men of different classes.”
“It would be quite impossible. They don’t understand friendship between men and women for one thing. I’m not sure that they haven’t got too much sense.”
Jenny rose and moved away. She found the conversation vaguely disturbing. Though, after all, she cried impatiently to herself, why should she? They hadn’t been discussing Godfrey—only the men where Gervase worked, who belonged altogether to a different class. But Godfrey, yeoman farmer of Fourhouses, solid, comfortable, respectable, able to buy land from impoverished Alard ... why should she think of him as in a class beneath her? Her parents would think so certainly, but that was because their ideas had grown old and stiff with Alard’s age ... mentally Alard was suffering from arterial sclerosis ... oh, for some new blood!
Peter was vexed with himself for having forgotten Godfrey’s appointment—not that he thought his forgetfulness would jeopardise the business between Conster and Fourhouses, but such a lapse pointed degradingly to causes beneath it. He had been careless and forgetful as a farmer because he was unhappy as a husband. His private life was hurting him and its convulsions had put his business life out of order.
On his return from Canterbury there was a reconciliation between him and Vera. His long day of futile loneliness had broken his spirit—he could endure their estrangement no longer, and in order to make peace was willing to stoop to treacheries which in the morning he had held beneath his honour. He had made Stella a burnt offering to peace. No—he said to Vera—he had never really loved her—she had just been “one of the others” before he met his wife.... He took her glowing memory and put it in the prison house where he had shut up the loves of a month and a week and a day ... he saw her in that frail company, looking at him from between the bars, telling him that she did not belong there. But he spoke to her roughly in his heart—“Yes you do—you’re one of the thieves who stole a bit of the love I was keeping for Vera—just that.”
Vera, after the first frigidities, graciously accepted his contrition. As he was willing to acknowledge that he had never really loved Stella, she was willing to drop the other half of the argument and allow that he was not belatedly in love with her now. Once more there was love and harmony at Starvecrow—warmth in the low rooms, where the firelight leaped on creamy walls and the rustle of Vera’s silk seemed to live like an echo, a voluptuous ghost. The cold, thin Spring seemed shut outside the house—the interior of Starvecrow, its ceilings, doors, walls and furniture meant more to Peter now than its barns and stacks and cobbled yard, even than its free woods and fields.
The cold, thin Spring warmed and thickened in the woods. The floods receded from the Tillingham marshes, and the river ran through a golden street of buttercups to the sea. The winter sowings put a bloom of vivid green into the wheat fields, the blossom of apple, cherry, pear and plum drifted from the boughs of the orchard to the grass, leaving the first green hardness of the fruits among the leaves; and as the outer world grew warm and living, once more the heart of the house grew cold. Peter and Vera were not estranged, but the warm dusk of their rapture had given place to the usual daylight, in which Peter saw the ugly things his peace contained.
He was not blinded by the wonder that had happened, by the knowledge that probably, almost certainly, Vera was to have a child—that there would be an heir to Conster and Alard, and lovely Starvecrow would not go to strangers. He felt intensely relieved that his fears would not be realised, that he was not inevitably building for Gervase to throw down—but there was less glamour about the event than he had anticipated, it could not set his heart at rest, nor make Vera shine with all the old light of the honeymoon.
He had always thought and heard that expecting a child brings husband and wife even closer together than the first days of love—he was vexed that the charm did not work. Was it because of his feeling that if the child were a girl it might just as well not be born? That was certainly the wrong thing to feel, for much as he longed for an heir, he should not forget that a girl would be his child, the child of the woman he loved. Then one day he had a dreadful realisation—the conviction that if he were waiting for Stella’s child it would all have been different, that he would have thought of the child as much as now he thought of the heir. Of course he would still have wanted an heir, but he would not have had the feeling that if it did not give him a boy his wife’s childbearing was in vain.... In vain—in vain.... He would not have known that word which now he found in his mind so often—“Marriage in vain if there is no child ... childbearing in vain if there is no heir.” He saw his marriage as a mere tool of Alard’s use, a prop to that sinking edifice of the Squires.... He felt as miserable as in the first days of the cold, thin Spring.
He now no longer denied that in one sense he had made a mistake in marrying Vera. He still found her brilliant and beautiful, a charming if sometimes a too sophisticated companion. But she was not the wife of his heart and imagination. Her personality stood queerly detached from the rest of his life—apart from his ideas of home and family. He felt coldly angry with her for the ways in which she refused or failed to fulfil his yearnings, and he could never, he felt, quite forgive her for having demanded Stella as a sacrifice. His denial of his love for Stella, which he had made in the interests of peace, now pierced his memory like a thorn—partly he reproached himself, and partly he reproached Vera. And there was a reproach for Stella too.
But he still told himself that he was glad he had married Vera. After all, he had got what he wanted. All he no longer had was the illusion that had fed him for a year after marriage, the illusion that in taking Vera he had done the best thing for himself as a man as well as an Alard. He could no longer tell himself that Vera was a better wife and a sweeter woman than he would have found Stella—that even without family considerations he had still made the happiest choice. That dream had played its part, and now might well die, and yet leave him with the thought that he had chosen well.
He need not look upon his marriage as mercenary because it was practical rather than romantic, nor himself as a fool because he had been heated and dizzied into taking a step he could never have taken in cold blood. He had always planned to marry money for the sake of Alard and Starvecrow, and he could never have done so without the illusion of love. Nature had merely helped him carry out what he had unnaturally planned.... And Starvecrow was safe, established—and under his careful stewardship the huge, staggering Conster estate would one day recover steadiness. The interest on the mortgages was always punctually paid, and he had hopes of being able in a year or two to pay off some of the mortgages themselves. By the time he became Sir Peter Alard he might be in a fair way of clearing the property.... So why regret the romance he had never chosen?
He told himself he would regret nothing if he was sure that Stella would not marry Gervase—that having very properly shut romance out of his own house, he should not have to see it come next door. In his clearer moments he realised that this attitude was unreasonable, or that, if reasonable, it pointed to an unhealthy state of affairs, but he could never quite bully or persuade himself out of it. He had to confess that it would be intolerable to have to welcome as a sister the woman he had denied himself as a wife. Anything, even total estrangement, would be better than that—better than having to watch her making his brother’s home the free and happy place she might have made his own, throwing her sweetness and her courage into the risks of his brother’s life, bearing his brother’s children, made after all the mother of Alards ... perhaps the mother of Alard’s heir. This last thought tormented him most. He saw a preposterous genealogical table:
JOHN ALARD
|
+----------------+----------------+
| |
Peter Alard = Vera Asher Gervase Alard = Stella Mount
(died without male issue) |
+-----+-------+---------+
| | | |
John Peter George Gervase
From the family’s decaying trunk he saw a new healthy branch springing through the grafting in of Stella’s life—healthy but alien, for the children Stella gave Gervase would not be Alards in the true sense of the children she might have given Peter. They would be soaked in their father’s disloyal ideas. His bad sense, his bad form. John, Peter, George and Gervase would probably smash up what was left of the tradition and the estate.... Peter saw them selling Starvecrow, selling Conster, opening shops and works, marrying indiscriminately.... He hated these insurgent nephews his mind had begotten.
Now and then he told himself that his fears were ill-founded. If Stella was going to marry Gervase surely something definite would be known about it by this time. She was not so young that she could afford to wait indefinitely. But against this he knew that Gervase was scarcely twenty-one, and that neither of them had a penny. A long, public engagement would be difficult for many reasons. There might be some secret understanding. His brother still spent most of his Sundays at Vinehall... better not deceive himself with the idea that he went merely for devotional reasons, to gratify this newly-formed taste which to Peter smacked as unseemly as an appetite. No, he went to see Stella, sit with her, talk with her ... kiss her, hold her on his knee, feel the softness of her hair between his fingers ... oh damn!—if only he knew definitely one way or the other, he could choke down his imagination.... His imagination was making a hopeless fool of him with its strokings and its kisses—with its John, Peter, George and Gervase....
His uneasiness finally drove him to take what a little earlier would have seemed an impossible way out of his difficulties. One day, at the end of the brooding of a lonely walk, he met Stella unexpectedly in Icklesham street, and after the inevitable platitudes of greeting followed the first wild plunges of his mind.
“I say, Stella—forgive my asking you—but am I to congratulate you and Gervase?”
The colour rushed over her face, and he had an uneasy moment, wondering whether he had guessed right or merely been impertinent.
“No—you’ll never have to do that,” she answered firmly the next minute.
“I—I beg your pardon.”
He was flushing too, partly with relief, partly with apprehension at the rejoiced, violent beating of his heart.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit. Other members of your family have been half-asking—hinting ... so I’d rather you asked outright. Of course, seeing that I’m seven years older than Gervase, one would have thought ... but I suppose people must have something to talk about.”
He assented weakly—and it suddenly struck him that she was wondering why he had asked her instead of Gervase.
“As a matter of fact,” she continued, “I don’t see so much of him as people think. He comes over to us on Sundays, but that’s partly for Father Luce. He serves the Parish Mass, and they both have lunch with us afterwards—and in the afternoon he helps with the children.”
Peter felt inexpressibly relieved that there was no truth in his picture of Gervase and Stella in the afternoon—no kisses, no strokings of her hair, which was like fine silk between your fingers ... like a child’s hair.... Fresh and bright and living as ever, it curled up under the brim of her hat ... he wondered if she saw how he was staring at it—yes, she must, for she put up her hand rather nervously and pushed a curl under the straw.
“Please contradict anything you hear said about him and me,” she said.
“Yes, I promise I will. It was Vera put it into my head. She said she was quite sure Gervase was in love with you.”
“Well, please contradict it—it will be annoying for Gervase as well as for me.”
A sudden fear seized Peter—a new fear—much more unreasonable and selfish than the old one. It expressed itself with the same suddenness as it came, and before he could check himself he had said—
“Stella ... there isn’t ... there isn’t anyone else?”
He knew that moment that he had given himself away, and he could not find comfort in any thought of her not having noticed. For a few seconds she stared at him silently with her bright perplexed eyes. Then she said—
“No, there isn’t.... But, Peter, why shouldn’t there be?”
He murmured something silly and surly—he was annoyed with her for not tactfully turning the conversation and covering his blunder.
“I’m nearly twenty-eight,” she continued—“and if I can manage to fall in love, I shall marry.”
“Oh, don’t wait for that,” he said, still angry—“you can marry perfectly well without it. I have, and it’s been most successful.”
He knew that he had hurt her in the soft places of her heart; and with his knowledge a fire kindled, setting strange hot cruelties ablaze.
“Besides, it’s easy enough to fall in love, you know—I’ve done it lots of times, and so have you, I expect—easy enough to fall in love and just as easy to fall out.”
She answered him sweetly.
“Oh, I can do both—I’ve done both—but it’s not been easy, not a bit.”
“Well, I’ll wish you luck.”
He took off his hat and passed on. For a quarter of a mile he hated her. He hated her because he had wounded her, and because she would not be proud enough to hide the wound—because from outside his life she still troubled it—because he had lied to her—because he had treated her badly—because he had once loved her and because he had denied it—because he loved her still and could not deny it any more.
He was so busy hating and loving her that he did not notice the large car that passed him at the cross roads till he heard it slithering to a stop. Then he looked up and saw it was his mother’s. Jenny stuck her head out of the window.
“Hullo, Peter! Like a lift home?”
“No thanks, I’m not going home. I’ve got to call at Fourhouses.”
“Haven’t you finished that dreadful business yet?” asked Lady Alard in a tragic voice. The selling of thirty acres to the farm which had originally owned them struck her as the deepest humiliation the family had had yet to swallow.
“Yes—the agreement’s been signed, but there’s a few minor matters cropped up over the transfer.”
“Why don’t you make him come and see you? Why should you walk six miles across country to interview a man like Godfrey?”
“Because I wanted a walk,” said Peter shortly.
“You’ve got terribly restless lately. This is the second time I’ve met you tramping about like a—like a——”
“I call it very sensible of him,” said Jenny—“we’re a lazy lot—rolling about in cars. I’ve half a mind to get down and walk with him.”
“But he’s going to Fourhouses, dear.”
“Never mind—I’d like to see Fourhouses.”
“Your shoes are too thin for walking.”
“Not on a day like this.”
Peter opened the door—he was anxious for Jenny’s company, she would take his thoughts off recent complications. He helped her out, and signed to Appleby to drive on.
“We’ve been paying calls in Winchelsea,” said Jenny with a grimace—“Oh, Peter, this is a dog’s life.”
