The Four Swans

by Winston Graham

  By this time Morwenna had retired for her afternoon rest. Rowella lingered on at the table as she sometimes did these days, and Ossie talked to her about anything that came into his head: his first wife, his mother, parish matters, his ambition to become vicar of St Sawle, his relationship with Conan Godolphin, the progress of the Warleggans and the misdeeds of the churchwardens.

  Presently Rowella rose, tall and thin and apparently shapeless, her shoulders drooping, her long frock just touching her flat-heeled velvet slippers. Ossie rose with her, following her as if by accident into the gloomy hall. The whole house was dark on this close dank July afternoon. A thin mist rose from the river and made the trees at the end of the garden drift like ghosts.

  Rowella picked up her book from the parlour – it was the Iliad – and went upstairs, past the playroom where Anne and Sarah were at their lessons, past Morwenna’s room and the nursery where childish sounds suggested that John Conan Whitworth was awake. She went up the next flight to her bedroom, and it was not until she had opened her bedroom door that she allowed herself to become aware that the Reverend Osborne Whitworth had followed her. With her hand on the door she looked up at him enquiringly, her eyes narrowed, inscrutable, conveying nothing in their green depths but a casual fronded curiosity.

  ‘Vicar?’

  ‘Rowella, I have been meaning to speak to you. May I come in a moment?’

  She hesitated and then opened the door, waiting for him to pass. But he held the door for her and followed her in.

  Although an attic it was a pleasant little room, and she had made it pretty with a few feminine things: flowers, a bright cushion, a coloured rug over the one easy chair, curtains changed from a downstairs room.

  He stood there, heavy and tall, and his breathing was noticeable. She inclined her hand towards the one comfortable chair, but he did not move to sit down.

  ‘You wanted to speak to me, Vicar?’

  He hesitated. ‘Rowella, when we are alone, would you call me Osborne?’

  She inclined her head. He looked at her. He looked her over. She turned a page of her book.

  He said: ‘I envy you being so familiar with Greek.’

  ‘My father taught me young.’

  ‘You are still young. Yet in some ways you do not seem so.’

  ‘In what respects?’

  He shied away from answering this question.

  ‘Where are you – in the poem?’

  Her eyes flickered. ‘Achilles has allowed Patroclus to go and fight.’

  He said: ‘I learned a little Greek, of course, but regretfully have forgot it. I do not think I even remember the story.’

  ‘Patroclus leads an army against the Trojans. He leads them to victory. But he is possessed by hybris—’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Hybris. Hubris. Whichever you wish to call it—’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘—and so he pushes his triumph too far.’

  The day was very still.

  He took her hand. ‘Go on.’

  She withdrew her hand to turn a page, her lip trembling, but not with fear, not with embarrassment.

  ‘You must remember, Vicar. Patroclus is slain by Hector. Then a terrible fight ensues around the body, for it is of great importance to the Greeks that the funeral rites shall be performed in full upon the body of their hero . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’

  ‘Are you sure you are interested in what I am saying?’

  ‘Yes, Rowella, of course I am . . .’ he took her hand again, and this time kissed it.

  She let him continue to hold it while she went on with the story.

  ‘All this time Achilles is sulking. Folly (they call her Ate, the goddess of mischief) has possessed him, so that he has refused to fight because – because Agamemnon has insulted him. Vicar, I think—’

  ‘Pray call me Osborne.’

  ‘Osborne, I think you are not really interested in this story at all.’

  ‘I very much suppose you are right.’

  ‘Then why have you come up here?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Can we not – just sit and talk?’

  ‘If you wish.’ She waved him again to the chair and this time he sat down. Then still holding her hand he pulled her cautiously until she came to be sitting on his knee.

  She said: ‘I don’t think this is proper, Osborne.’

  ‘Why ever not? You are but a child.’

  ‘Girls, you must remember, grow up very young.’

  ‘And you are grown up? Har – hm! – well, I—’

  ‘Yes, Osborne. I am grown up. What did you wish to talk to me about?’

  ‘About – about yourself.’

  ‘Ah, I suspicioned that was it.’

