‘Ah, poor little thing!’
‘Rubbish, ’tis no worse than chucking a sackful of cats over the bridge.’
Emily began to burn.
‘What if us do drown a cat now and then? It’s got to be.’
He closed the door, picked Datty up by the hind legs and pitched her into the corner.
‘She bit me,’ he said, and seated himself beside Emily. Bending, he seized her apron to wipe his face. She dragged it from him, her fingers touched him. She went on with her plucking.
‘Easter, it’s late; you’d best go home. There won’t be nothing tonight.’
He broke out savagely and suddenly: ‘I told you I wasn’t poaching! You dirty whore; a man can’t look at you but you think he’s out to get hold of you.’
‘You never looked at me for no other reason…’
In some obscure way this man was again betrayed. He bounded to his feet and reached the door in one vital exhaustless spring. The pallid drawn look left his face. Those indefinable surgings which he sometimes experienced towards a sort of higher development invariably left their mark on him: a sign of suffering was a sign of grace. At his most animal he was magnificently unimpaired. That moment he radiated a physical joy fearfully brilliant to behold.
He rammed the bolt.
Emily, pushing away the fowl, gave a longing sigh. He enclosed her, kicking the lamp to the ground. It continued to burn on its side. He would have left it; at such a moment stars, moon, and noonday light were all one to him. But she was furtive and would not be still until he put it out.
Afterwards he lay face downwards on the ground, hiding his head in his arms. She heard how he had killed Datty, something of what had happened at The Dog. He spoke languidly, as if he were asleep.
‘I crawled to the kennel… she barked… she was on a chain. Old Collins thought a fox was after the ducks… he fired a shot from the window. I throttled her.’
‘What’re you going to do with ’er?’
‘Heave her in the pond.’
‘No, ’er’ll rise.’
‘I’ll weight her, then,’ he said drowsily.
‘Get up; you can’t sleep ’ere.’
They stood up in the dark. Easter relit the lantern. He prodded the half-plucked fowl.
‘That there hen’s a knowing old bird now.’
‘Go on! Us couldn’t teach ’er.’
‘Goodnight.’
Emily went to bed without undressing. In the morning she went to work at the farm all crumpled and creased. She was criticised for wearing a torn apron.
‘That cock’ril’s creels done it when I were twisting ’is neck.’
Miss Williams looked at the naked carcass on the enamel dish.
‘It’s a hen.’
‘’Twere a cock’ril as done it,’ retorted Emily finally.
* * *
Easter returned home. He found the door open, a lamp burning on the table, and coals in the grate. Wet clothes were spread on a horse and hung across a line in the kitchen. He found Mary asleep in an odd attitude, or rather dozing, half-dressed on the bed. She was lying stretched on her side, her head lifted, her cheek on her hand. On a chair beside the bed stood a lighted candle and a large bronze bell.
As he entered she started up, uttering a single sharp groan. Her face, convulsed with pain and tense, stared up at him; her eyes were distended. She said something had happened to her earlier in the night when she was rinsing the clothes which he had ruined, and then she had suffered two awful attacks of pain. Then she spoke no more but, reaching out her arms, caught the iron edge of the bed under the mattress in a petrified grip.
Easter fled for help.
The same copy of the Salus Times which announced that Samuel Collins had lost a tan terrier bitch answering to the name of Datty, proclaimed also the birth of a son to Easter Probert and his wife Mary, prematurely.
For the first two days after its birth it was thought that the child would not live. The mother might. Matt paid for better aid than the parish afforded, and they both survived, although for nearly a week the boy did not open his eyes. He was kept alive on drops of brandy; in the night the vicar came to baptise him; it was done from a silver loving-cup belonging to Phoebe. They called him Shannon. He was amazingly small and still.
Six weeks in bed passed for Mary in a weak flow of night and day. Two events she remembered always: a night when she was still desperately ill and Easter came to her door, drunk, bawling and shouting that the child was not his.
‘A bastard, and the son of a bastard.’