Peter would not have liked himself to spend an afternoon paying calls, but he regarded it as part of a woman’s duty, and rather disapproved of Jenny’s rebellion. He liked her, and admired her for her young well-bred loveliness, but lately he had begun to think she was getting too like Gervase....
“Somebody must pay calls,” he said a little gruffly.
“Why?” asked Jenny.
“Don’t be silly, my dear. You know it’s a social necessity.”
“Well, it oughtn’t to be—just knowing a lot of dull people because they live in the same neighbourhood and are of the same social standing as ourselves—keeping up our intercourse by means of perfunctory visits which we hate paying as much as they hate receiving ... carefully dodging the tea-hour, so that there’ll be no chance of any real hospitality...”
“So that’s how you choose to describe it——”
“That’s how it is.”
Peter said nothing. He told himself emphatically that Stella probably had exactly the same ideas. Now Vera, for all her intellect and modernity, never shirked her social obligations. Oh, he had done right, after all.
Jenny was enjoying the walk, in spite of her thin shoes and the gruffness of her companion—in spite of some feelings of trepidation at her own recklessness. She was going to see Godfrey again after an interval of nearly two months ... she was going to see him through her own deliberate choice and contrivance. Directly Peter had mentioned Fourhouses she had made up her mind to go with him. If Godfrey’s attraction had not been merely good health and good looks, but his character, his circumstances, she would know more of her own feelings when she saw him in his proper setting, against the background of Fourhouses. His background at present was her own revolt against the conditions of her life—for two months she had seen him standing like a symbolic figure of emancipation among the conventions, restrictions and sacrifices which her position demanded. Life had been very hard for her during those months, or perhaps not so hard as heavy. She had missed the habit of her relation to Jim Parish and felt the humiliation of its breaking off—the humiliation of meeting him casually as he dangled after an heiress.... “He’ll do like Peter—he’ll make himself fall in love with a girl with money and live happy ever afterwards.” She had felt the galling pettiness of the social round, the hollowness of the disguises which her family had adopted, the falseness of the standards which they had set up. “We must at all costs have as many acres of land as we can keep together—we must have our car and our menservants—our position as a ‘county family.’ We call ourselves the New Poor, though we have all these. But we’re not lying, because in order to keep them we’ve given up all the really good things of life—comfort and tranquillity and freedom and love. So we’re Poor indeed.”
She was frankly curious to see the home of the man whose values were not upside down, who had not sacrificed essentials to appearances, who found his pleasure in common things, who, poorer than the poverty of Alard, yet called himself rich. Godfrey had captured her imagination, first no doubt through his virile attraction, but maintaining his hold through the contrast of her brief glimpse of him with the life that was daily disappointing her. She asked Peter one or two questions about Fourhouses. It ran to about four hundred acres, mostly pasture. Godfrey grew wheat, as well as conservatively maintaining his hop-gardens, but the strength of the farm was in livestock. His father had died twelve years ago, leaving the place in surprisingly good condition for those days of rampant free trade—he had a mother and two sisters living with him, Peter believed. Yes, he had always liked Godfrey, a sober, steady, practical fellow, who had done well for himself and his farm.
Fourhouses showed plainly the origin of its name. The original dwelling-house was a sturdy, square structure to which some far-back yeoman had added a gabled wing. An inheritor had added another wing, and a third had incorporated one of the barns—the result was many sprawling inequalities of roof and wall. No one seemed to have thought about the building as a whole, intent only on his own improvements, so that the very materials as well as the style of its construction were diverse—brick, tile, stone, timber—Tudor austerity, Elizabethan ornament, Georgian convention.
There was no one about in the yard, so Peter walked up to the front door and rang the bell. It was answered by a pretty, shy young woman whose pleasant gown was covered by an apron.
“Good afternoon, Miss Godfrey. Is your brother in?”
“Yes, Mr. Alard. If you’ll step into the parlour I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Jenny glanced at Peter, asking silently for an introduction. But her brother seemed abstracted, and forgot the courtesy he had practised at Starvecrow.
The young woman ushered them into a little stuffy room beside the door. There was a table in the middle of it covered by a thick velvet cloth, in the midst of which some musky plant was enthroned in a painted pot. There were more plants in the window, their leaves obscuring the daylight, which came through them like green water oozing through reeds. Jenny felt a pang of disappointment—this little room which was evidently considered the household’s best showed her with a sharp check the essential difference between Alard and Godfrey. Here was a worse difference than between rough and smooth, coarse and delicate, vulgar and refined—it was all the difference between good taste and bad taste. Ben Godfrey’s best clothes would be like this parlour—he would look far more remote from her in them than he looked in his broadcloth and gaiters.
Fortunately he was not wearing his best clothes when he came in a few minutes later. He came stooping under the low door, all the haymaking’s brown on his face since their last meeting.
“Well, this is good of you, Mr. Alard, coming all this way. Why didn’t you send me a line to call around at Starvecrow? Good evening, Miss Alard—have you walked all the way from Conster too?”
“Oh no, I drove as far as Icklesham. The car’s making me lazy.”
“Well, you’ve had a good walk anyway. Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea? We’re just sitting down to it.”
It was six o’clock and neither Peter nor Jenny had remembered that there were human beings who took tea at this hour.
“Thank you so much,” said Jenny—“I’ll be glad.” She had had her tea at Conster before leaving to pay the calls, but she said to herself “If I go in now and see them all having six o’clock tea together, it’ll finish it.” Since she had seen the parlour she had thought it would be a good job if she finished it.
Godfrey led the way down a flagged passage into the oldest part of the house. The room where his family were having tea had evidently once been a kitchen, but was now no longer used as such, though the fireplace and cupboards remained. The floor was covered with brick, and the walls bulged in and out of huge beams, evidently ship’s timber and riddled with the salt that had once caked them. Similar beams lay across the ceiling and curved into the wall, showing their origin in a ship’s ribs—some Tudor seafarer had settled down ashore and built his ship into his house. Long casement windows let in the fullness of the evening sun, raking over the fields from Snowden in the west—its light spilled on the cloth, on the blue and white cups, on the loaf and the black teapot, on the pleasant faces and broad backs of the women sitting round.
“This is my mother—Miss Alard; and my sister Jane, and my sister Lily....” He performed his introductions shyly. The women stood up and shook hands—Jane Godfrey found a chair for Jenny, and Mrs. Godfrey poured her out a cup of very strong tea. There was a moment’s constraint and some remarks about the weather but soon an easier atmosphere prevailed. This was partly due to Peter, who was always at his best with those who were not socially his equals. Jenny had often noticed how charming and friendly he was with his father’s tenants and the village people, whereas with his own class he was often gruff and inarticulate. She knew that this was not due to any democratic tastes, but simply to the special effort which his code and tradition demanded of him on such occasions. She had never realised so plainly the advantages of birth and breeding, as when at such times she saw her unsociable brother exert himself, not to patronage but to perfect ease.
She herself found very little to say—she was too busy observing her surroundings. The “best parlour” atmosphere had entirely vanished—the contrast which the kitchen at Fourhouses presented with the drawing-room at Conster was all in the former’s favour. She found a comfort, dignity and ease which were absent from the Alard ceremonial of afternoon tea, in spite of Wills and the Sèvres china. Whether it was the free spill of the sunshine on table and floor, the solid, simple look of the furniture, the wonder of the old ship’s beams, or the sweet unhurried manners of the company, she could not say, but the whole effect was safe and soothing—there was an air of quiet enjoyment, of emphasis on the fact that a good meal eaten in good company was a source of pleasure and congratulation to all concerned.
She ate a substantial tea of bread and butter and lettuce, listening while Peter and Ben Godfrey talked post-war politics, now and then responding to a shy word from one of the Godfrey women. She was reluctant to praise what she saw around her, to comment on the charm and dignity of the house, for fear she should seem to patronize—but a remark ventured on its age found Mrs. Godfrey eager to talk of her home and able to tell much of its history. After tea she offered to show Jenny the upstairs rooms.
“This is a fine old house, I’ve been told. The other day a gentleman came over from Rye on purpose to see it.”
They walked up and down a number of small twisting passages, broken with steps and wanting light. Rooms led inconveniently out of one another—windows were high under the ceiling or plumb with the floor. There was a great deal of what was really good and lovely—old timber-work, old cupboards, a fine dresser, a gate-legged table and a couple of tallboys—and a great deal that recalled the best parlour, the iron bedsteads, marble-topped washstands, flower-painted mirrors and garlanded wall-paper of the new rural tradition. All, however, was good of its kind, comfortable and in sound repair. Mrs. Godfrey was proud of it all equally.
“But I suppose, Miss Alard, you don’t find it much of a house compared to your own.”
“I think it’s lovely,” said Jenny—“much more exciting than Conster.”
Mrs. Godfrey was not sure whether a house had any right to be exciting, so she made no reply. They went downstairs again, and fearing the best parlour, Jenny suggested that they should go out into the yard and find the men.
“They must have finished their business by now.”
“They’ll be in Ben’s office—leastways in what he calls his office,” said Mrs. Godfrey with a small tolerant laugh.
She led the way into one of the barns where a corner was boarded off into a little room. Here stood a second-hand roll-topped desk and a really good yew-backed chair. The walls were covered with scale-maps of the district and advertisements for cattle food, very much after the style of the office at Starvecrow. Jenny looked round for some individual mark of Ben, but saw none, unless the straightness and order of it all were an index to his character.
“He’ll be showing Mr. Alard the stock—he’s proud of his stock,” said Mrs. Godfrey, and sure enough the next minute they heard voices in the yard, and saw Godfrey and Peter coming out of the cow-shed.
“Here you are,” cried Peter to his sister—“I want you to look at Mr. Godfrey’s Sussex cattle. He’s got the finest I’ve seen in the district.”
Jenny could not speak for a moment. She had seen a look in Godfrey’s eyes when they fell on her that deprived her of speech. Her heart was violently turned to the man from his surroundings in which she had sought a refuge for her self-respect—Fourhouses, its beauties and its uglinesses, became dim, and she saw only what she had seen at first and been ashamed of—the man whom she could—whom she must—love.
Having tea at Fourhouses had not “finished it”; and she was glad, in spite of the best parlour. The Godfreys’ life might be wofully lacking in ornament, but she had seen enough to know that it was sound in fundamentals. Here was the house built on a rock, lacking style perhaps, but standing firm against the storms—while Alard was the house built on the sand, the sand of a crumbled and obsolete tradition, still lovely as it faced the lightning with its towers, but with its whole structure shaken by the world’s unrest.
She did not take in many impressions of her last few minutes at the farm. The outhouses and stables, tools and stock, were only a part of this bewildered turning of herself. They scarcely seemed outside her, but merged into the chaotic thought processes which her mind was slowly shaking into order. A quarter of an hour later she found herself walking with Peter along the road that winds at the back of Icklesham mill....
“Uncommon good sort of people, those Godfreys,” her brother was saying.
“Yes, I liked them very much.”
“I think there’s no class in England to equal the old-fashioned yeoman farmer. I’d be sorry to see him die out.”
“Do you think he will die out?”
“Well—land is always getting more and more of a problem. There aren’t many who can keep things up as well as Godfrey. He’s had the sense to go for livestock—it’s the only thing that pays nowadays. Of course the farmers are better off than we are—they aren’t hit the same way by taxation. But rates are high, and labour’s dear and damn bad. I really don’t know what’s going to become of the land, but I think the yeoman will last longer than the Squire. Government supports him, and won’t do a thing for us.”
Jenny said nothing. She felt unequal to a discussion in her present mood.
“I envy Godfrey in a lot of ways,” continued Peter—“he’s been able to do for his place things that would save ours if only we could afford them. He’s broken fifteen acres of marsh by the Brede River and gets nine bushels to the acre. Then you saw his cattle.... Something to be proud of there. If we could only go in for cattle-breeding on a large scale we might get the farms to pay.”
“I like the way they live,” said Jenny—“they seem so quiet and solid—so—so without a struggle.”
“Oh, Godfrey must be pretty well off, I suppose. I don’t know how he’s made his money—I expect his father did it for him. But he paid us cash down for the land, and doesn’t seem to feel it.”
“I don’t suppose they’re better off than we are. It’s simply that they aren’t in the mess we’re in—and they haven’t got to keep up appearances. They’re free, so they’re contented.”
Peter evidently suspected a fling at Alard in this speech, for he answered gravely.
“All the same, it’s up to us to stand by our own class. I daresay the Godfreys are happier and more comfortable than we are, but we can’t ever be like them. We can’t shelve our responsibilities. We’ve got a tradition as old as theirs, and we have to stick to it, even if at present it seems to be going under. Personally I’m proud of it.”
