The Lonely Furrow

by Norah Lofts

  He thanked God that he had been mistaken; or that she had not understood. Which? He did not know; never would know. The weeks of hardship had made him feel very guilty and once or twice he had tried to apologise: Madam, this is not what I mean. You eating hard-tack!’ But she had always smiled and said she had never been happier. And she did look happy.

  Then she did something which annoyed him. One of the scurvy-sufferers, instead of making a saleable trinket, had carved out of a log of driftwood another sign for The Sailors’ Rest. A huge thing, big enough almost to be a ship’s figurehead. And it was coloured, as ships’ figureheads were, with crude colours, so well-mixed with oil and cow-heel glue as to be resistant to salt water, rain, and wind. David’s own painted sign, hanging creaking in the wind, showed a sailor, recognisable by his head-wear and clothes, lying at ease on a mattress. A sailor at rest. The figurehead thing was different; just a head with a recognisable sailor’s woollen cap which could be pulled down over the ears, homespun, buffish in colour, as most were; the drab colour set off the face, reddish brown, and the eyes, blue, as sailors’ eyes mostly were. The mouth of this crude and yet powerful image wore a carved smile, the red of the lips darker than the face.

  ‘I like it,’ Mistress Captoft said, after she had thanked the man who had made it and seen him off to whatever fate awaited him; scurvy again with no cure handy; or shipwreck or accident. Actually, anxious as she was to restore and heal, every parting with a man restored and healed hurt her. While they were under her roof, for a long time or short, they were her children and she felt towards them the helpless protectiveness, the defeated possessiveness of mothers the world over.

  ‘It must be nailed up,’ she said, ‘above the shop window. It will attract attention.’

  It would also make David’s swinging sign, already bleached, look like a shadow.

  ‘It will give the wrong idea, madam. In no time at all this will be called The Jolly Sailor.’

  ‘And would that matter, David? Were we not, even during the worst times, jolly together? Sharing what little we had? Making merry over the hard-tack and three of a bed? I think the sign apt. And, being so conspicuous, a further annoyance to that woman.’

  The next inmate to arrive, however, was not attracted by the implied jollity. He came because he was in very poor shape and, as David had foreseen, news of The Sailors’ Rest had spread.

  He was a big man, both tall and broad; he was in good health for his ship had been only just out from Hull when he’d ducked his head, below deck, a thing he’d done many times before; but this time was different; he couldn’t straighten his neck again. Worse than that, every movement, even the effort to walk, caused agony. No ship bound for Lisbon could afford a useless hand, so he’d been put ashore at Bywater; not utterly destitute, for the captain was a humane man. Somebody had said, ‘Make for The Sailors’ Rest, mate. Madam there’ll cure you if anybody can.’ So here he was, having been obliged to ask direction because it was impossible for him to lift his head to an angle from which either sign would have been visible.

  For once Mistress Captoft was at a loss, never having met with his condition before. Flesh wounds, even broken bones she was prepared to deal with; but there was no wound; and had his neck been broken, the man would have been dead. As usual, when she was in a difficulty, she called for David and he, having so recently suffered defeat over the matter of the sign, was delighted to be able to say that he had seen a man or two in this state before; and he knew the cure.

  It sounded very drastic.

  ‘Hanging by the neck!’ she exclaimed. ‘But David, surely that would kill him.’

  ‘Not properly done, madam. Hung people die one of two ways. They hang till they choke and that’s a long business or the jolt’ll break their necks. We shan’t let him hang long and we won’t jolt him. I’ll make a kind of collar.’

  Cautious, in case of accident, Mistress Captoft asked the man if he were willing to submit to being half-hanged; and he said anything, even a real hanging, would be better than this.

  The operation took place in the kitchen, supervised by David, watched by Mistress Captoft and two or three reasonably able-bodied fellows who had orders to act immediately if anything seemed to go wrong.

  The leather collar, well-padded with straw, was fixed to the man’s neck and to a rope, slack at the moment, tied to a beam from which next year’s hams and strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs would hang.