The parish nurse was sitting with her. She pushed him away, and when she came in, with her heart visibly heaving in her skinny bosom, she said to Mary.
‘Remember that, I will.’
And her old friend Margaret Tressan lying across her bed, weeping: ‘Mary, Mary… come back to me when you like, and you shall both live with me.’
Easter made up a bed for himself in the harness room. Every day now Dorothy urged her husband to give him notice. The topic was eternal, it nearly drove them all mad during July. Every single person in the house was affected by it. The sound of quarrelling travelled down the corridors; the opening of doors released shrill, abusive voices.
lt was queer weather, with sharp showers, hot sunshine or whole days of grey stuffiness. Phoebe found a soothing occupation. She used to pump up soft water until her arms ached, or hide herself away to learn poetry. She learned the whole of the Rubaiyat. She loved it, but it depressed her, and for relief she kept a sort of diary, or rather a record of her vague, unhappy thoughts. Thus: ‘Suppose there were no wine in Omar’s jug – no companion in the wilderness?
‘Your words are beautiful and I love you for that, but your philosophy, your creed is useless to console, harder than the Stoics! Hope of the future is everything for those who have nothing. You wrote for the happy. Today – the today you preached so exquisitely – is nothing.
‘But the sheer music in that work of selfishness! Perfect as the Sermon on the Mount. Well, Phoebe, take your choice.’
She added that same night: ‘My heart acknowledges Christ.’
The next day: ‘There is much to do. Why do I stop to write? The house resounds with the awful clatter of dustpans – how I hate it! I feel rather like a cold potato, heavy and solid. I wish I knew what to do. There is a ton weight on me.’
One entry concerned Easter: ‘I’m haunted…’
‘There is a glorious moon in a streaky sky, so calm that I said my prayers looking at it for I felt God’s very face might be behind it, so unutterably peaceful it is…’
‘Yes, I’m haunted. Else why should strangers look at me with Easter’s eyes?
‘I do feel strange when he looks at me, so that I have to shut my eyes and feel my heart beating.
‘When I came up to bed I found a bowl of yellow pansies. Mrs Wood had sent them in for me and they smell so sweet and pure and young as if they belonged to God. So what are they doing in my room?’
For some reason she felt violently ashamed when she had written these last words. She quickly tore out the page, put it in the grate and burnt it to ashes. The next day she destroyed the whole book.
VI
Nearly eight weeks after Shannon’s birth in the middle of August, the weather turned hot again. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Phoebe and Rosamund were going down to bathe.
They undressed by the river in an oval hollow in the meadow; a threshing machine was droning and they both felt sleepy and languid.
A watcher saw them standing on the bank, then sit down, and with upflung arms slide out of sight. A moment later they reappeared, wading through the shallows, Rosamund with eager limbs, Phoebe shading her eyes from the sun which flashed on the rippling water. When they were in the middle of the river they plunged. It was Dorothy who was watching them from the summerhouse where she was sitting with a basket of coloured wools on her lap, and a piece of canvas between her fingers. Near her, lying close to her feet on the warm
ed, wooden floor, Philip was playing with her pearl necklace.
The grass under the trees had been mown. Pale green apples hung glossy among the leaves. There were clumps of pink and yellow columbine growing near the summer-house which was blistering in the sun. The ants ran over the steps.
‘Don’t do that, darling.’
‘What, mummy?’
‘Drag my pretty pearls across your teeth.’
He unclasped the pearls, wound them twice round her bare ankle above the strap of her thin sandal, and, in trying to fasten them, snapped the clasp.
‘Can I get up?’ he asked, looking at her slyly.
‘Yes, if you’ll promise not to run about in the sun. Does your mum’s nose want powdering?’
‘No.’
Dorothy raised her hands to her curls, stretched, lit a cigarette and rose. The pearls fell off when she moved. Philip saw them; he said nothing.
‘Let’s go down to the river and watch the girls swim.’
‘Phib can’t swim much, mummy.’
‘No, but Rosamund can.’