Again Jenny felt herself unable to argue, to tell Peter, as Gervase would have done, that what he called responsibilities were only encumbrances, that what he called tradition was only a false standard. Instead she was acutely conscious of her disloyalty to her people’s cause, of how near she stood to betraying it.
She had not quite realised this before, she had not grasped the full implications of the inward movements of her heart. She had seen herself first, in bitter shame, as a young woman whose sexual consciousness had been stirred by a young man of a lower class; then she had seen herself as enticed not merely by his health and comeliness but by his happy independence, his freedom from the shackles that bound her—till at last he had become a symbol of the life outside the Alard tradition, of the open country beyond the Alard estate, a contrast to all that was petty, arbitrary and artificial in her surroundings. And now, this evening, at Fourhouses, she had met the man again, and met him without shame. She knew now that she was attracted to him not merely in spite of his class but because of it—because he belonged to the honourable class of the land’s freemen. He appealed to her as a man, speaking to her with his eyes the language that is common to all men, and he appealed to her as a freeman, because she knew that if she went to him she would be free—free of all the numberless restrictions and distresses that bound her youth.
The problem before her now was not whether she should be ashamed or not ashamed of his attraction, but whether she should yield to it or turn away. She faced these new thoughts during the rest of her walk with Peter, between the dry, abstracted phrases of her conversation—during dinner and the long dreary evening of cards and desultory talk—and at last, in greater peace, when she had gone to bed and lay watching the grey moonlight that moved among the trees of the plantation.
What was she to do? What had she done? Had she fallen in love with Godfrey? Was she going to tear her life out of its groove and merge it with his, just on the strength of those three meetings? She did not know—she was not sure. She could not be in love yet, but she felt sure that she was going to be. At least so she should have said if he had been a man of her own class. Then why should she act any differently because he was not? Her defiance grew. Godfrey’s class was a good class—his family was old, substantial and respected. It was silly and snobbish to talk as if he belonged to some menial order—though, hang it all, any order was better than the order of impoverished country families to which she belonged.
Resentfully Jenny surveyed her tribe. She saw the great families of the Kent and Sussex borders struggling to show the world the same front that they had shown before they were shaken. She saw them failing in that struggle one by one—here a great house was closed, and for sale, with no buyers because of its unwieldy vastness and long disrepair—here another was shorn of its estate stripped off it in building plots and small holdings—yet another had lost its freedom in mortgages, and kept its acres only at the price of being bound to their ruin. There was no need for Gervase to tell that the Squires, having outlived their day, were going under—her broken romance with Jim Parish had shown her that. She had realised then that it was not likely that she would ever marry into her own class. The young men who were her friends and associates in the life of the county must marry wealth. Peter had gone outside the county and married money—she too one day would have to go outside and marry money—or marry where money did not matter. The days were gone when Manor mated with Manor and Grange with Grange—mighty alliances like the marriages of Kings. Nowadays, just as Kings could no longer mate with the blood royal but sought consorts among their subjects, so the Squires must seek their wives outside the strict circle of the “county”—and not even in the professional classes, which were nearly as hard-hit as themselves, but in the classes of aspiring trade, nouveaux-riches, war-profiteers....
Jenny grimaced—yet, after all, what else was there to do? Remain a spinster like Doris, or induce some hot-blooded heir of impoverished acres to forget them in a moment of romance, from which he would wake one day to reproach her.... No, she would have to be like the rest and marry outside the tribe. But since she must go out, why shouldn’t she go out in the direction she chose? Why was it very right and proper to marry into trade as long as it is wealthy, and somehow all wrong if it is not? Why was Peter without reproach for marrying Vera Asher, whose grandfather had kept a clothes-mart in the city, while she would never be forgiven if she married Ben Godfrey, whose grandfather, with his father and fathers before him, had been a yeoman farmer of ancient land?
The answer of course was plain, and she must not be cynical in giving it. If she acknowledged that the excuse was money she must also acknowledge that it was money for the family’s sake—money to keep the family alive, to save its estates from dispersal and its roof from strangers. These men and women married into a class beneath them to save their families. But if they did so to save their families, why shouldn’t she do so to save herself? Why was there always this talk of the group, the tribe, the clan, while the individual was sacrificed and pushed under? Both she and Jim Parish had been sacrificed to his family.... Doris had been sacrificed to hers ... and there was Mary, sacrificed to the family’s good name, escaping, it is true, at the last, but not till after her wings had been broken ... there was Peter, marrying a rich woman and becoming dull and stuffy and precise in consequence. Only Gervase so far had not been sacrificed—probably he would never be, for he had already chosen his escape. And she—she now had her chance ... but she did not know if she would take it.
Lying there in the white break of the dawn, her mind strung with sleeplessness, she faced the danger. If she did not escape Alard would have her—she would have to offer herself to it either as Doris had offered herself or as Peter had offered himself.... Why should she? Why should she sacrifice her youth to prop its age—an age which must inevitably end in death. “Things can’t go on much longer—it’s only a question of putting off the end.” If the house was bound to fall, why should she be buried in the ruins?... She had a momentary pang—for she knew that Peter had great schemes for Alard, great dreams for it—that he hoped to save it and give it back, even in the midst of the world’s shaking, some of its former greatness. But she could not help that. For Peter the family might be the biggest thing in life—for her it was not, and she would be betraying the best of herself if she did not put it second to other things. What she wanted most in the world was love—love, peace, settlement, the beauty of content ... these no one but Ben Godfrey could give her.
The sky was faintly pink behind the firs. A single bird’s note dropped into the still air. She heard a movement in the room next to hers—she and Gervase still slept at the top of the house in the two little rooms they had had as girl and boy. Her brother was getting up—first, she knew, to serve the altar at Vinehall, then to drive away over the Kentish hills to his work among bolts and screws and nuts and rods and grease ... there is more than one way out of the City of Destruction.
After that she must have slept, for when she next opened her eyes she had made up her mind. Jenny was not naturally irresolute but she was diffident, and this problem of escape was the biggest she had ever had to tackle. However, sleep had straightened out the twisted workings of her thought—the way was clear at last.
She sprang out of bed, alive with a glowing sense of determination. She knew that she had a great deal to plan and to do. This love affair, apart from its significance, was entirely different from any other she had had. Her intuition told her that she would have to make the openings, carry on all the initial stages of the wooing. She would have to show Godfrey that she cared, or his modesty would make him hang back. In common language she would have to “make the running.” Rather to her surprise, she found that she enjoyed the prospect. She remembered once being a little shocked by Stella Mount, who had confided that she liked making love herself just as much as being made love to.... Well, Jenny was not exactly going to make love, but she was going to do something just as forward, just as far from the code of well-bred people—she was going to show a man in a class beneath her that she cared for him, that she wanted his admiration, his courtship....
She hurried over her bath and dressing, urged by the conviction that she must act, take irretraceable steps, before she had time to think again. She had already thought enough—more thought would only muddle her, wrap her in clouds. Action would make things clearer than any amount of reflection. She would go over to Fourhouses—a litter of collie pups she had confusedly admired the day before would give her an excuse for a visit, an excuse which would yet be frail enough to show that it alone had not brought her there.
She was the first at breakfast that morning, and hoped that no one else would come down while she was in the room. Her father was generally the earliest, but today she did not hear his footstep till she was leaving the table. There were two doors out of the breakfast-room, and Jenny vanished guiltily through one as Sir John came in at the other. She was ashamed of herself for such Palais Royal tactics, but felt she would stoop to them rather than risk having her resolution scotched by the sight of her father.
She had decided to go on foot to Fourhouses—not only would it mean a more unobtrusive departure from Conster, but it would show Godfrey her determination. The purchase of a puppy she had scarcely noticed the day before was a flimsy excuse for walking five miles across country the first thing next morning. He would be bound to see at least part of its significance—and she had known and appraised enough men to realise that his was the warm, ready type which does not have to see the whole road clear before it advances.
The early day was warm; a thick haze clotted the air, which was full of the scents of grass and dust, of the meadowsweet and the drying hay. The little lanes were already stuffy with sunshine, and before Jenny had come to Brede she realised that the light tweed suit she had put on was too heavy, and her summer-felt hat was making a band of moisture round her head, so that her hair lay draggled on her brows. She took off her coat and slung it over her arm ... phew! how airless this part of the country was, with its old, old lanes, trodden by a hundred generations of hobnails to the depth of fosses ... when she was across the marsh with its trickery of dykes she would leave the road and take to the fields. The way had not seemed so long yesterday in the cool of the evening.... What would Peter say if he could see her now?—Poor old Peter! It would be dreadful for him if she carried out her scheme. He felt about things more strongly than anyone.... She was sorry for Peter.
Then she wondered what Godfrey would think when he saw her, arriving hot and tired and breathless, with her trumped up excuse for seeing him again. Would he despise her?—Perhaps, after all, he did not particularly care about her—she was a fool to be so sure that he did. He probably had that slow, admiring way with all women. Besides, it’s ridiculous to go by the look in a man’s eyes ... silly ... schoolgirlish ... novel-reading-old-maidish ... she was losing her balance in her hatred of things. She would probably find out that he was in love with some girl of his own class.... Her heart beat painfully at such an idea and her ridiculous mind denied it, but she knew that her mind was only obeying her heart.
... Or he might fail to see anything significant in her coming. He probably had one of those slow-moving country brains on which everything is lost but the direct hit. He most likely was a dull dog ... and she had thought he could make her happy—Jenny Alard, with her quick mind, high breeding and specialised education. Her longing to escape had driven her into fancying herself in love. All she wanted was to get away from home—and this door stood open. Beyond it she might find even worse restrictions and futilities than those from which she fled.
She was losing heart, and almost lost purpose as well. She stopped in the lane at the foot of Snailham hill, and looked back towards the north. Conster was hidden behind the ridge of Udimore but she was still on Alard ground—there was Crouch’s Farm beside the Brede River—and Little Float and Cockmartin, both Alard farms—and all that green width of marsh was Alard’s, with its dotted sheep. She had a preposterous feeling that if she walked off the estate on to Godfrey’s land it would be too late to turn back ... if she was going back she must go back now.
She stood in the pebbly marle, looking over the marsh to the trees where Udimore church showed a hummock of roof. She tried to examine herself, to find out in a few giddy seconds why she was going to Fourhouses. Was it simply because she was tired of convention—of county shams—of having to go without things she wanted in order to have things she didn’t want?—or was she in love with Ben Godfrey, and going to him in spite of the efforts of her class instinct to keep her back? She suddenly knew that the latter was the only good reason. If it was true that she had fallen in love with Godfrey the second time she had seen him—that afternoon, weeks back, at Starvecrow—and if all this hatred of Alard ways, this ramp against convention, was no genuine revolt against either but just the effort of her mind to justify her heart—then she had better go forward. But if, on the other hand, she really hated her life and was willing to take any way of escape—particularly if her unrest was due to the collapse of her affair with Jim Parish—if she was going to Fourhouses only to escape from Conster—then she had better turn back.
She stood for a moment hesitating, her heels deep in the silt of the lane, her eyes strained towards Udimore. Then a footstep made her start and turn round. She had the confused impression of a man and a gun, of a recognition and a greeting, all blurred together in the mists of her surprise. She had not expected to meet him so far from his farm, right off his own land ... she felt a quake of disappointment, too; for the boundaries of the two estates had now a mysterious significance, and she was sorry that she had met him before she had left Alard ground, before she had escaped.
“Good morning, Miss Alard. You’ve come a long way so early.”
“Yes; I was coming to Fourhouses—it struck me that you might be willing to sell one of those collie pups you showed me yesterday.”
This was not how she had meant to speak. She knew her voice was clipped and cold. Hang it! she might have managed to break through the wall on this special occasion. First words are the most significant, and she had meant hers to have a more than ordinary warmth, instead of which they had a more than ordinary stiffness. But it was no good trying—she would never be able so to get rid of the traditions of her class and of her sex as to show this young man that she loved him ... if indeed she really did love him.
He was speaking now—she forced herself to listen to what he said.
“I’d never sell you one of those—they’re not worth paying for. It’s only I’m that soft-hearted I couldn’t think of drowning them. I got rid of the last litter quite easily, just giving them away. So I’ll be grateful if you’ll accept one.”
“Thank you—but I really couldn’t allow—I mean....”
