Turf or Stone
Page 14
‘Nothing of the sort. It’s quite simple. I shall get a boy. Cyril Price wants to work up here. He asked me for a job months ago. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays you’ll have to put up with the presence of your old friend Easter. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays he’ll be over at Pendoig and I shall do the work here with Cyril.’
His face glowed.
‘It seems a funny arrangement,’ said Dorothy uncertainly.
‘Why?’
‘Just at this time… so much added and unnecessary expense.’
‘You must curtail your clothes and cinemas.’
Dorothy flew into long-suppressed vixenish abuse.
‘All right, all right,’ said he, sardonically, soothing. ‘Go on with your little amusements. But I don’t see why I shouldn’t have mine as well. And I’m going to.’
Dorothy looked anxiously at her husband.
‘You do such dreadful things: drinking, gambling…’ she began, throwing away her cigarette and sighing.
‘And going into strange women.’
‘Matt, don’t talk like that! If I ever find out you’ve been unfaithful it will kill me,’ she exclaimed hysterically.
He broke into a loud laugh.
‘Oh, nonsense, you’d survive.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Then if my footsteps ever deviate I must take pains to conceal them.’
He rose, lit a cigarette, and sauntered towards the door.
‘Come back,’ said Dorothy slowly, modulating her high-pitched voice, ‘I want to talk to you.’
He returned, unwillingly, and stood with his arm on the mantelpiece, looking soberly at her.
‘Do you know you have a very remarkable daughter?’ she began portentously.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I knew it long ago.’
‘Phoebe.’
‘Exactly… Phoebe, you said it, lady. God damn it, Dolly, I’m not blind or deaf; nobody’s died, either, that I know of, and you’re not in church. For heaven’s sake, don’t pull such a long face. What is it?’
She sat up, extended her thin, graceful arms, and felt in his pockets while she talked.
‘Give me a cigarette, and don’t bluster. Shall we have the lamps?’
‘No, I’m going in a minute. Do tell me what all this is about.’
‘Mother wants Phoebe to go and live with her in Clystowe. She says a school in Salus isn’t good enough for her, and she wants her to have proper music lessons. She says Phoebe’s playing and singing are really remarkable.’
‘How old is Phib exactly?’
‘She was fifteen last February.’
‘If she has a voice she shouldn’t begin to use it before she’s seventeen or eighteen.’
‘Rubbish! What do you know about it?’
‘I’ve heard your mother say so herself.’
‘Yes, but, Matt, she wants Phoebe to live with her.’
‘Well, what does Phoebe say?’
‘I haven’t asked her, and she hasn’t mentioned it.’
‘Then I’ll ask her tonight.’
‘Shall you let her go?’
‘By all means.’
He looked across the room with a strange, preoccupied stare: ‘for we aren’t good enough for her either,’ he added.
* * *
Phoebe described the adventures of Calpurnia and Cleopatra every night when Philip went to bed. Rosamund also adored to listen; the tears sometimes came into her eyes just thinking of the little animals walking on their hind legs, giving concerts and going shopping. For this reason she sat on the floor, her head bent over her knees. Phoebe lay across the bed, twisting her hands and playing with her plaits while her invention ran on: ‘Calpurnia sneered as she drove past. “Aren’t you getting wet walking about in the rain, Miss Cleopatra?” So next day, as it was still raining, Cleopatra took out her new umbrella…’
‘Oh, Phib, where did she get it?’
Phoebe laughed and said: ‘Out of a cracker. You see, Philip Kilminster had a birthday party on the lawn, with crackers, and this tiny, tiny umbrella dropped out of one and Cleopatra found it.’
‘Yes, but how did she hold it? Cleo-pat-ra hasn’t any hands.’
‘She had a subservient sparrow-servant who walked behind and carried it in one claw.’
‘A subservient sparrow!’ cried Rosamund.
‘A froggy an’ a snail and a sparrow with an umbrella!’ screamed Philip.
They all burst out laughing.
