He went to the chopping block on the bank at the back of the house, under an old plum-tree. And there, with quick strokes, he smashed the heavy frame to pieces, so that the plaster of the moulding flew abroad.
‘It’s nowt but grey plaster, at that !’ he said.
Then he gathered the bits of the frame, and carried them to the hearth.
‘If we leave nothing,’ he said, ‘there’ll be nothing for my mother to open her mouth about, when she comes a Sat’day.’
He carefully swept up all the bits, and put them in the fire, continuing to burn pieces of the heavy cardboard.
‘Dirty stuff to burn!’ he said. ‘But I can poke it out tonight. — I might as well wash up while it’s finishing.’
‘Shall I wash up?’ she said.
‘You? You dirtied no plates, so why should you wash ’em up?’
‘Then I’ll dry, shall I?’
‘If you like.’
Curious how he had become hard and angry again, at the mere thought of the photograph.
He stood at the sink washing the dishes in boiling water, putting his fingers in the very hot water with quick haste.
‘You’ll scald your hands,’ she said.
‘I’m used to it!’ he replied. ‘I’ve done my own Polly-anning long enough for that.’
‘Don’t you mind doing your own housework?’
‘I’d rather do it than have a woman in. Seems to me anybody ought to be able to do for themselves. Mother comes a’ Sat’days an’ cleans up an’ black-leads, an’ takes my bit o’ washin’. But if she didn’t, I’d do it myself. What cleanin’ an’ sewin’ an’ cookin’ I need I can do for myself, an’ bother nobody!’
The cardboard. was a red and grey mess in the fireplace. He poked it somewhat clear, and put on the frame, piece by piece. It burnt up quickly, and the plaster cracked and flew. Meanwhile he looked at the bare place on the wall.
‘It shows, doesn’t it!’ he said. ‘I s’ll have to nail up a Church almanach.’
‘Aren’t you glad it’s gone?’ she said.
He shook his head in a queer sideways jerk of assertion.
‘Ay! I’m glad to be shut of it.’
He tidied up the house quickly and carefully, till it had its usual bare look of a place half-inhabited, a sort of cabin used just for meals and sleep. Then he put on his coat. It was past five o’clock, when he glanced up at the time. He mended the fire carefully with coal, to keep it going, washed his hands, and put on his hat, taking his gun.
Connie had been sitting in the arm-chair, musing, as he moved quickly and quietly about. Now, she didn’t want to go.
‘Shall we be going, then?’ he said. ‘You won’t be at the Hall for tea, shall you?’
She looked up at the clock.
‘No,’ she said.
‘What will they be thinking?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, with indifference, not moving. He waited a few moments at the open door, looking out at the full ripe sunshine of the evening, and listening to the calls the birds. Then he looked indoors again, to her who still sat the arm-chair by the hearth.
‘Shall we be going?’ he repeated.
‘I suppose so!’ she said, rising with a gesture of impatience, and moving resentfully towards the door.
‘Where’s your hat?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t bring one,’ she replied curtly, passing out of the door and stooping to gather one of the double red daisies, which she threaded in her dress.
‘Hat nor nothing?’ he asked.
‘Nothing at all,’ she said impatiently.
He shut the door and locked it. Flossie ran round in silent joy, lifting the feather of her tail. Then she started off towards the wood.
‘It’s a beautiful evening!’ he said.
‘Lovely,’ she cried, impatient at having to go home.
He looked at her closely.
‘Has something nettled you?’ he asked.
‘No!’ she said, with assumed indifference.
And again he looked at her.
‘Folks’ll tell where you’ve been, by that red daisy,’ he said.
‘Surely they grow in other places besides at your cottage,’ she said, rather rudely, looking at the flower threaded into her dress.
‘Ay, they may! But —, he said no more.
The wood facing the cottage was hazel brake, out of which rose the grey, twiggy oak-trees. The hazels had myriad down-turned buds, half opened, like a kind of dew in the full-evening sunlight. And underneath was a dense, dark-green sward of dogs-mercury, without any colour but the dark green. Over this dense green poured the early-evening sunlight, and the birds already seemed very busy and happy.
Connie resented bitterly going home Yet he walked beside her without feeling, accepting the fact of her departure She almost despised him, for his mechanical acceptance of facts.