  The man—he gave his name as Dan Rush—stood on the kitchen table, David beside him. David moved the rope a little way along the beam and said, ‘Step on to the stool.’ Dan did so, and the rope lost its slack. ‘Now on to the cask,’ David said. And then, ‘Cask away!’ Mistress Captoft held her breath as the big man hung suspended. She heard, or imagined she heard, a slight click, no more than the turning of a key in a lock.

  ‘Hold him,’ David said, and the two men ran forward to take Dan’s weight while David unfastened the collar.

  Dan stood on the kitchen floor, straight and tall, dumbstruck. He turned his head from right to left, bent it towards one shoulder then the other.

  ‘By God!’ he said, in an awed voice. ‘A bloody miracle. I’m cured! I’m cured!’

  He rushed over to Mistress Captoft, flung his great arms round her, kissed her on both cheeks; thumped David and the other men on the shoulders. He was beside himself with joy. He danced.

  He was a newcomer, David reminded himself; not yet aware of the rules of the house—many of them drawn up by David himself. One concerned the language unsuitable for use in Madam’s presence, a rule that rendered many men practically dumb for the first forty-eight hours at least, since profanity was their natural tongue.

  Another rule concerned drinking. David knew how easily men of quite mild disposition, quiet fellows, could become aggressive and noisy after that drop too much; and not only that, men of ordinarily clean habit became filthy, vomiting the least of their offences.

  Ale was served at The Sailors’ Rest—even during that bad time when food ran short. Mistress Captoft had laid in stores and every morning each man broke his fast with a mug of very weak ale and a hunk of bread. Ale of a slightly stronger kind was served at supper.

  Anybody who wanted more than this was free to go out and buy it. Mistress Captoft said she did not wish men to feel constricted as in the ordinary charitable institution. And on the whole the matter was—at this stage—largely academic, since most of those seeking shelter were destitute. Of the paying clients there had as yet been few. But David was prepared for the future. Like many people he associated drunkenness and immorality generally with the keeping of late hours, so supper was early, soon after the Vespers bell, and at the first sound of the Compline bell the door of The Sailors’ Rest was barred for the night. This gave David a chance to judge the state of any latecomer.

  On the first night after his miraculous cure, Dan was slightly late and slightly tipsy. He had spent a lot of time hunting about Bywater for a present for Madam, something pretty and not too expensive, for what money he had must last until he found a ship again. Also he had plans for the next evening when he would, as he expressed it, feel more like himself. The days of agony, when even to eat or drink was an effort, and the drastic, sudden cure had somewhat unmanned him. Tomorrow!

  He found his trinket at last, a piece of amber, small, but genuine—he knew by the light weight and the warm feel of it that it was not a bit of the coloured glass so often sold as amber—slung on a thin silver chain. He then went to an alehouse and drank just enough to make him, in his exuberant state of mind, a little more exuberant. Not, David realised, being a just man, quite drunk enough to warrant the slammed door and the inexorable sentence: Get into the gutter and sleep it off which in the last four months three bad characters had earned; but tipsy enough and late enough to be admonished; tipsy enough to resent admonishment. He said, ‘Get outta my way, you little runt. It ain’t your house anyway. It’s hers. And I’ve got a present for her. Where is
she?’

  ‘I am here,’ Mistress Captoft said from the top of the stairs. There was, as she had planned, only one she in the house.

  ‘Brought you something,’ the big man said, exhibiting the frail trinket on his huge horny palm.

  She took it with exactly the unselfconscious, innocent assurance that she had accepted the home-made gifts of other grateful men—things which had formed a nucleus, given a start to quite a flourishing little business.

  ‘How very pretty,’ she said. ‘But there was no need. To see you better is reward enough. Now; you are late, supper is over. But there is bread and cheese in the kitchen.’

  ‘And if you must be sick, do it out of the window,’ David said.

  The big man went off in search of the food and David followed Mistress Captoft into the little parlour now, save for the counter, her own place again.

  ‘Madam, you heard what he said?’