Matt stood outside, watching them through the open door. Presently Phoebe turned down the lamp and took away the hot water bottle. Matt followed her and questioned her.
‘Do you want to go, Phib?’
‘Yes,’ she said in her low, mature voice, as if she had made up her mind long before.
In the beginning of October she went. At the same time Matt put his plans into execution. Life at The Gallustree was changed, less gloomy, less high-strung, because Matt himself was active, healthy, and stirring. Mary was none the less fascinating for being easily accessible… besides, she knew instinctively how to draw a fine inner line which kept Matt continually interested. They were violently in love with each other.
Easter drank more, but for a long time it passed unnoticed, like so many of his subterranean activities. It pleased him to think of himself as a mole, silently destructive beneath the green, smooth surface. He grew haggard, lost a great deal of his former malicious gaiety. There was usually a brooding morose look on his face.
He did not want to live at Jones’ farm in Pendoig. The farmer was ostentatiously religious, and Easter was a blatant scoffer. They would never have agreed. So Matt bought a small cottage, one up and two down, which, owing to its mouldy condition and dreary situation, was going very cheap. He had the roof and spouting put in order, the windows made weather-tight and stopped up the rat holes in the floor. The place was full of rubbish, a broken wooden bedstead, a couple of rotting potato baskets, and a heap of smashed china. The rubbish was carted away to be tipped in the river, but Easter retained the bed, which he slept on the whole time he was there. It was low and wide, and mended with wire netting which sagged beneath the mattress. The rude, obscene figures of men and women had been burnt into the headboard with a hot poker and some power. They were grotesque, but not amusing. Most of them were erotic in character, but one represented two undertakers pushing a child into a coffin. A woman stood by with her arms flung out in an attitude of the most abandoned grief.
With a little money that he had in hand, Easter bought a few bits of furniture at a cottage sale, all rather weird. He had a bamboo tripod, holding a cactus in a red pot, a wooden gramophone, a rocking chair, one or two cups and saucers belonging to a really beautiful old tea set, three china plates adorned with flowers and birds, a steel fender, a milking stool, a pair of large wooden candlesticks, and an engraving in a fretwork frame called ‘Parted’. Easter liked this engraving which represented a fair, large-eyed woman leaning on a stone wall, perusing a letter while a tear flowed down her cheek. Behind her appeared a suggestion of melancholy, windswept distance; the noble trees in the foreground were represented as rocking in an autumn gale, which, however, did not disturb one sculptured fold of the maiden’s colourless robe.
The gypsy in him recognised no necessity for carpets or curtains. His bed was made up of old horse rugs and blankets; the rocking chair was uncushioned. He usually sat on the milking stool close to the high, old-fashioned grate and partly screened from the roaring draught between door and window by a projecting cupboard.
Inside the cottage looked bare, utterly comfortless, slovenly and pathetic; outside it merely seemed uninhabited.
It was a bare quarter-mile from Pendoig village, right on the main road, having no more than a few feet of loose gravel between the door and the tarred surface. Heavy traffic shook it so that even the spiders did not spin their webs among the beams, and in summer dust coated the windows until it became impossible to see in or out. The raving south-easterly
storms tilted full at them; the rain was dashed under the door. At all seasons it was infested with flies and midges, active or torpid. It was a plain whitewashed cottage, built of large, irregular stone blocks and with a bluish slate roof. The garden – such as it was – was to one side. A yard from the rear wall sprang a rocky precipice, casting its cold shadow over the cottage and half the road. In the crannies of the sandstone, which was piled in long, powerful, sloping layers, grew enormous, wet green ferns, oddly and repulsively luxuriant. The deep bed of rich red marl which the blasting of the rock had temporarily exposed, was now hidden by a weltering mass of crawling vegetation; it had killed the hedge and used the dried sticks to support its own exuberant life. It was like a great green wave breaking over the precipice, crested in autumn with silvery diaphanous old man’s beard. In wet weather, surplus water used to pour down behind the cottage, trickling through the garden into the road. One might have almost supposed that this seedy dwelling place had been constructed by a savage misanthrope, who, bearing a general grudge against human comfort, and a furious contempt for life, health, or joy, had calculated on torturing its future inhabitants with rheumatism, and sending them either twisted and crippled to their premature coffins, or driving them sore and stricken to some drier situation. Its history lent colour to the idea. I will add that anyone beholding Easter’s goings and comings, or seeing him through those same bleary panes as he sat absorbed in his reflections, with his brow knitted, his strange eyes fixed on the back of the fireplace, that person might have thought the influence persisted and gone away, thanking his stars that he was not that man and not his friend.
