Ross Poldark

by Winston Graham

  Dr. Halse sniffed at his handkerchief. “Well, speaking for myself, I feel that if a man is—hm—well enough to go stealing pheasants, he is—hm—well enough to take the consequences.”

  “Aye, true ’nough,” came a voice.

  Mr. Warleggan tapped on the desk. “Any further disturbance—” He turned. “You know, Mr. Poldark, I’m of a mind to agree with my friend, Dr Halse. It is no doubt a misfortune for the prisoner that he suffers these disabilities, but the law gives us no opportunity to draw fine distinctions. The degree of a man's need should not determine the degree of his honesty. Else all beggars would be thieves. And if a man is well enough to err, he is surely also well enough to be punished.”

  “Yet,” Ross said, “bearing in mind the fact that he has already suffered nearly four weeks’ imprisonment—and bearing in mind his good character and his great poverty, I cannot help but feel that in this case justice would be best served by clemency.”

  Warleggan thrust out his long upper lip. “You may feel that, Mr. Poldark, but the decision rests with the bench. There has been a marked increase in lawlessness during the last two years. This, too, is a form of lawbreaking both difficult and expensive to detect, and those who are apprehended must be prepared to bear their full share of the blame. Nor can we apportion the guilt; we can only take cognizance of the facts.” He paused. “In view, how ever, of the medical testimony and of your own testimony as to Carter's former good character, we are willing to take a more lenient view of the offence than we should otherwise have done. The prisoner is sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.”

  There was a murmur in the court, and someone muttered a word of disgust.

  Ross said: “I trust I may never have the misfortune to have the leniency of the court extended to me.”

  Dr. Halse lowered his handkerchief. “Have a care, Mr. Poldark. Such remarks are not entirely outside our jurisdiction.”

  Ross said, “Only mercy enjoys that privilege.”

  Mr. Warleggan waved a hand. “Next case.”

  “One moment,” said Dr. Halse. He leaned forward, putting his fingertips together and pursing his thin lips. He disliked this arrogant young squireen afresh every time they met: at school, in the coach, in court. He was particularly gratified at having been able to put that sharp little question about dates which had turned the other magistrates to his own way of thinking. But even so the young upstart was trying to have the last word. It would not do. “One moment, sir. We don’t come here and administer justice according to the statute book without a considerable sense of our privileges and responsibilities. As a member of the Church, sir, I feel that responsibility with especial weight. God has given to those of his ministers who are magistrates the task of tempering justice with clemency. That task I discharge to the best of my poor ability, and I think it has been so discharged now. Your insinuations to the contrary are offensive to me. I do not think you have the least idea what you are talking about.”

  “These savage laws,” Ross said, controlling his temper with the greatest difficulty, “these savage laws which you interpret without charity send a man to prison for feeding his children when they are hungry, for finding food where he can when it's denied him to earn it. The book from which you take your teaching, Dr. Halse, says that man shall not live by bread alone. These days you’re asking men to live without even bread.”

  A murmur of approval at the back of the court grew in volume.

  Mr. Warleggan rapped angrily with his hammer.

  “The case is closed, Mr. Poldark. You will kindly step down.”

  “Otherwise,” said Dr. Halse, “we will have you committed for contempt of court.”

  Ross bowed slightly. “I can only assure you, sir, that such a committal would be a reading of my inmost thoughts.”

  He left the box and pushed his way out of court amid much noise and the shouts of the usher for silence. In the narrow street outside he took a breath of the warm summer air. The deep gutter here was choked with refuse and the smell was unsavoury, but it seemed agreeable after the smell of the court. He took out a kerchief and mopped his forehead. His hand was not quite steady from the anger he was trying to control. He felt sick with disgust and disappointment.

  A long mule train was coming down the street with the heavy panniers of tin slung on each side of the animals and with a number of travel-stained miners plodding slowly along by their side. They had walked miles since dawn from some outlying district with this tin for the coinage hall, and would ride home on the backs of the weary mules.

  He waited until they were past and then was about to cross the narrow street. A hand touched his arm.

  It was Jinny, with her father, Zacky Martin, in the rear. There were pink flushes in her cheeks, showing up against the pale freckled skin.