  ‘In part. His voice was somewhat slurred.’

  ‘He called me a runt!’

  ‘David you are not so small as to resent that, surely. To a man of that size, I suppose we all look small.’ She moved to the court cupboard and poured wine into two silver cups. She could afford decent wine now, if she spared on dresses. ‘Sit down, David; drink and forget runt. I have been called worse things in my time. There is an old song that children sing: Sticks and stones may break my bones; but names can never hurt me. Shrug it off, David; he will soon be gone. And as soon as he goes I shall put this,’ she indicated the bit of amber and slender silver chain, ‘into the window, for sale with the other things.’

  All right; all right; but she had not said what she should have said. Out he must go, to quote from another children’s game.

  She did not say that; she said instead, ‘David, we must remember that the poor man was only this very day released from a crippling disability.’

  Yes—and to whom were thanks due for that? David Fuller. Pushed aside, called runt and reminded—as though he needed reminding—that he was not the master of this house.

  Nursing his wine and his grievances, too painful to be put into words, David sat and brooded, his mind like balanced scales tipping this way, that way. Mistress Captoft had saved him from starvation, given him a chance to rehabilitate himself, ventured out on this whole enterprise, at his suggestion, and when the thing looked like being a failure, he had apologised. And with things at their worst, she had said that she was happy. Had indeed looked happy. As he had been. Until now, when gratitude, devotion, a desire to serve, protect, had suddenly changed; just as a bowl of sweet milk could be changed, by the addition of wine, into syllabub, by a little rennet, into cheese. It was not his house but he took a large part in the running of it, upheld, both by warnings and by his own example, that respectful awe with which the men regarded her. It was to him that she turned for help and advice in any material difficulty; and for comfort and cheer in those rare moments when her spirits were low. When men were bedridden, it was he who had undertaken the tasks which he considered unsuitable for a lady to do; when men were delirious he’d taken care always to be there. Now she had stood by and heard him insulted and gone out her way to be pleasant to the tipsy fellow, accepted his gift, bothered lest he should go supperless to bed. Just because he was a huge, handsome brute.

  Mistress Captoft observed that the glass of good wine was doing little to lift David’s gloom. Being a woman she did not understand the offence in the word runt; she had stated a fact when she said that to a man of that size everybody else must look small. The remark about who owned the house was also a fact. To mention it was not perhaps in the best of taste; but then the man was not completely sober and had not been under her roof long enough to have learned that mannerliness was the rule here.

  Then her gaze fell upon the bowl of cowslips which stood on the table between the two chairs.

  ‘Oh, David,’ she said quickly, ‘it has been such a busy day, I neglected to thank you for the flowers. They gave me great pleasure. I love the scent.’ She leaned forward and put her face to the posy.

  ‘There was just the one bunch. It looked a bit lonely alongside the cabbages.’

  The gloom did not lighten. She thought about how he had exerted himself over the hanging cure; scrambling up on to the table, reaching up to move the rope so that it was exactly above each decreasing level, table, stool, cask. His badly mended leg, she knew, served him well enough with the properly built up shoe but it was susceptible to changes in the weather and to fatigue.

  ‘Is your leg paining you, David?’

  ‘No more than usual, thank you, madam.’

  A perfectly ordinary, civil reply but cold, but offhand, as his remark about the cowslips had been. Best to take no notice.

  ‘I’d advise an early night for you. For myself, too.’

  *

  In the morning Dan woke; stretched, turned, reached both arms above his head. No pain! Cured! He could remember the cure with perfect clarity; also the hunt for the right gift; after that his memory was hazy though he had not, by his own standard, been drunk. The way the man who had organised the miracle looked at him, however, indicated that something was wrong; and now he came to look at it, the man who had helped with the miracle and the man who had tried to bar his way later on, were one and the same.

  He made his graceless attempt at apology. ‘No offence meant, mate.’

  ‘You’re no mate of mine.’

  ‘You helped to cure me.’

  Something of last night’s business, or something looming in the future, threw a shadow.