  ‘That was what?’

  ‘That it was not the fight about the body of Patroclus that interested you. That it was not Patroclus’s body that interested you at all.’

  He stared at her, shocked at her outspokenness – coming so strangely from such young lips – and shocked that she should so clearly have perceived his preoccupation.

  ‘Oh, come now, my dear, you mustn’t have thoughts like that! Why I—’

  She slipped quietly off his knee and stood there, thin and gawky in the faded afternoon light. ‘But are you not interested in me? If I am a child – even if I am a woman – should you not tell me the truth? Surely you have been interested in me very much recently.’

  He cleared his throat, grunted, sat there awkwardly for a moment. ‘I do not see why you should suppose that.’

  ‘Do you not? Do you not, Vicar? Then why have you been staring at me every meal time, every time we meet? You stare at me all the time. And most of the time you stare at me here.’ She put her long thin hand to her blouse. ‘And now you have followed me upstairs.’ Her look slanted at him. ‘Is it not true?’ she asked.

  Looking at her, his eyes suddenly reddened, became heavy and unashamed. The physical contact of her having sat on his knee, and then having moved away from him, was the last straw.

  ‘If you ask me . . .’

  ‘I do ask you.’

  ‘Then yes. I have to tell you. It is true. I have to – to tell you, Rowella, it is true. It is true.’

  ‘Then what is it you want?’

  He could not answer, his heavy face taut and strained.

  ‘Is it this you want?’ she asked.

  He stared the more, blood pounding, licked his lips, nodded without breath.

  She glanced out at the lowering day, mouth pouting, eyes hidden under lashes.

  ‘It’s a dull afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Rowella, I—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I – I cannot say it.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘perhaps you need not. If you would like it. If this is really what you want.’

  She began carefully and slowly to unlace the front of her blouse.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I

  Drake said: ‘Pass me that other hammer, will ee? No, the small one. Else I’ll not get the head in.’

  ‘I don’t know how you do it, Drake,’ Geoffrey Charles said. ‘I didn’t know you were such a craftsman!’

  ‘I was apprenticed four year to Jack Bourne. But he was jealous – I always helped but was never left to do one on my own. So I’m not so good as I did ought to be.’

  He was making a new wheel for a wagon belonging to Wheal Kitty mine. The back wheel and the side of the wagon had been crushed by a fall of rock and it was easier to begin again than to try to reconstruct matchwood. Since taking over Pally’s Shop he had done little of this work, being regarded mainly as a smith; but gradually people were learning that he could create a good serviceable wheel, and he was cheaper and it saved going farther afield. But this meant the purchase of seasoned wood, which was expensive and hard to obtain, and Drake had been restricted in the amount of such work he could take on.

  Geoffrey
Charles said: ‘Why do you make the face of the wheel dished like that, sort of hollowed?’

  ‘Well, he has to go over hard and bumpy roads. If you made him flat the jolting would knock all the spokes abroad.’

  ‘Some day you must teach me. I’d far rather be able to make a wheel than worry over stupid Latin declensions.’

  Drake paused and looked at the boy, whose pallor in a few weeks had turned to a healthy tan. ‘Tedn’t only Latin you d’learn, Geoffrey Charles. You’re learning to be a gentleman.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I know. And a gentleman I intend to be. And I intend to inherit Trenwith. But I ask you as a friend, which do you think will be most useful to me when I am a man – to be able to make, or even repair, a wheel or to be able to state the nominative case of a finite verb – or some such nonsense?’

  Drake smiled and weighed a strip of ash in his hand, calculating whether it would match the other pieces which were to be pegged together to make the rim.

  ‘When you’re a man you’ll be able to pay me to make the wheels.’

  ‘When I own Trenwith you shall come and live there as my factor and we’ll make wheels together!’

  Drake went to the well at the side of the yard and picked up the wooden bucket. ‘I’ll learn you to make one of these here some time. They’re not so hard. But now you’ve been here more than two hour and your mother will grow angry at us if ye’re away too long.’