He walked through the wood, alert, listening for every noise, watching everything that moved. He did not look at flowers nor trees. These he only noticed when there was something unusual. But he watched all the time, with trained alertness, for sounds and for movements, and suddenly out of nowhere, he said to her:
‘If you come to th’ hut and I’m not there, an’ you want to find me, what you want to do is to take the hatchet an’ chop a bit o’ wood. I s’ll hear you — an’ Flossie will. Chop a bit o’ wood on th’ block, you know. We s’ll hear that.’
‘All right!’ she said. But the idea pleased her.
‘An’, if I don’t see you afore Sunday, I s’ll be waiting for you at ten o’clock. An’ if you don’t come, I s’ll walk up to th’.house. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right!’ she assented.
‘I won’t come to th’ gate with you, for fear there’s somebody in th’ park. — You know about that daisy, don’t you?’
Again she glanced down at the inoffensive button of a flower threaded in the bosom of her dress.
‘Quite! I’ll throw it away in the park,’ she said.
He hesitated at the turn of the path.
‘Well!’ he said, looking at her.
She looked up at him.
‘Good-bye!’ she said.
He gave a hasty salute, turned, and was gone.
She went on blindly towards the gate, and out into the effulgence of light, in the park. There, as if from force of habit, she began to hurry. The sun was sinking, in clarified gold, towards the rookery beyond the hall, and rooks were dropping home in dark specks from the sky.
Clifford had come in his wheel-chair to the top of the drive, the screen of the yew-trees at the corner of the curving sweep, and was sitting looking out into the living glow of the evening, that was full of the wild, uncanny disturbance of an English Spring. She saw him, and waved her hand quickly, as she came up the incline. Then she stroked back her hair from her flushed face.
‘It is so lovely, Clifford!’ she said. ‘I went to sleep.’
‘To sleep!’ he re-echoed, looking at her flushed, sensitive face that was clear again, and fresh like spring with the warm tenderness of the flesh. Suddenly she struck him as lovely: the fresh, tender flush of her face, of her flesh, the flushed, sensitive flesh! ‘You went to sleep!’ he re-echoed, fatherly. ‘But how? Where did you go to sleep?’
‘In the keeper’s hut, sitting in the sunshine. I went fast asleep.
She still looked as if she had only just wakened up.
‘And was the keeper there?’ asked Clifford.
‘Not at the hut,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you come and meet me?’ I kept expecting to hear the chair.’
‘I didn’t know where you’d gone,’ he said. ‘And on a day like this — especially an evening like this —‘ he looked up into-the sky — ‘I was by no means sure you would want me and my chair.’
‘Why not?’ she said quickly. ‘I was thinking of you, as I came home, and wondering if you were out of doors, as you ought to be.’
‘If there were any point in my being
out of doors!’ he said,’ with a touch of bitterness. ‘You look so lovely this evening, Connie! You want something different from me to come and meet you.’
She stopped, and looked at him.
‘Why, Clifford?’ she said.
‘Why!’ he answered ironically. ‘A bath-chair, in the month of May! There goes the cuckoo, he’s at it all day! I can’t bear May, I wish it was always winter, and dark and rainy. Then I don’t mind.’
‘Oh Clifford, don’t! It’s so lovely.’
‘Am I lovely!’ he said desperately. ‘The cuckoo only jeers at me, even the rooks. How dare I come and meet you, in a bath chair! — as you come flushing home like a Dryad! Why doesn’t somebody shoot me!’
‘Oh Clifford, don’t. Oh don’t! Don’t spoil it all! It is so lovely. Don’t say anything against it!’
She laid her hand reluctantly and tremulously on his, that lay on his steering-wheel. He controlled himself with difficulty.
‘You missed your tea,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want to go in and have some?’
She looked at him. She didn’t want tea. But if it would please him —! Yet no! She wouldn’t drink any more tea.
‘It’s not long to dinner now,’ she said, hesitating.
‘You look so happy,’ he said, watching her with a sort of gnawing misery inside him. ‘Are you happy?’
She looked at him, startled, wondering what he saw.
‘I didn’t think I was so happy,’ she said. ‘But I loved today.— Was it horrid of me not to be home to tea?’