They left the summerhouse and the pearls lying on the floor. Dorothy pick-a-backed Philip through the meadows and he tickled the back of her neck with a grass. He sang her a song, but all the time the pearls were at the back of his mind.
The river was low. They were able to sit on a little pebbly beach. Philip wanted to catch minnows, and then he wanted to bathe. Dorothy undressed him and he capered into the water with his tongue hanging out. He kept looking over his shoulder – he thought something queer lived in the sandmartins’ holes, something like a large spider.
He was quite right; Phoebe was not even an average swimmer, although she forced herself to go into deep water.
Under the opposite bank a slowly turning pool curved into the red clay, overhung by fresh young alders thick with leaves whose dipping branches swept the water. Phoebe swam froggily into the pool with her neck strained, her mouth tight shut, her head far too high. Suddenly she saw a fishing line lying on the surface. It was Easter’s; he was having a half day off and spending it fishing. His voice came through the green leaves flurrying Phoebe. She was dismayed.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop swimming,’ she panted in answer to his request that she would throw the broken line ashore.
Her loose swimming suit frequently slipped off her breast. She felt terrified in that clean green water….
‘He’s smiling behind those leaves,’ she thought, and put herself about.
‘Let yourself go, miss; you’d enjoy it!’ Easter called.
‘Thank you; keep your advice. Miss Phoebe can swim,’ cried Rosamund haughtily.
She had seen Easter all the time. What on earth did he hope to catch there? She was diving off a submerged rock into a narrow pool between two boulders. Each time the current brushed her softly against rocks. She had nerve, and a passionate love of flinging herself into water. Directly after her aristocratic speech she hitched up her behind and disappeared.
Over them all the sun flashed and sparkled, caught by the broken current. The meadows were bathed in the full calm flood; the trees flung clear green shadows. Behind the alders, Easter slowly lit his pipe, gathered up line and bait, and strolled away.
Philip stayed in until he began to turn blue. Dorothy dragged him out. She dried him on his sisters’ towels, gently butting her face into his thin body, hiding it in the folds.
‘Eat you… eat you… with a big wooden spoon.’
He grasped her hair.
‘Mammy, your pearls are broken.’
‘What, what? Who broke them? You naughty boy! Where are they?’
‘In the summerhouse. They came off.’
‘Are you sure? Then come along at once.’
‘Oh, you’re cross…’
‘A little. No – no, my darling.’
She kissed him again, heedlessly picked up the towel, wandered away with Philip leaning fondly against her.
Phoebe and Rosamund went and lay down in the yard on the hot cobbles. Rosamund rolled her bathing suit down to the waist, and Phoebe lay with her face turned up to the sky, her open hand pressed over her eyes. The yard was very quiet.
‘We’re ripening,’ said Rosamund, who was in a good temper.
‘Now we’re the Modest Marys again,’ she continued, while she tried to twist her hair into curls. The ‘Modest Marys’ were two young ladies of their invention who loved to take off their clothes, particularly in public places. They made a habit of lying in the yard after swimming.
Several years ago, a grumpy old Methodist groom who had worked for Matt before Easter, raised objections to this and threatened punishment. Even now an unexpected footstep would make them jerk with involuntary wariness and turn their eyes instinctively towards the harness room which was their old refuge.
‘Supposing Brant came now…’ Rosamund murmured idly.
Phoebe smiled. She was happy, untroubled. Her piteous, puzzled brow was relaxed. She began humming to herself, but broke off as her sister asked: ‘Why don’t you always lie here like you used? This is the first time this summer.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘That’s a lie,’ observed Rosamund.
Phoebe was ashamed.
‘Well, then, I shan’t answer the question.’
She lay still, assured that no Easter would appear. Presently she went in, dressed, and practised for two hours.
Matt did not have dinner with them that evening. Dorothy had quarrelled with him again. She began, as usual, to abuse him to the children: ‘The fact is, your father is a thoroughly careless, indolent man. Thorougly. He allows everybody far too much freedom. I told him I’d left my pearls in the summerhouse this afternoon, and when I went to get them they were gone. He took them out of his pocket: “Here they are; Mary picked them up,” he said, as though that was quite an ordinary thing to happen.’