  ‘Oh, Mother . . . she’s no trouble. But Uncle George is expected next week or the week after, and then the sparks may fly.’ Geoffrey Charles banged a hammer on the anvil. ‘Like that, I shouldn’t wonder. But he’s not my father and he’s not my overlord and I shall suit myself.’

  ‘I think, Geoffrey, that twould be an error to put yourself into more trouble on my part. Coming over here nigh every day . . .’

  ‘I shall suit myself and shall consult neither you nor Uncle George. Ma foi, I am not being corrupted!’

  ‘Yet twould be wise in you not to bring another quarrel on. If only for your mother’s sake. Isn’t it best to meet now and again on the quiet, like, instead of maybe being forbid to come and then coming whether or no?’

  Geoffrey Charles went over and looked at the bucket. ‘Pooh, I could almost make this now! It’s only a few staves and some iron bands.’

  ‘Tis not so easy as you d’think. If you made a bucket all the water’d rush out through the staves.’

  Geoffrey Charles swung the bucket over the well and lowered it. ‘I saw Morwenna last month.’

  Drake stopped with his hammer raised and slowly lowered it. ‘You never telled me that.’

  ‘I thought first perhaps better not.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I thought perhaps you had forgot it or were forgetting it. I thought, why reopen the cut?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But the cut isn’t healed, is it?’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘All right.’ Geoffrey Charles, having brashly broken into this forbidden field, had sense enough not to speak of Morwenna’s illness. ‘She has a baby, did you know?’

  Drake’s face flushed scarlet. ‘No, I didn’t know. What – when were that?’

  ‘In June – early June.’

  ‘. . . What is it?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘She’ll – she’ll be happy ’bout that?’

  ‘We-ll . . .’

  ‘What did she say? Did she say aught?’

  Geoffrey Charles wound the bucket up, and it reached the surface awash with spring water.

  ‘She – she said I was to say she’d never forget.’

  From being flushed Drake’s face went very pale. He turned the haft of the hammer in his hand. ‘When you go back school . . . be seeing her again, will you?’

  ‘I may. It’s quite likely.’

  ‘Will you tell her something from me, Geoffrey? Will you tell her something from me? Will you tell her that I know tis all over betwixt us and there can never be nothing more but, but . . . no, no don’t say that ’tall. Say nothing ’bout that. Just say as – just say that one day I’ll hope to bring her some winter primroses . . .’

  Geoffrey Charles said: ‘That reminds me of when you used to call and see us before Christmas, the year before last. Somehow – somehow life was all dark and secret and beautiful then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Drake, staring blindly. ‘Yes. That was how it was.’

  II

  Sam had just come off core and was digging in his garden. That it was misty-wet made little difference. Shawls of fine rain lay over the countryside. In the distance the sea was sulky and nibbled at the crusts of sand it could reach. Wafting about in the mist, seagulls swooped and cried.

  He had finished one row and was wiping the damp earth from his spade. In most parts it would have been difficult to dig in the rain, but here the soil was so light and sandy that it scarcely clogged at all. He was about to start again when a voice spoke:

  ‘What are you doing there, Sam?’

  His stomach turned over. She had come across the soft ground behind him unawares.

  ‘Well, Emma . . .’

  ‘Poor lot of taties ye’ve got,’ she said, peering into his bucket.

  ‘Nay, I drew them last month. I’m just digging over the ground a second time t’see if any little small ’uns be left behind.’

  She was wearing a red serge cloak and a black shawl over her head; wisps of hair had come loose and hung in half curling dankness on her cheeks.

  ‘Not at church praying, then?’

  ‘Not yet. There’s a Bible reading later.’

  ‘Still looking for lost souls just so smart as ever?’

  ‘Yes, Emma. Salvation is the gate of everlasting life.’

  She stirred a snail with her foot and it instantly retracted into its shell. ‘Not been quite so smart after my soul recent, I notice.’

  He leaned on his spade. ‘If you’d give but a thought to God, Emma, twould rejoice me more’n anything else on earth.’

  ‘That was my impression until this month. Following me, you was, even into Sally Chill-Off’s. Not seen ee now for all of a month. Found another soul to save, have ee?’