  “I want to thank ee, sur, for what you said. Twas more’n good of you to try so ’ard for Jim. And what you said—”

  “It did no good,” Ross said. “Take her home, Zacky. She’ll be best with you.”

  “Yes, sur.”

  He left them abruptly and strode off up Coinagehall Street. To be thanked for his failure was the last straw. His disgust was partly levelled at himself for having lost his temper. Be as independent as you liked when it was your own freedom you were bartering; but at least have a greater restraint when it was someone else's. His whole attitude, he told himself, had been wrong. A good beginning, and then it had gone awry. He was the last person to make a success of such a job. He should have been obsequious, flattering to the bench. He should have upheld and praised their authority, as he had begun by doing, and at the same time have brought it home to them that a lenient sentence might be passed out of the benevolence of their hearts.

  Deep down he wondered if even the golden voice of Sheridan would have charmed them from their prey. An even better approach, he thought now, would have been to see the magistrates before the court opened and have pointed out to them how inconvenient it would be for him to be deprived of his manservant. That was the way to get a man off, not by the testimony of doctors or sentimental appeals for clemency.

  He was in Prince's Street by this time, and he turned down into the Fighting Cock's Inn. There he ordered a bottle of brandy and set about drinking it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  l

  IN THE HOT SUNSHINE OF THE EARLY SUMMER AFTERNOON, DEMELZA AND PRUDIE were thinning out the young turnips which had been sown in the lower half of the Long Field.

  Prudie was not slow in her complaints, but if Demelza heard, she did not pay any attention. She thrust and dragged rhythmically with her hoe, breaking the young weeds at the same time as she cleared spaces for the growth of the plants. Now and then she paused, hands on hips, to stare out over Hendrawna Beach. The sea was very quiet under the hot sun. Faint airs moved across from time to time, brushing dark gentle shadows over it as over the down of a bird's wing. Where the water was shallow, its surface was an ever-shifting pattern of mauve and bottle-green wrinkles.

  Sometimes she hummed a tune, for she loved warmth of any kind, especially the warmth of the sun. Much to Prudie's disapproval, she had taken off her blue bonnet and worked now in one of her blue print frocks with sleeves rolled up and bare legs and hard wooden-soled shoes.

  With a groan and a pressing of hands, as if this were a movement not often to be made, Prudie straightened her back and stood upright. With one dirty finger she lifted her bonnet and tucked away a strand of black hair.

  “I’ll be that stiff in the morning. There's no more I can do today. My hips! I’ll ’ave no easement all the night.” She plucked at the heel of one slipper, which was tucked under and was letting in a trickle of soil. “You’d best finish too. There's calves to be meated and I can’t do all—Now who be this?”

  Demelza turned and frowned into the sun.

  “Why, it's—What can he be wanting?”

  She dropped her hoe and ran across the field towards the house. “Father!” she called.

  Tom Carn
e saw her and stopped. She ran up to him. Since his last visit when he had announced his coming marriage her feelings for him had changed. The memory of his ill treatment was faded, and now that there was no point at issue between them she was willing to let bygones be bygones and to offer him affection.

  He stood there with his round hat on the back of his head, feet planted stolidly apart, and allowed Demelza to kiss the prickles of his black beard. She noticed at once that his eyes were less bloodshot and that he was dressed in respectable clothes: a jacket of coarse grey cloth, a grey waistcoat, with thick trousers turned up some inches at the bottoms, showing brown worsted stockings and heavy shoes with bright brass clasps. She had forgotten that the Widow Chegwidden had a long purse.

  “Well, dattur,” he said, “so you be still ’ere.”

  She nodded. “And happy too. Hope you’re the same.”

  He pursed his lips. “That's as may be. Is there any place we can talk, maid?”

  “There's no one can hear us here,” she answered. “ ’Cept the crows and they’re not interested.”

  At this he frowned and stared across at the house, lying close and warm in the sun.

  “I don’t know as ’tis any place for a dattur o’ mine,” he said harshly. “I don’t know ’tall. I bin much troubled about ee.”