  ‘Worst day’s work I ever did,’ David said.

  One of Mistress Captoft’s projects—based now on experience—was the reclamation of the stables where the knights’ horses had stood in that brief, lordly interlude between times when humbler animals had been there. She thought it unlikely that next winter—or any in the foreseeable future—would be quite like the one they had just survived but, just in case, she wanted the stables put into such a state of repair that men could sleep there, and not three to each narrow cell, and some in her private parlour as well as in the big communal room. The work on the stables was being done, not by hired labour—altogether too expensive—but by those of her guests fit for work. And of those Dan Rush, yesterday a cripple, was by far the strongest and most able. He could carry a plank with which two ordinary men must struggle, sweating, as though it weighed no more than a stool: he could hold a supporting post steady and upright, dead true, while the hole into which it was planted was filled in and resolutely stamped down. Merely exerting his size and strength was, after the helplessness, a pleasure. And there was the evening still to come.

  The evening held promise for David as well as for Dan. The big man was not present at the supper table and tonight, if he came back one second late, drunk or sober, the door would remain barred. And the mild wind which had brought the cowslips into bloom had shifted; sudden and keen, it now blew from the east. A night on the beach would not be pleasant—but no worse than the dog watch aboard ship. It might, however, teach the big brute a salutary lesson; David might not own the house; he did govern the door. And what could have been a weak place in the defensive action—Madam interfering and being sentimental—was, most fortuitously, forestalled. Madam had one of her headaches. Her headache, but part of the tiresome process all women suffered if they lived long enough. It took various forms, hysteria, inexplicable pains; some completely honest women took to stealing; some, married, became pregnant and bore children known as tails’ ends.

  Madam merely had headaches for which, naturally, she had a palliative.

  While the headache raged she lay in the darkened room, took some drops of the stuff which dulled but did not remove the pain and waited, subsisting on water since the very thought of food nauseated her. She had had three attacks since coming to Bywater and David knew that there was nothing he could do except tiptoe in, see that there was water in the jug and ask, solicitously, ‘How is it now, Madam?’ If she
had taken the drops recently she would give a mere drowsy murmur; fully awake she would say with resolute cheerfulness, ‘Getting better, thank you.’ Which was true, for her headache never lasted more than twenty-four hours.

  ‘Mind how you move about, mates,’ David reminded the men as bedtime came round. ‘Madam can’t bear noise when her head is bad.’ Down in the big communal room noise didn’t matter, for Madam’s bedroom was immediately over her little parlour and the old house had thick walls and floors. Following the example of those who had been here on an earlier, similar occasion, the men shed their footwear and crept upstairs, stealthy as thieves. David made his final visit to Mistress Captoft’s room. She was asleep, not merely drowsy. She would be perfectly well in the morning, he thought, as he stole away to his own bed.

  *

  Mistress Captoft woke in the dark and, like Dan some hours earlier, was delighted to find herself free of pain.

  When there were sick men likely to need her in the night she kept a candle burning but there was no such man now, so she reached for the tinder box and, not too steadily, made a light. She was slightly confused, as always, after the headache and the doses of lovage-and-opium. She was unsure whether it was night or day until she listened. No sound from the quay. Night then! A conclusion confirmed when she moved, a little shakily, to the window and opened the shutter and looked out into the night; a clear night with a lop-sided moon and many stars. Yes, it was night. And she was, as always after a spell of headache, ravenously hungry; not the natural hunger quite explained by the fact that she, a woman of good appetite, had fasted through a day and part of a night. The hunger—she had observed this before—was in some curious way connected with the headache, as though it had stolen something from her, something which must be replaced before recovery was complete. And it must be either cheese or ham. Nothing else would do. She pulled on her loose robe and pushed her feet into her slippers, just as she had done many times before, called up suddenly to tend the sick, and then, taking her candle, went down to administer to herself as she had so often administered to others. But not for her sops-in-wine or chicken broth or egg custard. Such items of good invalid diet still roused faint echoes of nausea. She wanted cheese or ham.