That which the door failed to exclude, as it did the rain, was the washing sound of the river. The road was an intermediary step between it and the crag, divided from it solely by a steep willow-fringed bank and some rusty iron railings. Occasionally the floods rose nearly to the brim; very exceptionally the road was under water right up to the doorstep. The cottage windows then afforded a heartening and invigorating view of reddish, livid waters swirling over the opposite flat meadows, with spiky thorn hedges very sparse and starved sticking up through the desolation encompassing them.
In other weathers, sheep of much the same sulky hue wandered about, picking at the brown grass, limping on three legs and coughing up their lungs like sickly tramps under a haystack at night.
The cottage and its site were altogether cheerful and picturesque. Easter never said anything. He chose to live there rather than at Pendoig. He seemed happy.
The cottage was called ‘The Hollow’. He usually referred to it as the ‘Louse Pit’.
At any rate, there he lived for two years, every blessed Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
* * *
Emily Queary being too far away for his immediate casual needs, Easter sought the acquaintance of various young women. The first was a Russian, about thirty years old, who lived with her aunt and grandmother. The latter did not approve of her connection with the groom on the grounds that she had noble blood in her veins. But Katya declared that all the English were swine, anyway, and a groom would do just as well for a lover as a certain widowed Colonel Aston, who wished her to go and live with him.
Katya was ugly-beautiful and very strange. She had a broad, straight nose flattened into her brown face, and eyes and eyebrows that slanted towards the temples. Her clothes were like sacks flopping from her shoulders; her voice had a nasal drag. She seemed to be everlastingly boiling fish in a large kettle, washing up, or roaming the fields with a book in her hand. Easter met her one autumn day standing in a shower of golden hazel leaves, staring at the red and white signs which marked a jump.
‘What are those?’
He told her. She had thought they were a kind of trap; without adding a word to her abrupt question, she scrambled through the hedge and, looking after her, he saw her squat, strong figure crossing the swell of ploughed meadow beyond, a blue blot against the dry red furrows.
She invited him to her home. He went only once. It was a small, ivy-covered house in Pendoig village. The aunt and grandmother were entertaining a crowd of casual, smiling visitors in the living room. Easter caught a glimpse of their grey, lace-covered heads as they sat at a little round table facing their visitors. He did not wish to go in, so Katya put him in her bedroom while she finished the washing up; he entertained himself by examining the Russian books which were lying in heaps on the bed and floor, and counting the dirty cups and saucers stacked on the washstand.
When finally she said farewell to Easter a few months later, Katya told him that she would have felt really affectionate towards him if, on that day, he had helped her with the washing up. When she had finished, they went for a walk in the woods. It was a cold, fresh, autumn day. A rainbow against the black clouds formed a complete and vivid arch. They passed a pond under an elm tree where a vast sow lay wallowing. The lazy creature seemed dead…. Katya laughed; the wind blew her draggled hair away from her forehead.
As they reached the outskirts of the wood it began to hail. They sheltered, and the stones bounced off their heads and rolled down their necks. Katya said: ‘I’m thirsty, Easter.’
He held out his hands to catch the hailstones, and she licked them from his palms. Then he wanted to make love to her, but she began stooping and gathering up an armload of rotten twigs. She would not stop, for the twigs positively fascinated her and she could not leave them alone. The Russians were very poor; they had to pick up wood for their fires.
When this had gone on too long for his patience, he snatched the twigs from her and threw them down. This made her furious. She ran away, and for a month would have nothing more to do with him.