“Won’t you come up to the place and look at them? You’ll see for yourself they’re not much. I could let you have a really good retriever-pup later, but these collies—it’s just my sister’s Lizzie that one of our old men gave her years ago, and she’s no particular breed, and the sire’s their dog at Wickham.”
“Thanks ever so much—but you’re out with your gun, so I won’t trouble you to turn back.”
She wondered if he would make any explanation, offer some apology for carrying his gun over Alard fields. But he merely urged her again to come up to Fourhouses, and slack after her conflict, she gave way and turned with him.
“Are you bothered much with rabbits?” she asked as they walked up the hill. “We’re simply over-run with them at Conster.”
“They’re pretty bad, especially now the corn’s up. I generally take out my gun when I go round the place.”
“But is this your land?—I thought I was still on ours.”
“This is the land I have just bought from your father, Miss Alard. It was yours three months ago, but it belongs to Fourhouses now.”
Jenny had known before that love could make her superstitious—only under its influence had she occasionally respected the mascots, charms, black cats and other gods of the age, or yielded to the stronger, stranger influences of buried urgencies to touch and try.... But she was surprised at the sudden relief which she felt at Godfrey’s words. She tried to reason herself out of the conviction that she had definitely crossed the frontier and could now never go back. She could not help feeling like one of those escaped prisoners of war she had sometimes read of during the last five years, who passed unaware the black and orange boundary posts of Holland, and, after hiding for hours from what they took for German sentries, found themselves at last confronted by the friendly Dutch guards. In vain she told herself that it made no difference whether she met Godfrey on land belonging to Conster or to Fourhouses—she was in the grip of something stronger than reason; she could not argue or scold herself out of her follies.
The answer to all her questionings was now pretty plain. She was coming to Fourhouses for the man, not for escape. No need of her own could have made a fool of her like this. She was not fancying herself in love with Ben Godfrey—she really loved him, attracted physically at first, no doubt, but as she advanced finding ever more and more solid reason for attachment. She wanted him, and why in the world shouldn’t she have him?—if he had been rich, not even the lowest rank would have made him ineligible in her people’s eyes. But because he was only “comfortable,” only had enough to live on in peace and happiness and dignity, her family would be horrified at such an alliance—“a common farmer,” she could hear them calling him, and her cheeks reddened angrily as she walked up the hill.
“Are you tired?” asked Godfrey—“let me carry your coat—it’s a terrible hot day.”
She let him relieve her, pleased at the accidental touch of his hand under the stuff. She wondered if he would say “I beg your pardon” as he had said the first time. But he was silent, indeed the whole of the way to Fourhouses he said very little, and she wondered if he was pondering her in his mind, perhaps asking himself why she had come, trying to argue away his surprise, telling himself it was just a lady’s way to be impulsive and tramp five miles to buy a mongrel pup she had scarcely noticed the day before. Now and then his glance crept towards her, sweeping sideways from deepset blue eyes, under the fringe of dark lashes. She liked his eyes, because they were not the brown bovine eyes of the mixed race who had supplanted the original South Saxons, but the eyes of the Old People, who had been there before the Norman stirred French syllables into the home-brew of Sussex names. They were the eyes of her own people, though she herself had them not, and they would be the eyes of her children ... she felt the colour mounting again, but this time it was not the flush of indignation, and when next she felt his gaze upon her, her own was impelled to meet it. For the first time on that walk to Fourhouses their eyes met, and she saw that his face was as red as hers with the stain of a happy confusion.
When they came to the farm, he invited her in, saying that he would bring her the puppies. For a moment she saw him hesitate at the parlour door, but to her relief he passed on, leading the way to the kitchen.
“Mother, here’s Miss Alard come again to see Lizzie’s pups”—he ushered her in rather proudly, she thought, standing back against the door which he flung wide open.
“You’re welcome,” said Mrs. Godfrey—“please sit down.”
She was ironing at the table, but stopped to pull forward a chair to the window, which was open. There was no fire in this, the big outer room, but from a smaller one within came the sound of cracking wood and occasional bursts of singing.
“I’m afraid I’ve come at an awkward time,” said Jenny.
“Oh, no—we’re never too busy here—and Ben ull be proud to show you the little dogs, for all he makes out to look down on them, they being no sort of class and him a bit of a fancier as you might say. You’ve had a hot walk, Miss Alard—can I get you a drink of milk? It’s been standing in the cool some while and ull refresh you.”
Jenny was grateful and glad. Mrs. Godfrey fetched her the milk in a glass from the dairy, then went back to her ironing. She was a stout, middle-aged woman, bearing her years in a way that showed they had not been made heavy by too much work or too much childbearing. She could still show her good white teeth, and her hair had more gloss than grey in it. She talked comfortably about the weather and the haymaking till her son came back with the two most presentable of Lizzie’s family.
“If you’ll be kind enough to take one of these little chaps, Miss Alard....”
They spent twenty minutes or so over the puppies, and in the end Jenny made her choice and accepted his gift.
“He won’t be ready to leave his mother for a week or two yet.”
“I’ll come back and fetch him.”
“Won’t you come before then?”
They were alone in the great kitchen—Mrs. Godfrey had gone into the inner room to heat her iron, and they stood between the table and the window, Jenny still holding the puppy in her arms. The moment stamped itself upon her memory like a seal. She would always remember that faint sweet scent of freshly ironed linen, that crack of a hidden fire, that slow ticking of a clock—and Ben Godfrey’s face before her, so brown, strong and alive, so lovable in its broad comeliness. The last of her reserve dropped from her—he ceased to be a problem, a choice, a stranger; he became just a fond, friendly man, and her heart went out to him as to a lover, forgetting all besides.
“Yes, of course I’ll come”—she said gently—“when ever you want me.”
The rest of that day did not seem quite real—perhaps because she would not let herself think of what she had done in the morning, what she had committed herself to. And when the day was over and she lay flat on her back in her bed, with the bedclothes up to her chin, the morning still seemed like something she had watched or dreamed rather than something she had lived.
She did not actually live till the next day at breakfast, when she turned over the letters beside her plate. Among them lay one in handwriting she did not know, small and laborious. She looked at the postmark and saw it was from Icklesham, and immediately found herself tingling and blushing. Her first impulse was to put it away and read it in solitude later on, but a contrary impulse made her open it at once—partly because she could not bear the suspense, and partly because she could not bear the shame of her own foolishness. Why should she be so sure it was from Fourhouses? Ben Godfrey was not the only person she knew in Icklesham ... though the only person she knew who was likely to write in that careful, half-educated hand.... Yes, it was from Fourhouses.
I hope this letter finds you in the best of health, and I hope you will not think I am taking a liberty to ask if you could meet me by the Tillingham Bridge on the road from Brede Eye to Horns Cross next Thursday afternoon at three p.m. I have something very particular to say to you. Ever since you were kind enough to call this morning and said you would come back any time I wanted I have been thinking that perhaps you would like my freindship. Dear Miss Alard, I hope you do not think I am taking a liberty, and if you do not want my freindship perhaps you will kindly let me know. But ever since you came over with Mr. Peter Alard I thought perhaps you would like my freindship. I must not say any more. But I would like to talk to you on Thursday at three p.m. if you will meet me on the Tillingham Bridge by Dinglesden Farm. I think that is better than me coming to your house—[“yes, I think so too,” said Jenny]—and I should be very much obliged if you would come. My dear Miss Alard I hope you do not think I am taking a liberty on so short an acquaintance, but I feel I should like to be your friend. If you would rather not have my freindship perhaps you will kindly let me know. Having no more to say, I will now draw to a close.
Yours sincerely,
BENJAMIN GODFREY.
Jenny was half surprised to find herself choking with laughter.
“Here I am, down to brass tacks,” she thought to herself—“I must put this letter with the best parlour and the Sunday clothes” ... then suddenly, deep in her heart—“Oh, the darling! the darling!”
“Your letters seem to be amusing,” said Doris from the other end of the table.
“Yes, they are.”
“I wish mine were. I never seem to get anything but bills. I’m glad you’re more lucky—though I expect it makes a difference not hearing from Jim.”
“Oh, we never corresponded much—we met too often.”
“It was always the other way round with me ... the piles of letters I used to get.... I expect you remember.”
Jenny could remember nothing but a fat letter which appeared every other day for about three weeks, from an Indian civil servant who was presumptuous enough to think himself fit to mate with Alard.
“Well, I’ve had my good times,” continued Doris, “so I oughtn’t to grumble. Things seem to have been different when I was your age. Either it was because there were more men about, or”—she smiled reminiscently. “Anyhow, there weren’t any gaps between. I put an end to it all a little while ago—I had to—one finds these things too wearing ... and I didn’t want to go on like Ninon de l’Enclos—I don’t think it’s dignified.”
“Perhaps not,” said Jenny absently. She was wondering what Doris would say to her letter if she could see it.
After breakfast she took it up to the old schoolroom and read it again. This time it did not make her laugh. Rather, she felt inclined to cry. She thought of Ben Godfrey sitting at the kitchen table with a sheet of note-paper and a penny bottle of ink before him—she saw him wiping his forehead and biting his penholder—she saw him writing out the note over and over again because of the blots and smudges that would come. Yes, she must remember the debit side—that he was not always the splendid young man she saw walking over his fields or driving his trap. There were occasions on which he would appear common, loutish, ignorant.... But, and this was the change—she saw that she loved him all the better for these occasions—these betraying circumstances of letter writing, best parlour and best clothes, which seemed to strip him of his splendour and show him to her as something humble, pathetic and dear.
“Dear Mr. Godfrey,” she said to herself—“I shall be very humbly grateful for your freindship ... and I can’t imagine it spelt any other way.”
She found it very difficult to answer the letter, as she was uncertain of the etiquette which ruled these occasions. Evidently one said little, but said it very often. In the end all she did was to write saying she would meet him on the Tillingham bridge, as he suggested. She thought it was rather rash of him to appoint a tryst on her father’s land, but they could easily go off the road on to the marsh, where they were not likely to be seen.
She posted the letter herself in the box at the end of the drive, then gave herself up to another twenty-four hours’ in reality of waiting.
The next day was heavy with the threat of thunder. The ragged sky hung low over the trees, and clouds of dust blew down the lanes, through the aisles of the fennel. Jenny was exactly punctual at her tryst. She did not know whether or not he would expect to be kept waiting, but she had resolved to weigh this new adventure by no false standards of coquetry, and walked boldly on to Dinglesden bridge just as the thin chimes of Conster’s stable-clock came across the fields.
He was nowhere in sight, but in a couple of minutes he appeared, riding this time on a big-boned brown horse, who swung him along at a slow, lurching pace. Evidently he had not expected to find her there before him.
Directly he caught sight of her he jerked the reins and finished the last hundred yards at a canter, pulling up beside her on the crest of the bridge.
“Good-day, Miss Alard. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
She was pale with shyness. Hitherto she had never, under any circumstances, felt ill at ease with a man, but now she was incomprehensibly too shy to speak. He had dismounted, and was leading his horse towards the gate opening on the marsh by Dinglesden Farm. She found herself walking beside him.
“Bit thundery,” he remarked—“maybe we’ll have a storm.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m not sure—it may blow over. I hope it does, for I’ve still a couple of fields uncut.”
“The hay’s been good this year.”
“Not so bad—but a bit stalky.”
They were through the gate now, walking side by side over the grass-grown, heavy rutted track that leads past the barns of Dinglesden down the Tillingham marsh, between the river and the hop-gardens. Jenny was glad they were off the road—soon they would be out of sight of it. The hop-gardens that covered the slope and threw a steamy, drowsy scent into the heaviness of the day, would hide them completely from anyone who went by. She began to feel very much alone with Godfrey ... and still neither of them spoke. They had not spoken since they had left the road.
Only a few hundred yards brought them to the turn of the valley, where the Tillingham swings southward towards Rye. Behind them the farm and the bridge were shut out by the sloping hop-gardens, before them the marsh wound, a green street, between the sorrel-rusted meadows, with the Mocksteeple standing gaunt and solitary on the hill below Barline.
“It’s very good of you to have come,” said Ben.
“I—I wanted to come.”
He checked his horse, and they stood still.
“You—you don’t think it cheek—I mean, that I’m taking a liberty—in wanting to know you?”
“No....”
“When you came that evening to the farm, I—I wanted to say all sorts of things, and I didn’t like ... for I didn’t know....”
“I should like to be your friend.”
Her voice came firmly at last.
“I should like to be your friend,” she repeated.
She knew what the word “friend” meant in his ears. “My friend” was what a girl of his class would say when she meant “my lover.”
“Well, then....”
He took her hand and blushed.