‘My dear child, the only thing that is absolutely horrid is my existence. I ought to be shot, as a horse with broken legs is shot.’
He spoke in dry, nervous anger and misery.
‘No Clifford!’ she said. ‘Stop! Stop! I won’t hear any of that! I won’t hear it!’
‘Then don’t come home looking so damned lovely,’ he said.
‘Must I come home ugly? — Don’t make me wish I needn’t come home at all,’ she said, turning to the house. And she left him there in the chair on the drive, at the crest of the park slope.
Mrs Bolton was in the hall.
‘Have you seen Sir Clifford?’ she asked. ‘He was fretting a bit about you not being home for tea, though I said to him: “Do leave her ladyship free, in such a small matter!” — I told him you’d just be having tea at Marehay — Thursday, market-day, and no men home. How well you’re looking, my lady! You’re’ a different woman!’
‘I didn’t go to Marehay, I went to sleep in the wood,’ said Connie.
‘Well I never now! Well it’s done you good, that’s all! We ought to have a border of those red daisies here at the Hall, don’t you think? They’re so winsome!’
Constance took the flower quickly from her dress.
‘We might get some later on from the keeper’s cottage,’ she said, looking Mrs Bolton in the eyes. ‘Some plants.’
‘Yes! Mightn’t we!’ said Mrs Bolton, flushed and excited. ‘There goes Sir Clifford! I’ll go to the back door to him, don’t you bother, my lady! I think he frets a bit when he doesn’t know where you are — and such a lovely day! If only he’d have gone out for a drive in the motor. But I couldn’t persuade him.’
‘No!’ said Connie thoughtfully. — ‘I mustn’t be out unless I let him know.’
‘That’s right, your ladyship! He doesn’t mind a bit if you’ve told him you’ll be out—’
‘But how is one always to know!’ said Connie resentfully. ‘People make life so tight.’
‘I know! And if you just doze off in the sun! — But don’t you bother, my lady, he’ll be right in a minute now you’re here.’
She went to the back door, to help Clifford, and Constance. went upstairs.
Dinner was a little constrained. She could not help feeling him a dead weight. And he was feeling uneasy and’ trammelled. She was in love with the other man, and did not get clear this evening. And she did not want to be interrupted in her flow. She wanted to be left alone. Yet after dinner he started again.
‘You mustn’t mind, Connie, if I grouse a bit sometimes. The spring makes it gruesome for me, you know.’
‘But why don’t you forget!’ she said. She wanted to say, ‘forget yourself!’ — but that would have offended him.
‘Quite! But when the larks go up into the air, and you have’ gone off into the void of spring, and I have nothing to do;— and you come home at evening lovely and expectant like a Dryad, and I sit waiting for you in a bath-chair, then I can’t help thinking, why wasn’t I finished off, why was I left this mutilated thing, encumbering other people’s lives? — and encumbered with my own deadness!’
She frowned slightly.
‘But you encumber nobody’s life, Clifford,’ she said.
‘Not yours?’ he asked, with a queer look.
‘No!’ she said.
‘Do you mean you love me as Héloïse loved Abélard, after he was mutilated?’ he said, in a queer ironic tone.
‘I don’t know I’ she said. ‘I’m not Héloïse. But Abélard’ never wished they had killed him. He was very much alive and active.’
‘He had his feet,’ said Clifford.
‘And his mind! and his courage! he was a brave man.’
‘Which you don’t think I am?’ he said.
‘Not when you repine! she said ‘Imagine if I sat in a corner of the house on a lovely spring day and moped because you were ill! How would you like it?’
‘Not at all! I’d far rather you went off into the woods like a Dryad.’
‘Well then! And after all, you can hear the larks, and feel the sun, and smell the wall-flowers under the window, and see the trees looking so queer and fleecy, in bud. After all, Clifford, think what life still offers you! — And you have the mine to be interested in, and all the things you studied in Germany, you can make use of them now! After all, Clifford, don’t be too poor-spirited to accept life, as far as you can.’
He was quiet for a while.
‘Quite!’ he said, rather ironically. ‘Quite! I suppose I’ve no right to cry and howl, when it comes over one, no matter how much I may want to.’