  He rubbed a wet hand across his mouth. ‘There’s no soul s’important to me as yours, Emma. Though all may be alike in the sight of our Redeemer, there’s none I’d so dearly like to bring into the light!’

  She stared across towards the misty sea. Then she laughed, that big hearty laugh, full-throated, unrestrained.

  ‘Tom d’say you’re afeared of he. That’s why you’ve left off.’

  ‘Tom Harry?’

  ‘Yes. I d’tell him he’s all wrong. Tedn that at all. Tedn Tom you’re afeared of.’

  He stared at her, heart thumping. ‘And what d’you say I’m afeared of, Emma?’

  She met his gaze frankly. ‘The Devil.’

  ‘The Devil . . .’ He stumbled over the word. ‘My dear, we all fight – the Devil. And those of us who have enlisted in the army of King Jesus—’

  ‘The Devil in me!’ she said. ‘Maybe tis best to admit the truth of it, Sam. Isn’t that what you’re afeared of?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never that. I could never fear any ill in you, Emma, unless twas in me also. Satan within me I fight every day of my life. There can never be an end to the enemies within. But there are no enemies without. I – want to help ee, Emma. I want ee to find eternal Salvation, I want ee to be . . . I want—’

  ‘You mean you want me,’ Emma said.

  Sam looked up at the sky. There was a long silence. ‘If I want you, Emma, it is in purity of heart; because tis my earnest belief that your soul if turned to Christ would be a noble one and a beautiful one to offer Him. If I want you in – in another way it is not from carnal lust but from a wish to wed you as my wife, and take you to my bed and to my heart – in – in a true spirit of grace and worship . . .’

  He stopped, short of breath. He had hardly intended to say anything like this, but it had come up out of
his throat unbidden.

  Emma stood there, stirring the retracted snail with her toe. The fine rain continued to fall on her face, washing it clean of expression.

  ‘You know I’m promised to Tom Harry.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, half promised . . . And you know tis said I’m a whore.’

  ‘I sha’n’t believe it till I hear it from your own lips.’

  ‘I been out in the hayfields wi’ many a man.’

  ‘Is that the same thing?’

  ‘Folk’ll tell you so.’

  ‘But d’you tell me so?’

  She said: ‘You seen me drunk.’

  ‘I’ve prayed for ee every night – in great distress of mind. But tis not too late, Emma. Ye know what Ezekiel d’say: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean; from all filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you.”’

  She made an impatient movement. ‘Oh, Sam, what do praying do? You’re a good man, I know. You’re happy in your goodness. Well, I’m happy in my filthiness, as you d’call it. What difference do it make in the long run?’

  ‘Oh, Emma, my dear, my dear, can you not feel a conviction of error, of sin? Is not the love of the Redeemer more precious to you than the arms of Satan? Leave me help you to find repentance and faith and salvation and love!’

  She looked him up and down with narrowed glinting eyes. ‘And you’d wed me, Sam?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes. That would make—’

  ‘Even if I didn’t repent?’

  He stopped and sighed, the wrinkles coming and going on his face. ‘I’d wed you in the hope and faith that God’s bountiful love would able me to bring you into the light.’

  ‘And what would happen to your flock, Sam?’

  ‘They be all men and women who have received sanctification, who have been forgive their sins by Him who only can forgive. As we forgive them that trespass ’gainst us. They would welcome you among them as a prodigal daughter—’

  She shook her head so vigorously that raindrops spattered from it. ‘Nay, Sam, tedn true and you d’know it! If I just came as a convert they’d look at me athwart, so much as to say, what be she doing here, she that’s been flaunting around. What be Sam up to? Ar – Sam be tankering after she, like all they others! But if I wed ee and wed ee without so much as saying sorry for my sins, what’d they think then? They’d think their glorious Leader had gotten himself into a deep mire of vice and malefaction, and they’d say we don’t want nothing more to do with he; wouldn’t touch him with a pole, they’d say, can’t touch pitch without getting fouled, they’d say. And that’d be the end of your precious Connexion!’