“Let’s sit down for a bit,” he said.
A stripped and fallen tree lay on the grass, and they sat down on it when he had hitched his horse to the fence of the hop-garden. Long hours seemed to roll by as they sat there side by side ... the sun came out for a moment or two, sending the shadow of the hop-bines racing over the ground. There was a pulse of thunder behind the meadows in the north. Then suddenly, for some unfathomable reason, Jenny began to cry.
At first he seemed paralysed with astonishment, while she leaned forward over her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. But the next moment his arms came round her, drawing her gently up against him, her cheek against his homespun coat that smelt of stables.
“My dear ... my little thing ... don’t cry! What is it?—Are you unhappy? What have I done?”
She could not speak—she could only lift her face to his, trying to smile, trying to tell him with her streaming eyes that she was not unhappy, only silly, only tired. He seemed to understand, for he drew her closer, and she could feel his whole body trembling as he put his mouth shyly against hers.
One or two drops of rain splashed into the ruts, and a moan of wind suddenly came through the hop-bines. He lifted his head, still trembling. He looked at her sidelong, as if for a moment he expected her to be angry with him, to chide his presumption. He would have taken away his arm, but she held it about her.
“You’ll get wet,” he said reluctantly—“we should ought to move.”
“I don’t care—I don’t want to move. Let me stay like this.”
“Then you aren’t angry with me for——”
“Why should I be?”
“Well, we aren’t long acquainted....”
During the next two months Jenny grew sweetly familiar with that strip of marsh between the hop-gardens and the River Tillingham. The Mocksteeple, standing out on the hill above the river’s southward bend, had become one of many joyful signs. Once more the drab, ridiculous thing looked down on Alard loves, though now it was not a cynical Alard Squire making sport of the country girls, but an Alard girl tasting true love for the first time with a yeoman. Her earlier love affairs, even that latest one with Jim Parish, became thin, frail things in comparison.
Godfrey was contemptuous of Jim.
“He couldn’t have loved you, or he’d never have let you go. He’d have let his place go first.”
“Would you let Fourhouses go for me, Ben?”
“Reckon I would.”
“Thank God you haven’t got to choose.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t got to choose, for I’d like to show you.” “Well, I’m glad, for whichever way you chose it ud be hard for you.”
“No—not hard.”
“You don’t know, because you’re safe; you haven’t even got to think of it. But I’m sorry for some of our men—yes, for Jim Parish, and even for Peter. You see, it’s not merely choosing for themselves. They have their families to consider. You can’t dish all your relations just because you want to get married.”
Love was making her soft in judgment.
“No relation that had any heart would stand in the way of a young chap’s marrying a good girl. My mother ud sooner turn out and live in a cottage than see me go without a wife.”
“But would you turn your mother out, Ben?”
“We’d all go out together—for my wife.”
His love-making was a delightful blend of diffidence and ardour. At first it had been difficult to show him that she was touchable, approachable to caresses. Yet once she had shown him the way, he had required no more leading. He had a warm, gentle nature, expressing itself naturally in fondness. His love for her seemed to consist in equal parts of passion and affection. It lacked the self-regarding element to which she was accustomed, and though it held all the eager qualities of fire, there was about it a simplicity and a shyness which were new to her. After a time she discovered that he had a mind like a young girl’s, and an experience very nearly as white. He had spent his life in the society of animals and good women, and the animals had taught him to regard them not as symbols of license but as symbols of order, and the women had taught him that they were something more than animals. He had the fundamental cleanness of a man who takes nature naturally.
There had been another surprise for her, too, and this had lain in his attitude towards her position and her family. She discovered that his deference for her was entirely for her as a woman, and he had no particular respect for her as an Alard. His courtship would have been as diffident if she had been the daughter of the farmer of Glasseye or the farmer of Ellenwhorne. He was grateful to her for loving him, and infinitely careful of her love, as a privilege which might be withdrawn, but he saw no condescension in her loving him, no recklessness in her seeking him. Indeed, the only time she found a stiffness in him was when she told him that their love would have to be secret as far as her family was concerned. He had come to see her openly and innocently at Conster, and though luckily her people had been out, and she had been able to convey to the servants that he had only called on business, she had had to warn him that he must not come again.
“But why not?—I’m not ashamed of loving you.”
“It isn’t that, Ben.”
“Nor ashamed of myself, neither.”
“Oh, darling, can’t you understand that it’s because of my parents—what they’ll think and say—and do, if they get the chance?”
“You mean they won’t hold with us marrying?”
“No—they won’t hold with it at all.”
“I expect they’d like you to marry a lord.”
“It isn’t so much a lord that they want as someone with money.”
“Well, I’ve got plenty of that, my lovely.”
“Not what they’d call plenty—they want a really rich man, who’ll be able to put us on our feet again.”
“Reckon he’d be hard to find. You’d need fifty thousand to do that, I reckon.”
Jenny nodded.
“Thank God,” he said, “my lands free.”
“It’s only because I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, nor my father before me. That piece I bought from your father is the first that Fourhouses has bought for sixty years. We’re not grand landlords, us. Maybe” ... he hesitated a moment ... “your father and mother ud think you were marrying beneath you to marry me. I reckon we’re not gentry, and I was sent to the National School. But my folk have had Fourhouses two hundred year, and we’ve kept ourselves honest, for all that my grandfather married a gipsy. There was a lady I met on leave in Egypt asked me to marry her,” he added naïvely, “and Lord! she was beautiful and had lovely gowns, and was a great man’s widow. But I couldn’t feel rightly towards her, so I declined the favour she would do me, but was honoured all the same. What are you laughing at, duck?”
“Not at you.”
She realised that the war was probably in part responsible for his failure to see the barriers between them—its freedoms coupled with his own inherited consciousness of a good inheritance and an honest history. She was not sorry for this—it showed that he was aware of no maladjustments in their comradeship, in their tastes, views, thoughts, ideas, which now they exchanged freely. It made their courtship much more natural. All she feared was his resentment at her family’s attitude.
But she found him unexpectedly mild on this point. His self-respect was solid and steady enough not to be shaken by what would have upset a man standing less securely. He was proud of his yeoman birth, his prosperous farm and free inheritance, and could laugh at the contempt of struggling, foundering Conster. Moreover, he loved Jenny, and, since she loved him, could forgive those who did not think him good enough for her. He agreed that their engagement should be kept from her people, though it was known to his, till she could find a proper time for disclosing it. Meanwhile they met either at Fourhouses, where the kindly, dignified welcome of his mother and sisters saved their love from any sordid touch of the clandestine, or else, nearer Jenny’s home, at Brede Eye or the Mocksteeple.
As time went on she felt the necessity of taking at least one member of her family into her confidence—partly to make contrivance more easy, and partly as a help in the ultimate crisis which must come before long. Ben was slow in his methods, and did not belong to a class who made marriages in haste, but she knew that the last months of the year would probably be crucial. She would then have somehow to declare herself, and she saw the need for an ally.
Of course there was only Gervase. She knew that he alone was in the least likely to take her part; and in spite of her growing approach to Peter, she realised that it would be folly to turn to him now. He had married a girl whose grandfather Ben Godfrey’s grandfather would have despised, nevertheless he would be horror-stricken at the marriage she proposed to make—he would talk as if she was marrying beneath her, as if she was making herself cheap and degrading her name. She could not bear it.... No, Peter would have to stay outside. Gervase was altogether different—he had accomplished his own revolt, and would encourage hers. Besides, he had always been her special brother, and though lately his new interests and long absences had a trifle estranged them, she knew she had only to turn to him to find their old alliance standing.
It was with this special decision that she came from the Mocksteeple one evening in September. She had told Ben that she meant to confide in Gervase, and he had agreed, though she knew that he too was sorry it could not be Peter. She felt the approach of relief—it would be a relief to have someone with whom she could discuss her difficulties, on whose occasional co-operation she could depend, and whose goodwill would support her during the catastrophic days of disclosure. Gervase seemed greater to her in all these capacities than he seemed to Ben. She knew that Ben thought him a mere boy, whose knowledge of their circumstances might, far from giving them support, actually lead to their confusion. But Jenny still had her queer new respect for Gervase. No doubt he was a hothead, a rather uncritical revolutionary; but his ideas seemed lately to have grown more stable; they seemed less ready-made, more the fruit of his own thinking. His contempt of his people’s gods had no longer such a patent origin in youthful bumptiousness, but seemed rather due to the fact of his having built his own holy places. She wondered what had taught him wisdom—which of the new elements that had lately come into his life. Was it work, religion, love, or merely his growing older?
She did not find an opportunity for speaking to him alone till after dinner. He went out, saying that he had some work to do at the garage, and as Rose Alard had dined at Conster and now made the fourth at bridge, Jenny was soon able to slip away after him.
She found him guiding an electric light bulb to and fro among the inward parts of the Ford. Gervase always did his own cleaning and repairs, which meant a lot of hard work, as the run to Ashford must be made every day, no matter how dirty the roads and the weather, and the lorry, which had long lost its youth when he first took it over, was now far advanced in unvenerable old age.
“Hullo, Jenny,” he cried when he saw her—“so you’ve escaped from the dissipations of the drawing-room.”
“Yes, Rose is playing tonight, thank heaven! and I’ve come out to talk to you.”
“That’s good. I’m sorry to be in this uncivilised place, but I can’t help it. Henry Ford has appendicitis, and I must operate at once. He’s got one wheel in the grave, I’m afraid, but with a little care and coddling I can make him last till I’m through with Ashford.”
“When will that be?”
“And what will you do then?”
“Get some sort of a job, I suppose.”
She thought he looked fagged and jaded, though it might have been the light, and the ugliness of his dirty blue slops buttoned up to his collarless chin. After all, now she came to think of it, he must have a pretty hard life—up every morning at six or earlier, driving fifteen miles to and fro in all weathers, working hard all day, and then coming home late, generally to finish the day with cleaning and repairs.
“Gervase,” she said abruptly—“are you happy?”
“Yes, Jen—quite happy. Are you?”
“Oh, Gervase....”
He looked up at the change in her voice.
“I’ve something to tell you,” she said hurriedly—“I’m going to be married.”
“What! To Jim Parish?”
“Oh, no, not to him. That’s all over. Gervase, I want you to stand by me; that’s why I’m telling you this. I’m making a great venture. I’m marrying Ben Godfrey.”
“Ben Godfrey....”
He repeated the name vaguely. Evidently it conveyed nothing to him. He was so much away that he heard little of the talk of the estate.
“Yes. The farmer of Fourhouses. Don’t you know him? I’ve known him three months, and we love each other. Father and Mother and Peter and everyone will be wild when they know. That’s why I want to have you on my side.”
“Jenny, dear....” He carefully deposited Henry Ford’s appendix on the shelf, wiped his oily fingers on a piece of rag, and came and sat beside her on the packing case where she had perched herself—“Jenny, dear, this is too exciting for words. Do tell me more about it.”
Jenny told him as much as she could—how meeting Ben Godfrey had set her mind on a new adventure and a new revolt—how she had resolved not to let her chance slip by, but had let him know she cared—how eager and sweet his response had been, and how happy life was now, with meeting and love-making. Her manner, her looks, her hesitations told him as much as her words.
“You will stand by me, won’t you, Gervase?”
“Of course I will, Jen. But do you mind if I ask you one or two questions?”
“Ask whatever you like. As you’re going to help me, you’ve a right to know.”
“Well, are you quite sure this is going to last?”
“My dear! I never thought you’d ask that.”
“I daresay it sounds a silly and impertinent question. But I must ask it. Do you think he’s pulled your heart away from your judgment? And do you think it’s possible that you may have been driven towards him by reaction, the reaction from all that long, meandering, backboneless affair with Jim Parish, and all the silly, trivial things that did for it at last? Don’t be angry with me. I must put that side of the question to you, or I’d never forgive myself.”
“Do you think I’ve never put it to myself? Oh, Gervase, it was exactly what I thought at the beginning. I told myself it was only reaction—only because I was bored. But when I met him at Fourhouses I couldn’t help seeing it was more than that, and now I know it’s real—I know, I know.”
“Have you tastes and ideas in common?”
“Yes, plenty. He has very much the same sort of abstract ideas as I have—thinks the same about the war and all that. And he’s read, too—he loves Kipling, and Robert Service’s poems, though he reads boys’ books as well. He really has a better literary taste than I have—you know what Vera thinks of my reading. And he’s travelled much more than I have, seen more of the world. He’s been in Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and Greece, and France. And yet he’s so simple and unassuming. He’s much more of a ‘gentleman’ in his speech and manners than lots of men I know.”