‘I don’t think you have!’ she said, rather brutally. ‘Why should you cry and howl? You are healthy, and have lots of interests. You are alive and well-off! Why should you want to cry and howl? If you are sure you are alive, live in every way, you can live. But if you want to die — well, really, don’t burden other people with it, not even Mrs Bolton; I hate Hamletising men!’
Again he listened in silence.
‘Quite!’ he said at length. ‘Quite! Not even Mrs Bolton! You’re quite right, Connie! Lash out at me, when you see me starting to Hamletise. — And another day, I’ll come with you to the wood, if I may.’
‘Come then, do!’ she cried, ‘So long as it will make you happy.’
‘Quite!’ he said.
But when she went upstairs, she felt an irritation in her blood, and she resented it deeply.
She went down again to Mrs Bolton’s sitting-room.
‘I’m going up early tonight, Mrs Bolton,’ she said. ‘So if Sir Clifford rings early, you’ll know! Don’t get up! No, don’t get up!’
‘Very good, my lady.’
Mrs Bolton was seated at a little table, spectacles on her nose, writing a letter. A small fire was burning in the grate. Some sprigs of pink blossom were in a jar on the window-sill.
‘Peach-blossom!’ said Constance, touching them.
‘I’m afraid I stole it,’ said Mrs Bolton.
‘One may just as well, the peaches are never any good. — How I love Italy when the almond and peach-blossom is all pink clouds under a blue sky! — Sometimes one wants to run away, don’t you think? — even from oneself. — I seem to have known such a lovely world, and then lost it. But today was lovely. I looked in at the keeper’s cottage. Did you know his wife fairly well?’
Mrs Bolton put down her pen and took off her spectacles.
‘I knew her, but I never ha
d anything to do with her. Will you sit down?’
‘A minute perhaps,’ said Constance, sitting by the fire. ‘What was she like? Who was she?’
‘She was a Bertha Coutts, one of those Irish Couttses that live down Beggarlee,’ said Mrs Bolton. ‘A common lot.’
‘Why are there Irish here? Are there others?’
‘Oh, quite a number of families, that’s why there’s that Catholic chapel at Bog End. Couttses, and Donellys, and Burns, and Mays, and Roddys, and Hunts, and Fitzpatricks — no end of them. They used to come in the old days, for harvest time. Then they got jobs at the pits, carpenters’ jobs or something on the bank, not many of them went down. And so they settled. They’re mostly very nice, decent people, a bit mean, being Catholics. But the Couttses were a rough lot. And this Bertha was a rough one, the only girl in a household of lads. They went down pit, the Coutts lads. But they were low, my word! even the other colliers didn’t have much to do with them. But it was a common -place to live in, Beggarlee. The Parkins lived down there for a long time, till the children was growing up. Then they moved up the hill.’
‘Which is Beggarlee?’ asked Constance — and she had to be told all about the two rows of very old cottages, miners’ cottages built down by the brook, in the old days when there were only gin pits. Connie thought Beggarlee rather attractive, by the old stone bridge.
‘It may be all right outside, my lady, but it’s a rum lot lives there. The same even now. But the Parkins moved when Oliver started to work. I think Mrs Parkin wanted to get away from the Couttses. I know they were trying to shove one another out of Beggarlee for years till Mrs Parkin had to give in, and go. Oliver would be a lad of fourteen or fifteen then: and that Bertha, she must have been years older than he was, a brazen hussy! Then she went away, to Sheffield or Nottingham or somewhere: not into service, oh dear no! the Couttses wouldn’t let their girls go into service, they were above it, they were. I never knew rightly what she did: but I believe she was a barmaid or something in some hotel. Anyhow, I can remember she used to come home dressed up to the nines, and parade about showing herself off. That was what she loved, to parade about the roads in fine clothes. She dressed quite smart, she was no fool. And she’d talk in that Nottingham way, carstle for castle, all the lardy-da! But she wasn’t above sitting in the pub and having half-a-pint with the men, even then. I suppose she must have been away some years. I know I’d started nursing, when she came home all at once with a broken arm. It must be — oh, fifteen or sixteen years ago, quite. Because I used to bandage her arm for her, and she’d talk to me that superior, my word, fairly made you sick! — And then she got Oliver Parkin. She was getting on, nearer thirty than twenty, so I suppose she thought she’d better nab what she could—’
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