But one night she came to the Louse Pit and told him she wanted him. She would not go in, so that time they went to an isolated barn. Easter was never under a roof in a gale afterwards without thinking of it. It was calm, then suddenly they heard the wind advancing like a frenzied army along the field; it struck the barn in a frantic, sustained assault, blowing through the slits in the walls until the hay rose in eddies.
Not very long afterwards the Russians moved to London and Easter heard no more of them. Katya was the one person who enjoyed the ridiculous side of Easter’s character. He had only to be absurd and she would lie back helpless with laughter, and when it was over, sit up and wipe her eyes and beg him never to look gloomy again.
When Katya was gone he found a successor in a solemnly immoral young woman who talked too much. Though handsome, she possessed too many drawbacks, and he could not subdue her. He saw her pulling up roots in a field when he was exercising the horses, a tall, strong creature with a large bosom, a ruddy face, and firm, straight legs. It had been raining, and she stood squarely with a leg in each corner of her skirt, ankle-deep in soil. She wore an overall of clear, watery green over a big coat, and a deeper green woollen cap which glowed in the fine drizzle like a jewel.
The woman, the wet field, the green plants, and her sulky face peering at him over her bent shoulder, made a vivid impression on him. There was nobody else in the field. Solitary, unamiable, she went on with her work. Easter smiled, his white teeth flashed; she scowled, he rode on.
The next day he rode that way again. She was still there, a little farther on, standing resting, her hands on her hips, puffing and blowing at a Woodbine. Easter sniffed: ‘Them cigarettes are dear at the price,’ he shouted impudently, ‘have one o’ mine?’
She grimaced. He chucked one over the hedge and she caught it. They talked until the Woodbine and the Player were both smoked out.
Her name was Lucy, and she lived at Mostone, a nearby village. She had an illegitimate son by a married man. She fairly jumped at Easter, but to hear her talk one would have thought her excessively refined and prudish. For all ‘unpleasant’ words or circumstances she invented genteel names, and all the time she spent with Easter she never shut her mouth. He simply could not understand what it was all about. Great names were mixed up in it, and favours done to Lucy,
all for artless admiration presumably.
They quarrelled and parted over the fleas in Easter’s bed. All night long Lucy used to be up and down trying to catch them. She declared she could hear them singing in the mattress, that not only was she ravenously devoured, but they danced on her back and ran deliberately, malicious, all the way up from her toes to her head. She would lie as still as she could for about ten minutes, just twitching and shuddering impressibly now and again; then, having finished as bait, up she would leap, drag off the top rugs and wetting her finger, turn huntress. She caught them as they fled beneath the pillow, as they wildly burrowed for safety; she made Easter hold the candle and burnt them under his nose. In the morning her body would be covered with great purplish blotches. He grew to hate the sight of her, and took his revenge in his own way. One night, when she allowed him no opportunity to come near her, he suddenly jumped out of bed, snatched up a girth and strapped her down among her enemies. Lucy, abandoning her affected vocabulary, lay on her back, cursing from her heart’s depths. It was the end.
The woman who came nearest to occupying a like position to Mrs Emily Queary was a virgin when he met her, and she became very fond of him. Physically, she was the least attractive woman in his life, being undergrown and slightly crooked, but the delicacy and docility she displayed towards him, endeared her to Easter. He was never quite so rough with her as with the others.
Her name was Ann Vey. Her father was a farm labourer, a widower with only one child. He was selfish, affectionate, and tyrannical in his wish that she should not marry.
Easter told her he was a single man. A week later she found out the truth, but she said outright that she was too fond of him to give him up. Night after night she returned home late. She used to hang up her old coat, clean and polish downstairs until her father ordered her to go to bed. He hit her, threatened and coaxed her. It was all the same.
Returning once at one in the morning, she found the door locked. Then she was in a helpless to-do, standing in the porch trying to break in with a hairpin. Her father spoke to her out of the window: ‘You be grown up – you be free. I’ve spoke to you time an’ agen – now you can go.’