“Have you ever seen him in his Sunday clothes?”
“Yes, I have, and survived. He wears a ready-made brown suit with a white stripe in it. And that’s the worst there is about him.”
“What are his people like?”
“They’re darlings. His mother is solid and comfortable and motherly, and the girls are about my own age, but with much better manners. When Ben and I are married, the others will live in a part of the house which is really quite separate from the rest—has a separate door and kitchen—the newest of the four houses. Oh, I tell you, Gervase, I’ve faced everything—tastes, ideas, family, Sunday clothes—and there’s nothing that isn’t worth having, or at least worth putting up with for the sake of the rest, for the sake of real comfort, real peace, real freedom, real love....”
Her eyes began to fill, and he felt her warm, sobbing breath on his cheek.
“Jennie, I want to kiss you. But I should have to make too many preparations first—take off my slops, wash my hands with soda, and clean my teeth, because I’ve been smoking woodbines all day. So I think I’d better put it off till Sunday. But I do congratulate you, dear—not only on being in love but on being so brave. I think you’re brave, Jenny; it’s so much more difficult for a woman to break away than for a man. But you’d never have found happiness in the family groove, and sometimes I was afraid that ... never mind, I’m not afraid now.”
“And you’ll stand by me, Gervase?”
“Of course I will. But you’ve got to show me the young man. I won’t stand by an abstraction. I want to see if I like him as flesh and blood.”
“I’ll take you over to Fourhouses on Saturday afternoon. And I’m quite sure you’ll like him.”
“I’ve made up my mind to, so he’ll be a pretty hopeless washout if I don’t. I wonder that I haven’t ever met him, but I expect it’s being away so much.”
Jenny was about to enlarge further on her young man’s qualities, when she remembered that there is nothing more tiresome to an unprosperous lover than the rhapsodies of someone whose love is successful and satisfied. Gervase had loved Stella Mount for two years—everybody said so—but nothing seemed to have come of it. It must distress him to hear of her happiness which had come so quickly. She wondered if his worn, fagged look were perhaps less due to hardship than to some distress of his love. She was so happy that she could not bear to think of anyone being miserable, especially Gervase, whom, next to Ben, she loved better than all the world. She checked her outpourings, and took his grimy, oil-stained hand in hers, laying it gently in her satin lap.
“Kid—do tell me. How are things between you and Stella?”
“There aren’t any ‘things’ between me and Stella.”
“Oh, Gervase, don’t tell me you’re not in love with her.”
“I won’t tell you anything so silly. Of course I’m in love with her, but it’s not a love that will ever give her to me. It can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t care for me in that way. I don’t suppose she thinks of me as anything but a boy.”
“Doesn’t she know you love her?”
“She may—I daresay she does. But I’m sure she doesn’t love me.”
“Have you ever asked her?”
“No.”
“Well, then ... Gervase!”
“One can find out that sort of thing without asking.”
“Indeed one can’t—not with a girl like Stella. If you didn’t speak, she’d probably try very hard not to influence you in any way, because she realises that there are difficulties, and would be afraid of leading you further than you felt inclined.”
“I haven’t seen so very much of her lately. We never meet except on Sundays. I can’t help thinking that she’s trying to keep me at a distance.”
“Perhaps she’s surprised at your not speaking. How long have you been friends?”
“About three years, I suppose.”
“And all that time people have been bracketing you together, and you’ve said nothing. I expect she’s wondering why on earth you don’t make love to her.”
“I shouldn’t dare.”
“Not to Stella?—She seems to me a girl one could make love to very easily.”
“I agree—once she’d said ‘yes.’ But she’s a girl one couldn’t take risks with—she’d be too easily lost. I’ve a feeling that if I made a move in that direction without being sure of her, she’d simply go away—fade out. And I’m terrified of losing the little I’ve got of her.”
“But you may lose her through not being bold enough. It sickens a girl frightfully when a man hangs round and doesn’t speak. The reason that she seems to avoid you now may be that she’s offended.”
“Jenny, you don’t know Stella. She’s so candid, so transparent, that if she had any such feelings about me, I’d be sure to see it. No, I think she stands away simply because she’s found out that people are talking, and wants to keep me at a distance.”
“But you can’t be sure. You may be quite mistaken. If I was a man I’d never let things go by default like that. She won’t ‘fade out’ if you do the thing properly. Women are always pleased to be asked in marriage—at least if they’re human, and Stella’s human if she’s nothing else.”
“And so am I. That’s why I can’t bear the thought of her saying ‘no.’”
“I’ll be surprised if she says ‘no.’ But anyhow I’d rather lose a good thing through its being refused me than through not having the spirit to ask for it.”
“Yes, I think you’re right there.”
He fell into a kind of abstraction, stroking his chin with one hand, while the other still lay in her lap. Then he rose suddenly and went over to the shelf where he had put his tools.
“Well, I can’t leave Henry Ford with his inside out while I talk about my own silly affairs. You may be right, Jen—I dunno. But I’m frightfully, ever so, glad about you—you dear.”
“Thank you, Gervase. It’s such a relief to have you on my side.”
“When are you going to spring it on the family?”
“Oh, not just yet—not till Christmas, perhaps. We want to have everything settled first.”
“I think you’re wise.”
“Remember, you’re coming with me to Fourhouses on Saturday.”
“Rather! That’s part of the bargain. I must see the young man.”
“And I’m sure you’ll like him.”
“I can very nearly promise to like him.”
She went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders.
“Good night, old boy. I must be going in now—I suppose you’re here till bed time?”
“And beyond—good night, Jenny.”
“Gervase, you’re getting thin—I can feel your bones.”
“I’d be ashamed if you couldn’t. And do run along—I’ve just had a vision of Wills carrying in the barley water tray. Clairvoyantly I can see him tripping over Mother’s footstool, clairaudiently I can hear Father saying ‘Damn you, Wills. Can’t you look where you’re going?’... Leave the busy surgeon now, there’s a dear.”
He stepped back from under her hands, and thoughtfully held up Henry Ford’s appendix to the light.
Jenny had made more impression than she knew on Gervase’s ideas of Stella. Hitherto he had always tacitly accepted a tolerated position—she had allowed him to go for walks with her, to come and see her on Sundays, to write to her, to talk to her endlessly on the dull topic of himself; she had always been friendly, interested, patient, but he had felt that if she loved him she would not have been quite all these—not quite so kind or friendly or patient. And lately she had withdrawn herself—she had found herself too busy to go for walks, and in her father’s house there was always the doctor or the priest. He respected and thought he understood her detachment. People were “talking,” as long ago they had “talked” about her and Peter, and she wanted this new, unfounded gossip to die.
Now it struck him that there was a chance that Jenny might be right, and that Stella fled before the gossip not because she wanted to disprove it, but because she wished it better founded, was perhaps a little vexed with him that it was not. Of course, if all these three years she had been wanting him to speak.... For the first time he saw a certain selfishness in his conduct—he was ashamed to realise that he had been content with his position as hopeless lover, so content that he had never given a thought to wondering if it pleased her. There had been a subtle self-indulgence in his silent devotion.... “Lord! I believe it’s as bad as if I’d pestered her.”
But he really could not believe that if Stella loved him he would not know it. One of her chief qualities was candour, and she was impulsive enough to make him think that she would readily give expression to any attraction that she felt. If Jenny, who was so much more cold and diffident, could have been quickened by love into taking the first step towards Ben Godfrey, how much more swiftly and decisively would ardent Stella move when her heart drove her. Of course she might see the drawbacks and dangers of marrying a man so much younger than herself—she might have held back for his sake ... perhaps that was why she was holding back now.... But he did not really think so—love was the last emotion that a nature like Stella’s could hide, however resolute her will.
There seemed no way of solving his doubts but to do as Jenny suggested and to ask her. He shrank from putting his fate to the test.... But that was only part of this same selfishness he had discovered. By speaking, he could harm nobody but himself. He might indeed turn himself out of Paradise, that garden of hopeless loving service which was home to him now. But he could not hurt or offend Stella—she could not accuse him of precipitancy after three years—and if it was true that she cared, as might be just possible, then he would have put an end to a ridiculous and intolerable state of things.
In this indecision he went with Jenny to Fourhouses on Saturday. He did not talk to her about his own affairs—for hers were too engrossing for both of them. She was desperately anxious that he should like Ben Godfrey, not only because it would put their alliance on firm and intimate ground, but because she wanted her brother’s friendship to apologise and atone to her lover for the slights of the rest of her family. As she grew in love for Ben and in experience of his worth she came fiercely and almost unreasonably to resent what she knew would be the attitude of her people towards him. She came more and more to see him from his own point of view—a man as good as Alard, and more honourably planted in the earth. She marvelled at herself now because she had once thought that she was stooping—she laughed at her scheme for holding out the sceptre.
But though she was anxious, she was not surprised that the two men should like each other. Ben Godfrey had all the qualities that Gervase admired, and young Alard was by this time quite without class consciousness, having lost even the negative kind which comes from conscientious socialism. He had had very little of congenial male society during the last two and a half years, as his work at Ashford had kept him chiefly among men with whom he had little in common. The farmer of Fourhouses belonged altogether to a different breed from the self-assertive young mechanics at Gillingham and Golightly’s ... there was no need to warn Jenny here of fatal differences in the pursuit of wealth, women and God.
Gervase was very favourably impressed by all he saw, and came home a little envious of his sister. She had found a happiness which particularly appealed to him, for it was of both common and adventurous growth. She would be happy in the common homely things of life, and yet they would not be hers in quite the common way—she would hold them as an adventurer and a discoverer, for to win them she would have dared and perhaps suffered much.
That was how Gervase wanted happiness—with double roots in security and daring. He wondered if only the kingdom of heaven was happy in that way, and if he could not find homeliness and adventure together on earth. He did not want one without the other, he did not want peace with dullness, nor excitement with unrest. He had learned that the soul could know adventure with profoundest quiet—might not the body know it too? Walking home in the sunset from Fourhouses, Gervase longed for the resurrection of the body—for his body to know what his soul knew; and his heart told him that only Stella could give him this, and that if she would not, he must go without it.
On Sunday mornings Gervase always went to see his mother before breakfast. It was to make up, he said, for seeing so little of her during the rest of the week. Lady Alard was subtly pleased and flattered by these visits. No one else ever paid them. He would sit on the bed and talk to her—not as the rest of the family talked, in a manner carefully adapted to her imbecility, but as one intelligent being to another, about politics and books and other things she could not understand. This pleased her all the more because he was careful to suggest her part of the conversation as well as carrying on his own; he never let her expose her ignorance. And though she secretly knew he was aware of it, and that he knew that she knew, the interview never failed to raise her in her own esteem, as a mother in whom her son confided.
This particular Sunday he stayed rather longer than usual, giving her the right attitude towards Queen Victoria, as to which she had always been a little uncertain. He had just been reading Lytton Strachey’s Life, and they laughed together over the tartan upholstery of Balmoral, and shook their heads and wondered over John Brown. From John Brown the conversation somehow wandered to Gervase’s work at Ashford, and finally ended in a discussion of the days not so very far ahead when he should have finished at the workshop and be his own master.
“What shall I do with myself then, Mother? Shall I open a garage in Leasan, so that you can sack Appleby and sell the car, and hire off me? Or would you like just to sack Appleby and let me drive the car? You’d find me most steady and reliable as a shuvver, and it would be such fun having tea with the maids when you went calling.”
“I wish you’d taken up a more dignified profession. There really doesn’t seem to be anything for you to do now that isn’t rather low.”
“I’m afraid I like doing low things, Mother. But I really don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave Gillingham’s. It’s funny—but my life seems to stop at Christmas. I can’t look any further. When I first went into the works I was always making plans for what I’d do when I came out of them. But now I can’t think of anything. Well, anyhow, I’ve got more than three months yet—there’ll be time to think of something before then. Did you know that I start my holiday next week?—Ten whole, giddy days—think of that!”
“Shall you be going away?”
“No, I don’t think so. A man I was with at Winchester asked me to come and stop with his people. But he lives in Scotland, and I can’t afford the journey. Besides it wouldn’t be worth it just for a week.”
“I thought you said you’d got ten days.”
“Yes—but I’m going to spend four of them at Thunders Abbey near Brighton. Father Luce thought it would be a good idea if I went to a retreat.”
“Oh, Gervase!—is it a monastery?”
“The very same. It’s the chief house of the Order of Sacred Pity.”
“But, my dear—are you—oh, you’re not going to become a monk?”