‘Mary?’ Phoebe exclaimed.
‘That’s Easter’s wife apparently. I can’t bear that couple. The idea of letting her sit in the summerhouse! Your father said he’d given her permission. Is nothing mine, I’d like to know? It’s absurd, ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Eh? Disgraceful.’
She could not resist knocking on his door as she passed on her way to bed.
‘I think you’re disgraceful. It’s humiliating to have to live with such a person; absolutely degrading.’
Matt did not reply. His eyes were on the book before him.
‘Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks.’
Dorothy, her long skirts gathered in one hand, her ear inclined towards the door, awaited some sound or retort from within. The unbroken, stony patience that Matt had shown towards her for the last few weeks enraged her.
She retired to her room, flung off her clothes in a heap on the floor, wrenched a strap off her shoe, patted herself all over with stinging perfume and jumped into bed, where she dragged the clothes close round her neck as if it were winter.
She was among those people who cannot hide their anger in their minds: rage shook her bodily and vented itself in violent action. She did not remain lying in the bed for more than a couple of minutes.
‘He’s drinking,’ she exclaimed, sitting up. She sprang to the floor and ran impetuously down the passage.
‘Matt, you’re getting drunk in there by yourself. How disgusting!’
‘Why; do you want to join me?’
‘So you are.’
‘No, I’m not. Worse perhaps,’ he added to himself.
‘You’ve locked the door. I will see what you’re doing. Let me in,’ she cried, shaking the panels.
He rose from the table: ‘Very well.’
He unlocked the door. Dorothy leapt into the room like a toy termagant, her hair flying, her feet bare. Her eyes glanced here and there, flashing over Matt as if he were too contemptible to dwell on. He was standing by the uncurtained window. He moved and sat down at the table again, looking at her sideways.<
br />
‘Do you know you’re naked?’
Her nakedness roused him but not towards herself. She was soft and white with a fascinating angularity about the shoulders and hips, of which one was slightly more developed than the other. The strange charm of it used to delight him when they were first married. She abruptly dragged the curtain over the window, then, standing opposite him with the table between them, leant her two thin arms on it and sank her head between her shoulders. She stared into Matt’s strained, bright eyes; she had reason to dread that stimulated brilliance.
‘You’ve hidden it!’
She flew to the corner cupboard, flung it open and peered inside. It contained a tin of tobacco, an old calendar and a pair of broken spectacles.
She looked carefully around the bare room. Her face was flushed, so that she looked painted.
‘There, now you’ve seen,’ ejaculated Matt, suddenly rising, ‘you’ve had a good look round, now go. Now leave me alone, for I’ve had enough. Do you hear me? Go!’
‘You can’t order me about. I don’t care a twopenny damn for what you say. I won’t go until it pleases me, and before I do you’ve got to promise me something…’
‘Well?’ he said with a sort of alarming restraint, striking his knee softly with his fist. ‘Well, I can guess what that is.’
‘Yes, because you know you ought to do it,’ she shouted, quivering all over, ‘because it’s on your conscience that you haven’t kept your word. Months ago you said you’d get rid of Easter. Now you must do it. Tomorrow.’
‘Listen to me, Dorothy, and remember what I’m going to say, for I shall neither repeat it nor go back on it: I am not going to sack Easter – how dare you interrupt? Be quiet – he works satisfactorily, his wife has been ill, and they have a delicate baby. I won’t have a decent man thrown out of work for your whim.’
He grasped her shoulders.
‘Let go of me!’ she spat.
‘In a moment I’m going to put you out of the room and you’ll run bleating to Phoebe. Do as you please, of course – what do I care what she or anybody else thinks of me?’
‘Nothing, you never did,’ she screamed bitterly, and began to sob, so that the tears dripped off her chin. Matt took his hands off her shoulders. She thought she could reproach him.
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