  She laughed. “What's to do wi’ a dattur of yourn?” She was lapsing into the broader speech she had begun to lose. “And how's Luke and Samuel and William and John and Bobbie and Drake?”

  “Brave enough. ’Tis not o’ they I’m thinking.” Tom Carne shifted his position and took up an even firmer one. The gentle breeze just stirred his whiskers. “Now look ee here, Demelza, I’ve walked all this way to see ee, an’ I’ve come to ask ee to come home. I’ve come to see Cap’n Poldark to explain why.”

  As he spoke she had a feeling as if something were freezing inside her. The newfound daughterly affection would be among the first things to go if all this had to be thrashed out again. Surely it wouldn’t have to be. But this was a new and more reasonable father than she had known before. He was not blustering or shouting or even ordinarily drunk. She shifted to leeward of him to see if she could catch any smell of spirits. He would be more dangerous if one could not so easily put him in the wrong.

  “Cap’n Poldark's in to Truro. But I’ve told ee afore. I want to stay here. And what about… how is she… the Wid… your—”

  “Well-a-fine. ’Tis she in part do feel you be betterer wi’ we than ’ere in this house exposed to all the temptations o’ the world, the flesh, and the devil. You’re but sixteen yet—”

  “Seventeen.”

  “No matter. You’re too young to be wi’out guidance.” Carne thrust out his bottom lip. “Do ee ever go to church or meetin’ house?”

  “Not so often.”

  “Mebbe if you coined back to us you’d be saved. Baptized in the Holy Ghost.”

  Demelza's eyes widened. “What's to do? What's the change in ee, Father?”

  Tom Carne met his daughter's eyes defiantly.

  “When you left me, I was in the darkness and the shadow o’ death. I was the servant o’ the devil and was iniquitous and a drunkard. Last year I was convinced o’ sin under Mr. Dimmick. Now I am a noo man altogether.”

  “Oh,” said Demelza. So the Widow Chegwidden had been successful after all. She had underrated the Widow Chegwidden. But perhaps indeed it was more than the widow. It would need Something Awful to have changed the man she knew.

  “The Lord,” said Tom Carne, “hath brought me out of a horrible pit of mire an’ clay, and set my feet ’pon a rock and hath put a new song in my mouth. There's no more drinkings and living in sin, Dattur. We d’ live a good life an’ we’d be willing to welcome ee back. Tis your natural place in the world.”

  Demelza stared a moment at her father's flushed face, then looked down bleakly at her shoes.

  Tom Carne waited. “Well, maid?”

  “It's mortal kind of you, Fathur. I’m that glad there's been a change. But I been here so long now that this is my home. It would seem like leaving home to come back wi’ you. I learned all ’bout farming here and everything. I’m part of the house. They’d not be able to get along without me. They need me, not you. One day I’ll walk over and see ee… you an’ the boys and all. But you don’t need me. You got she to look after you. There's nought I can do ’cept eat your food.”

  “Oh yes there is.” Carne stared over the horizon. “The Lord has blessed our union. Nellie is six months forward an’ will be delivered in August month. ’Tis your proper place and your bounden duty to come ’ome and look after us.”

  Demelza began to feel that she was caught in a trap which was only just beginning to show its teeth.

  There was silence. A curlew had come down in the field and was taking its little run forward, crested head down, and uttering its sad “pee-wit” sound. She looked across at Prudie, who had gathered up her tools and was ambling untidily towards the house. She stared at the field of turnips, half thinned out, the other half to do. Her eyes went across the sand and the sand hills to the cliff where two huts were being built and men moved like ants on the summer skyline. Wheal Leisure.

  She couldn’t leave this. Not for anything. She had come to look upon it all, quick and dead, all things alike, as owned by it and owning. She was fiercely attached to it. And of course to Ross. If this were anything for him she was being asked to do it would be different, but instead she was expected to desert him. Not until she came here had she lived at all. Though she did not consciously reason so, all the early part of her life was like a dark prenatal nightmare, thought and imagined and feared rather than suffered.

  “Where's Cap’n Poldark?” Tom Carne said, his voice having hardened again at her silence. “I come to see him. I got to explain and then ’e’ll understand. There’ll be no call for wrastling this time.”