“No fear—I’m just going into retreat for four days, for the good of my soul.”
“Well, I don’t know what a retreat is, but I feel it would do you much more good if you went to Scotland. You’re looking quite white and seedy. Are you sure your heart’s all right? You know we’ve got angina in the family. I’ve had it for years and years, and poor George died of it. I’m so afraid you’ve got it too.”
“I haven’t—honour bright. I’m looking white because I want a holiday—and I’m going to have one—for both body and soul.... And now I really must go down to breakfast or I shan’t be able to get more than my share of the kidneys.”
Sunday breakfast was an important contrast with the breakfasts of the week. On week-days he either scrambled through a meal half-cooked by the kitchen-maid, or shared the dry short-commons of Father Luce’s cottage. On Sundays he ate his way exultingly through porridge, bacon, kidneys, toast and honey, with generally three cups of coffee and a slice of melon. As a rule the family were all down together on Sunday, having no separate engagements, but an hour of united loafing before Appleby brought round the car to take to church such of them as felt inclined for it.
Gervase had to start earlier—directly breakfast was over. His Parish Mass was at half-past ten, in consideration for Vinehall’s Sunday dinners, since there the rich and the poor were not separated into morning and evening congregations. Also he was Master of the Ceremonies, and had to be in the sacristy well before the service began, to make the usual preparations, and exhort and threaten the clumsy little servers, who came tumbling in at the last moment with their heads full of Saturday’s football. Gervase was not a ritualist, and his aim was to achieve as casual an effect as possible, to create an atmosphere of homeliness and simplicity round the altar. But so far he had got no nearer his ideal than a hard-breathing concentration—the two torch-bearers gripped their torches as if they were to defend their lives with them, and the panting of the thurifer mingled with the racket of his cheap brass censer.
It was not till the sermon began that he had time to look for Stella. When he had taken his seat in the Sanctuary with his arms folded, and had seen that the three little boys were also sitting with their arms folded instead of in more abandoned attitudes, he was free to search for her face through the incense-cloud that floated in the nave. He found her very soon, for a ray of golden, dusty sunshine fell upon her as she sat with her arm through Dr. Mount’s. The sunshine had dredged all the warm brown and red tints out of her hair and face, giving her a queer white and golden look that made her unreal. As he looked at her, she smiled, and he found that her smile had come in response to a smile of his which had unknowingly stolen over his face as he watched her. Her smile was rather sad, and he wondered if the sadness too was a response.
Mr. Luce was delivering one of Newman’s Parochial Sermons in his own halting words, and though Gervase always made it a point of discipline to listen to sermons, however much they bored him, he found that this morning attention was almost impossible. Stella seemed to fix his thoughts so that he could not drag them from her. He knew that his attitude towards her was changing—it was becoming more disturbed, more desperate. His heart must have been ready for this change, for he did not think that Jenny’s words would have had power to work it of themselves. He wondered where it was leading him ... he wondered if it had anything to do with this feeling as of a ditch dug across his life at the end of the year.... But probably his leaving the works after Christmas would account for that. Well, anyhow, he would have to put an end to the present state of affairs—they were the result of mere selfishness and cowardice on his part. Perhaps he ought to go away—leave Stella altogether, since she did not love him and his heart was unquiet because of her ... he would have his chance to go away in January—right away.... But he could not—he could never bear to live away from her. And he had no certain knowledge that she did not love him—perhaps she did—perhaps Jenny was right after all.... “In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
After Mass, Gervase and the Vicar walked together to Hollingrove.
“I’ve heard from Thunders Abbey,” said Gervase to Luce, “and there’s a vacancy for the eighteenth. So I shall go.”
“I wonder how you’ll like it.”
“So do I. But I’m glad I’m going. They’re full up really, but Father Lawrence said I could sleep at the farm.”
“Then you’ll have to get up early. It’s fifteen minutes’ walk from the Abbey, and Mass is at half-past six and of obligation.”
“Never mind—I’m used to hardships, though I know you think I wallow in unseemly luxuries. But I’m getting keen on this, Father. Whether I like it or not, I know it will be exciting.”
“Exciting! That’s a nice thing to expect of a retreat.”
“Well, religion generally is exciting, isn’t it, so the more I get the more exciting it’s likely to be.”
“Um—too exciting perhaps.”
“What do you mean, Father?”
But Luce would not tell him, and in another minute they were at Dr. Mount’s cottage, where they always had mid-day dinner on Sundays. It was cooked by Stella herself, helped by the little maid, so she did not appear till it was ready. She had changed her frock and bore no traces of her labours beyond a face heated by the fire. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright—she looked absurdly young. How old was she, Gervase wondered? Twenty-eight or twenty-nine? But she did not look a bit over twenty. She did not look as old as he did. It must be her vitality which kept her young like this—her vitality ... and the way she did her hair. He smiled.
“What are you smiling at, Gervase?”
“At you, Stella.”
“And why at me?”
“Because you look so absurdly young. And I’ve been very knowing, and have decided that it’s the way you do your hair.”
“Really, Gervase, you’re not at all gallant. Surely I look young because I am young. If you think different you oughtn’t to say so.”
“This is a poor beginning for your career as a ladies’ man,” said Dr. Mount.
“Just as well he should start it on me,” said Stella—“then he’ll know the technique better by the time it really matters.”
Her words stabbed Gervase—they showed him how he stood with her. She did not take him seriously—or if she did, she was trying to show him that it was all no use, that he must give up thinking of her. The result was that he thought of her with concentrated anxiety for the rest of the meal, his thoughts making him strangely silent.
He was not wanted at Catechism that afternoon, so he could spend it with her, and for the first time he found the privilege unwelcome. He remembered other Sunday afternoons when he had lain blissfully slack in one of the armchairs, while Stella curled herself up in the other with a book or some sewing. They had not talked consecutively, but just exchanged a few words now and then when the processes of their minds demanded it—it had all been heavenly and comfortable and serene.... He found himself longing almost angrily to be back in his old attitude of contented hopelessness. But he knew that he could never go back, though he did not exactly know why. What had happened that he could no longer find his peace in her unrewarded service? Had he suddenly grown up and become dependent on realities—no longer to be comforted with dreams or to taste the sweet sadness of youth?
He had half a mind to go for a walk this afternoon and leave her—he knew that she would not try to make him stay. But, in spite of all, he hankered after her company; also there was now growing up in him a new desire to come to grips with her, to know exactly where he stood—whether, though she did not want his love she still wanted his friendship, or whether she would like him to go away. So when Father Luce went off to his Catechism, and the doctor to see a couple of patients at Horns Cross, Gervase stayed behind in the sitting-room where they had had their coffee, and asked Stella, according to custom, if she would mind his pipe.
“You know, Gervase, you’re always allowed to smoke your pipe if I’m allowed to mend my stockings. Neither is exactly correct behaviour in a drawing-room, but if you dispense me from the rules of feminine good-breeding, I’ll dispense you from the rules of masculine etiquette.”
“Thank you.”
He took out his pipe, and she fetched her work-basket from the back of the sofa. Nothing could have looked more domestic than the two of them sitting each side of the fire, he smoking, she darning, both silent. But the unreality of it vexed him this afternoon. He could not play the childish game he had sometimes played, of pretending they were married, and being content. “When I became a man I put away childish things....” He wanted to have the power to go over to her as she sat absorbed in her work, turn up her face and kiss her—or else pick her off the chair and set her on his knee....
“Stella,” he said gruffly.
“Well?”
“I want to speak to you.”
“What is it?”
“Well ... our friendship isn’t the same as it used to be.”
He would be furious if she contradicted him—or if she said ‘Oh, really? I haven’t noticed anything.’ But she said at once—
“I know it isn’t.”
“And what do you put that down to?”
She hedged for the first time.
“You’re trying to keep me at a distance.”
She did not speak, but he saw the colour burning on the face that she bent hurriedly over her work.
He edged his chair closer, and repeated—
“Yes, you are, Stella—trying to keep me off.”
“I—I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be sorry; but I wish you’d tell me why you’re doing it. It isn’t that you’ve only just discovered that I love you—you’ve always known that.”
“I’m wasting your time, Gervase. I shouldn’t keep you dangling after me.”
“You mean that I’ve hung about too long?”
“Oh, no....” She was obviously distressed.
“Stella, I’ve loved you for years, and you know it—you’ve always known it. But I’ve never asked anything of you or expected anything. All I’ve wanted has been to see you and talk to you and do anything for you that I could. It hasn’t done me any harm. I’m only just old enough to marry, and I have no means.... And up till a little while ago I was content. Then you changed, and seemed to be trying to put me off—it hurt me, Stella, because I couldn’t think why....”
“Oh, I can’t bear to hurt you.” To his surprise he saw that her tears were falling. She covered her face.
“Stella, my little Stella.”
By leaning forward he could put his hand on her knee. It was the first caress that he had ever given her, and the unbearable sweetness of it made him shiver. He let his hand lie for a few moments on her warm knee, and after a time she put her own over it.
“Gervase, I’m so sorry—I’m afraid I’ve treated you badly. I let you love me—you were so young at first, and I saw it made you happy, and I thought it would pass over. Then people began to talk, as they always do, and I took no notice—it seemed impossible, me being so much older than you—until I found that ... I mean, one day I met Peter, and he really thought we were engaged....”
It was not her words so much as the burst of bitter weeping that followed them which showed Gervase the real state of her heart. She still loved Peter.
“It’s nothing to regret, dear,” he said hurriedly—“you were perfectly right. And now I understand....”
“But it’s wrong, Gervase, it’s wrong....” By some instinct she seemed to have discovered that he guessed her secret ... “it’s wrong; but oh, I can’t help it! I wish I could. It seems dreadful not to be able to help it after all these years.”
She had gripped his hand in both hers—her body was stiff and trembling.
“Stella, darling, don’t be so upset. There’s nothing wrong in loving—how could there be? Surely you know that.”
“Yes I do. It’s not the loving that’s wrong, but letting my whole life be hung up by it. Letting it absorb me so that I don’t notice other men, so that I can’t bear the thought of marrying anyone else—so that I treat you badly.”
“You haven’t treated me badly, my dear. Get that out of your head at once.”
“I have—because I’ve spoilt our friendship. I couldn’t go on with it when I knew....”
“It’s high time our friendship was spoilt, Stella. It was turning into a silly form of self-indulgence on my side, and it ought to be put an end to. Hang it all! why should I get you talked about?—apart from other considerations. You’ve done me good by withdrawing yourself, because you’ve killed my calf-love. For the last few weeks I’ve loved you as a man ought—I’ve known a man’s love, though it’s been in vain....”
“Oh, Gervase....”
“Don’t think any more about me, dear; you’ve done me nothing but good.”
She had hidden her face in the arm of the chair, and he suddenly saw that he must leave her. Since she did not love him, his own love was not enough to make him less of an intruder. There were dozens of questions he wanted to ask her—answers he longed to know. But he must not. He rose and touched her shoulder.
“I’m going, my dear. It’s nearly time for Adoration. I shan’t come back next Sunday—and later, next year, I’ll be going away ... don’t fret ... it’ll all be quite easy.”
It wasn’t easy now. She held out one hand without lifting her head, and for a moment they held each other’s hands in a fierce clasp of farewell. He felt her hot, moist palm burning against his, then dropped it quickly and went out.
So that was the end. He had finished it. But Stella herself had taught him that one did not so easily finish love. He supposed that he would go on loving her as she had gone on loving Peter.
It was a quarter to four as he went into church. Quietly and methodically he lit the candles for Devotions, and watched the slight congregation assemble in the drowsy warmth of the September afternoon. He could not feel acutely—he could not even turn in his sorrow to the Sacred Victim on the Altar, whose adoration brought the children’s service to a close.
“O Sacred Victim, opening wide
The gate of heaven to men below ...”
The well-known words rose out of the shadows of the aisles behind him. They bruised his heart with their familiar sweetness.
“Our foes press round on every side,
Thine aid supply, thy strength bestow.”
The candles that jigged in the small draughts of the sanctuary blurred into a cloud of rising incense, and then more thickly into a cloud of unshed tears. He fought them back, ashamed. He was beginning to feel again, and he would rather not feel—like this. It was intolerable, this appeal to his bruised emotion—it was like compelling him to use a wounded limb. He felt as if he could not bear any more of the wan, lilting music, the faint, sweet voices of the faithful, the perfumed cloud that rose like smoke before the altar and then hung among the gilding and shadows of the chancel roof. And now the virile tenor of the Priest seemed to bring a definitely sexual element into the tender dream.... What was this he was saying about love?...
“O God, who has prepared for them that love thee, such good things as pass man’s understanding, pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee above all things....”
The clear pale sunlight of late October glittered on the River Tillingham, and seemed to be all light. No warmth was in the evening ray, and Jenny’s woollen scarf was muffled to her throat as she came to the Mocksteeple. From far off she had seen the tall figure waiting beside the kiln. She wondered if he would hear her footsteps in the grass, or whether till she had called his name he would stand looking away towards where the light was thickening at the river’s mouth.
Her feet made a sucking noise in the ground which was spongy with autumn rains. He turned towards her and immediately held out his arms.
“My lovely....”
She was enfolded.
His warmth and strength made her think of the earth, and there was a faint scent of earth about him as she hid her face on his breast. There was also that smell of the clean straw of stables which she had noticed when she first met him. She rubbed her cheek childishly and fondly against the roughness of his coat then lifted her mouth for his slow, hard kisses.... “My lovely—oh, my lovely.”
“How long can you stay?” he asked her a few minutes later, when they had huddled down together under the wall of the Mocksteeple, from which came a faint radiation of warmth, as the tar gave out the heat it had absorbed during the day.
“Not very long, I’m afraid, Benjie. There are people coming to dinner tonight, and I’ll have to be back in good time. But we must fix about Monday. I’ve already told them I’m going up to town for a day’s shopping, and I’ve written to a friend to choose me a couple of frocks at Debenham’s and send them down—to make the lie hold water. I’m afraid I’m getting quite a resourceful liar.”
“But you are going shopping, dear.”
“Yes, but I can’t tell them it’s furniture, stupid. Oh, Ben, won’t it be wildly exciting choosing things for Fourhouses! But we mustn’t be extravagant, and you’ve got some lovely bits already.”
“I want you to have the whole house to please you—nothing in it that you don’t like.”
“I like everything except the parlour, and those iron bedsteads they have upstairs. We’ll want some chests too, to use instead of the washstands. Then Fourhouses will be perfect inside and out.”
“You have real taste—that’s what you have,” he said admiringly.
“It’s so dear of you to give me what I want.”
“It’s my wedding-present to you, sweetheart; and Mother and the girls are giving you sheets and table linen, so reckon we’ll be well set up in our housekeeping.”
She drowsed against him, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his knees. He put his mouth to her ear.
“My sweet,” he murmured—“my little sweet—when is it going to be?”
“I’ve told you, Ben. At the beginning of January.”
“That’s your faithful word?”
“My faithful word.”
“I’m glad—for oh, my dearest, it seems I’ve waited long enough.”
“It won’t seem so very long now—and, Ben, I’ve made up my mind about one thing. I’m not going to tell the family till it’s all over.”
“You’re not!”
“No—because if I told them before it happened they’d try to stop it; and though they couldn’t stop it, it would be a nuisance having them try.”
“Does your brother agree with this?”
“It was he that suggested it.”
“Well, I’ve a great respect for that brother of yours. But, sweetheart, it seems so dreadful, us marrying on the quiet, when I’m so proud of you and ud like to hold you before all the world.”
“You shall hold me before all the world—after our marriage. But there’s no good having a row with the parents, especially as they’re old. It’ll be bad enough for them anyhow, but I think they’ll take it easier if they know it’s too late to do anything.”
He acquiesced, as he usually did, for he respected her judgment, and his natural dignity taught him to ignore this contempt of Alard for Godfrey. The rest of their short time together must not be spoiled by discussion. Once more he drew her close, and his kisses moved slowly from her forehead to her eyes, from her eyes to her cheeks, then at last to her mouth. His love-making gave her the thrill of a new experience, for she knew what a discovery and a wonder it was to him. It was not stale with repetition, distressed with comparison, as it was to so many men—as it was to herself. She felt a stab of remorse, a regret that she too was not making this adventure for the first time. She was younger than he, and yet beside him she felt shabby, soiled.... She strained him to her heart in an agony of tender possession. Oh, she would make his adventure worth while—he should not be disappointed in experience. They would explore the inmost heart of love together.
Jenny was glad that the numbers in the drawing-room made it unnecessary for her to sit down to cards. She and Rose Alard had both cut out, and as Rose liked to sit and watch the play, Jenny felt she had an excuse to mutter something about “having one or two things to see to,” and escape from the room. She wanted to be alone if only for half an hour, just to savour again in memory the comfort of her lover’s arms, his tender breathing, the warmth of his kisses and the darkness of his embrace. She shut her eyes and heard him say “My lovely ... oh, my lovely!”
A full moon was spilling her light over the garden, and instinctively Jenny turned out of doors. She had put on her fur coat, and the still, moon-dazzled night was many degrees from frost. In the garden she would be sure of solitude, and at the same time would not be without the response of nature, so necessary to her mood. “One deep calleth another,” and her heart in its new depth of rapture called to the moon and trees and grass, and received from them an answer which those self-absorbed human beings, crowded over cards, could never give.
She walked to and fro on the wide path beside the tennis lawn then turned into the darkness of the shrubbery, threading her way through moon-spattered arbutus and laurel till she came to a little garden-house which had been built in the reign of Queen Anne. It had the characteristics of its age—solid brick walls, high deepset windows, and a white pediment which now gleamed like silver in the light of the moon. It had been built by the non-juring Gervase Alard, and here he had studied after his deprivation of the Vicarage of Leasan, and written queer crabbed books on a revised liturgy and on reunion with the Eastern Church. No one ever worked in it now, and it contained nothing but a bench and a few dilapidated garden chairs—it would hold only just enough warmth for her to sit down and rest.
To her surprise she found it was not empty; a movement startled her as she crossed the threshold, and the next moment she discovered Gervase, leaning back in one of the chairs. He was just a blot of shadow in the deeper darkness, except where his face, hands and shirt front caught the moonshine in ghostly patches of white.
“Hullo, Gervase—I’d no notion you’d come here.”
He had left the drawing-room before coffee was brought in.
“I’ve been strolling about and got rather cold.”
“Same here. Is there a whole chair beside you?”
At first she had been sorry to find him and had meant to go away, but now she realised that he was the only person whose company would not be loss.
“If not, there’s one under me, and you shall have that.... Ah, here’s something luxurious with rockers. Probably you and I are mad, my dear, to be sitting here. But I felt I simply must run away from the party.”
“So did I.”
She sat down beside him. In spite of the ghastly moonlight that poured over his face, he looked well—far less haggard than he had seemed in the kinder light a month ago. It struck her that he had looked better ever since his holiday, and his parting from Stella Mount, which he had told her of a few days after it happened. He had had a bad time, she knew, but he seemed to have come through it, and to have found a new kind of settlement. As she looked at him more closely in the revealing light, she saw that his mouth was perhaps a little too set, and that there were lines between nose and chin which she had not noticed before. He looked happy, but he also looked older.
“And how goes it, my dear?” he asked.
“Well, Gervase—extremely well.”
She was too shy of intimate things to enquire how it went with him.
“I saw Ben this afternoon,” she continued, “and I told him what you and I thought about not telling the parents till afterwards.”
“And did he agree?”
“Yes, he agreed. I really think he’s been wonderful about it all—when you consider how he must feel....”
“He’s got some sense of proportion—he’s not going to let his love be spoilt by family pride. Jenny, if I’ve learnt anything in these first years of my grown-up life, it is that love must come before everything else.”
She was surprised at this from him.
“You would put it before religion?”
“Religion is the fulfilment of love.”
She repelled the awkward feelings which invariably oppressed her at the mention of such things. She wanted to know more of this young brother of hers, of the conflicts in which he triumphed mysteriously.
“Gervase, I wish I understood you better. I can’t make out how it is that you, who’re so modern and even revolutionary in everything else, should be so reactionary in your religion. Why do you follow tradition there, when you despise it in other things.”
“Because it’s a tradition which stands fast when all the others are tumbling down. It’s not tradition that I’m out against, but all the feeble shams and conventions that can’t stand when they’re shaken.”
“But does religion stand? I thought it was coming down like everything else.”
“Some kinds are. Because they’re built on passing ideas instead of on unchanging instincts. But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”
It was many months since she had heard him talk like this. It reminded her of the old days when they were both at school, and he had brought her all his ideas on men and things, all his latest enthusiasms and discoveries.
“Jenny,” he continued, “I believe that we’ve come to the end of false traditions—to the ‘removing of those things which are shaken, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”
“Is there anything besides religion which can’t be shaken?”
“Yes—my dear, the earth. The land will still be there though the Squires go, just as the faith will still be there though the Parsons go. The Parson and the Squire will go, and their places will be taken by the Yeoman and the Priest who were there before them.”
“Go back to the Middle Ages?”
“Lord, no! Too much has happened since then. We’ve got industry and machinery and science—we can’t go back to sack and maypoles. What I mean is that, instead of the country being divided among a few big landlords who don’t and can’t farm their own land, it will be divided into a lot of small farms of manageable size. Instead of each country parish being in the charge of a small country gentleman who has to keep up state on an income of two hundred a year, and is cut off from his parishioners by his social position and the iron gates of his parsonage, there’ll be a humble servant living among them as one of themselves, set above them only by his vocation. It’ll be a democracy which will have the best of aristocracy kept alive in it. The Parson and the Squire don’t belong to any true aristocracy—they’re Hanoverian relics—and they’re going, and I’m glad.”
“Yes, I think they’re going all right, but I can’t feel so glad as you, because I’m not so sure as to who will take their place. The yeoman isn’t the only alternative to the squire—there’s also the small-holder and the garden-city prospector. As for the parson—I don’t know much about church affairs, but I should think he’s just as likely to lose the spiritual side of himself as the material, and we’ll have men that aren’t much better than relieving officers or heads of recreation clubs.”
“Don’t try and burst my dream, Jenny. It’s a very good sort of dream, and I like to think it will come true. And I know it will come true in a sense, though possibly in a sense which will be nonsense to most people. That’s a way some of the best dreams have.”
He was silent and thoughtful for a moment. Perhaps he was thinking of another Gervase Alard, who had long ago sat where he sat, and dreamed a dream which had not come true.
“But don’t let’s have any more of me and my dreams,” he said after a while. “Talk to me about Ben. We started talking about him, you know, and then drifted off into Utopia. I should think that was a good sign.”
“I’m meeting him in London on Monday to do some shopping.”
“What are you going to buy?”
“Furniture. I want to pick up one or two really nice old pieces for Fourhouses. They’re to be his wedding-present to me. First of all we’ll go to Duke Street, and then to Puttick and Simpson’s in the afternoon.”
“Are you going to refurnish the house?”
“No, only get rid of one or two abominations. I had thought of doing up the Best Parlour, but now I’ve decided to let that stand. If I’m to be a farmer’s wife I must get used to the Family Bible and aspidistras and wool mats.”
“I think you’re wise. It’s just as well not to try to alter more of his life than you can help.”
“I don’t want to alter his life. I’m quite persuaded that his life is better than mine. And as for him not having our taste, or rather a different kind of bad taste from what we’ve got—it doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind I must take Ben as he comes and as a whole, and not try to ignore or alter bits of him. I’m going to do the thing properly—make his friends my friends, pour out tea for the old ladies of Icklesham, ask the farmers who call round on business to stay to dinner or supper, go to see them at their farms and make friends with their wives. I know I can do it if only I do it thoroughly and don’t make any reservations. Of course I’ll go on being friends with our set if they’ll let me, but if they won’t, it’s they who’ll have to go and not the others. Gervase, I’m sick of Jenny Alard, and I’m thankful that she’s going to die early next year, and a new creature called Jenny Godfrey take her place.”
“My dear, you’re going to be very happy.”
“I know I am. I’m going to be the only happy Alard.”
“The only one?”
“Yes—look at the others. There’s Doris, a dreary middle-aged spinster, trodden on by both the parents, and always regretting the lovers she turned down because they weren’t good enough for the family. There’s Mary, living alone in private hotels and spending all her money on clothes; there’s Peter, who’s married a rich girl who’s too clever for him, and who—worst of all—thinks he’s happy and has become conventional. No—I can’t help it—I pity them all.”
“And what about me, Jenny? You’ve left me out. Do you pity me?”
She had ignored him deliberately—perhaps because she did not quite know where to place him.
“O Gervase, I hope you’ll be happy—I’m sure you will, because you’re different from the rest.”
“Yes, I’m sure too. I’m going to be happy—as happy as you. I don’t quite know how”—and he gave her a wry smile—“but I know that I shall be.”