  That was true. Ross would not stop her going. He might even expect it of her.

  “He's from home,” she said bluntly. “ ’E’ll not be back till dark.”

  Carne moved round to meet her gaze, as in the old days he had sidled round to grip an opponent.

  “You can’t do nothing ’bout un. You got to come.”

  She looked at him. She saw for the first time how coarse and common he really was. His cheeks sagged and his nose was crossed with tiny red veins. But then all the gentlemen were not like the one she served.

  “You can’t expect me to say ‘yes,’ just like that and come away, after all these years. I got to see Cap’n Ross. He engaged me by the year. I’ll see what he says and leave you know.” That was it. Get him off the farm before Ross came back, get him away and allow herself time to think.

  Tom Carne was eyeing his daughter in return, keenly, with a tinge of suspicion. Only now did he take in the full change in her, the way she had advanced, matured, grown to a woman's shape. He was not a man to mince matters.

  “Is there any sin twixt you and Poldark?” he demanded in a low sharp voice, in the old voice of old Tom Carne.

  “Sin?” said Demelza.

  “Aye. Don’t look so innocent.”

  Her mouth tightened. The instinct of an outgrown fear saved him from a reply he would not quite have expected from a daughter's lips—even though they were words she had learned from him.

  “There's nought twixt us except what should be between master and servant. But you did ought to know I’m hired by the year. I can’t walk out without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “There's talk about you,” he said. “Talk that comes so far as Illuggan. Whether us all lies or no, tedn’t right for a young girl to be mixed up in such talk.”

  “It's nothing to do wi’ me what folks say.”

  “That's as may be. But I don’t want for a dattur o’ mine to be mingled up in such talk. When will he be home?”

  “Not till nightfall, I say. He's gone to Truro.”

  “Well, ’tis a long way for me to walk ’ere again. Tell un what I’v
e telled you and then come you over to Illuggan. If you’re not back by the end of the week, I’ll come over again. If ’tis Cap’n Poldark putting obstacles, I’ll talk un over with ’im.”

  Tom Carne hitched up his trousers and fingered the buckle of his belt. Demelza turned and walked slowly towards the house, and he followed.

  “After all,” he said on a more palliative note, “I’m not asking more’n any dattur would do.”

  “No,” she said. (Buckle end of a strap when it suited him; sores on her back, ribs you could count, dirt and crawlers; not more than any daughter would do!)

  As they reached the house Jud Paynter came out with a bucket of water. He raised his bald eyebrows at the sight of the other man.

  Tom Carne said: “Where's your master?”

  Jud stopped and set down his bucket and eyed Carne and spat. “Over to Truro.”

  “What time will ’e be home?”

  Demelza held her breath. Jud shook his head. “Tonight mebbe. Or tomorrow.”

  Carne grunted and walked on. At the front of the house he sat on the seat and took off his boot. Complaining of his corns, he began to press the boot into a more comfort able shape. Demelza could have screamed at him. Jud had told the truth as far as he knew it. But Ross had told her he expected to be back for supper at six. It was now after five.

  Tom Carne began to tell her about her brothers. The five eldest were all at work in mines—or had been until two were put off when Wheal Virgin closed. The youngest, Drake, was starting as forge boy at a wheelwright's next week. John and Bobbie were both saved and had joined the society, and even Drake nearly always went to the meetings, although he was too young to be admitted. Only Samuel was erring. His conviction had worn away and the Lord had not seen fit to send him mercy. It was to be hoped that when she, Demelza, came back among them, she would soon lay hold of the blessing.

  At another time she would have found quiet fun in his new talk, which for all its glibness fitted him as ill as a Sunday suit. She took in the news of her brothers, of whom she was as fond as they had allowed her to be. But above all was the need to see him gone. She could have kicked him to move his great slow body, fallen on him with her nails and drawn red scratches across his coarse complacent face. Even when he left she didn’t know what was to be done. But at least she would have time to think. She would have time. But if he stayed here talking all day until Ross came home, then Ross would hear of it tonight and that would be the end. Ross would invite her father to sleep here and bundle them off in the morning.