The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  Hilda looked up and met his glance. ‘My!’ she said, ‘that is a good job!’

  He smiled, not at the simplicity of her words, but with a sudden unprecedented pleasure in the sight of her. ‘It’s that right enough,’ he said.

  Without conscious thought he moved a step forward. She stood up to meet him, a faint shy smile dawning in her face.

  ‘I’m ever so glad, Mr Elderbrook!’

  ‘Yes, Hilda, I know you are,’ he said.

  His hands touched her arms, and the contact surprised him, checked him. For an instant he was at a loss, afraid of his unformulated wish. But Hilda, resolving the doubt, with a ravishing simplicity lifted her mouth to be kissed.

  Her kiss was generous, self-forgetful. Yet there was something in it that made his heart beat very fast, not with desire only, but with fear of a danger only dimly surmised. There was that in her kiss to which it was impossible that he should respond in half measure. But when it was over and he drew back to look at her, the smile she met him with was a smile of pure happiness and he was reassured, feeling dimly that it embraced in the large ambit of its benevolence not only himself but the happiness he had brought with him. In the moment of thinking I mustn’t do that again he kissed her a second time and her arms came firmly about him, constraining him to stay with her. Nor was it possible now that he should do otherwise. They were surprised into a mutual surrender by the discovery of strangeness and delight where there had been nothing but the bond of a common purpose.

  With desire fulfilled they lay together at peace, saying no word. Matthew drifted away on a dreaming tide and was suddenly asleep. He fell steeply, like a shot bird, into a dark pool of satisfaction, where he was and was not.

  Not for many months had he had deep sleep. Yet a stirring at his side brought him back to the surface.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  The word ‘dreadful’ had caught at his emerging consciousness.

  Disengaging herself from his arm, Hilda slipped off the bed.

  ‘What’s dreadful?’ he asked drowsily.

  ‘Me lying here,’ she said, ‘when there’s work to do.’

  ‘Is it late? I fell asleep.’

  Busy with her clothes Hilda said lightly: ‘Late enough I’ll be bound.’

  ‘Did you?’ he asked.

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘Did you go to sleep?’

  ‘Oh … I dunno.’ She stopped what she was going to say, with an earnest quick glance in his direction: ‘Hadn’t you better see what’s going on outside? Where Patchett is, and Dick?’

  ‘Suppose I’d better,’ he said, getting up.

  She stood at the window, looking out, but careful not to be seen from outside. ‘I like that tree,’ she said. ‘I always have, somehow.’

  ‘Tree?’

  ‘The beech. I can hear it when I’m in bed. Like the sea it is, in a wind.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Matthew. ‘There’s a story about that tree. Tell you sometime. Not now,’ he added, seeing her hesitate.

  ‘I’ll be going down then,’ said Hilda. ‘Expect you could do with a cup of tea.’ She paused to say, with her fingers on the latch: ‘It’s lovely about Mrs Elderbrook. Lovely it is.’

  She was back in the moment of first hearing that good news. Nothing that had happened since then was to make any difference.

  § 3

  The long drought went on into October. In patches the swede crop, from lack of rain, was blue with blight. The pastures were browner than Matthew had ever seen them. With cotton cake to eke out the meagre grazing the cows did well enough, but their milk was dwindling. Indeed there was plenty to shake one’s head over, without looking ahead for trouble. The state of the crops, the turn of the season, these were the things that should occupy a man’s mind. Not illness. Not problems of the far future. Not the curve of a girl’s thigh under the hand. The farm, this farm that had been his father’s before him, this was the common sense of Matthew’s existence, the true logic by which the days of his life were held together and given a continuing pattern; and he would have asked nothing better than that his own sons should carry it on after him. But his mind, in its infrequent moments of general reflection, jibbed at that fence. Sons he had none, nor ever would have. That knowledge, though seldom squarely faced, made the beginning of an emptiness, a disregarded void. But that was nothing, or nothing much. The main thing was that the work went on, and life went on. He was lucky in having good men to work for him. Yes, and to work with him, for he had never forgotten his father’s precept, and would remain till the end a working farmer, not a looker-on. Busy with today and tomorrow he did not pause to contemplate the strangeness of this place he had been born in, compared with what it had been in his father’s day: the house that had been once so full of life had now more than half its rooms unused. Enough that Ann was mending, and would soon be back. Then everything would fall into place again.

  As for the girl Hilda, she was no problem at all. He would not admit that what had happened made any difference to anything. It was good, it was done, there was an end of it. Up to a point he was right in this diagnosis. He was still weary for the return of Ann. The house wasn’t the same without her, and he wanted it to be the same. Between himself and the girl everything was unspoken, and this especially: they were in nothing more at one than in the tacit assumption that nothing was altered. The perception of this fact gave him great ease, kept all danger, if danger there was, out of sight. Hilda continued to be her normal, ordinary, placid self, endlessly occupied with the affairs of house and dairy. Quite evidently it did not occur to her to be other than she had always been, or to expect from him, in the chance daily encounters, anything beyond the goodhumoured taciturn civility she had always had. There were moments when he marvelled at her utter unselfconsciousness, while gratefully approving it. It was almost possible to believe that she had forgotten an episode which he knew to have been unique in her experience. One thing was certain, he told himself next morning, and at intervals throughout the day: there’s no harm done, but it mustn’t happen again because … his thoughts halted there, instinctively refraining from a reason, for the reason ran deeper than thought, a dark glittering tide, and it carried him, against his half-hearted resolve, towards what itself forbad. It mustn’t happen again, but how could it not happen, the bridge once crossed? Hilda did nothing to make a second approach easy, and she received it at first dumbly, unrespondingly, as if giving him time to think again, to escape, to let her escape. Her mind was hard to read: she herself could not have read it and did not try. Her resistance was momentary, not long enough sustained to make the surrender seem important; and she surrendered with a sort of shrug, as if to point its unimportance. In the giving and receiving of love she became a new person, speechless and radiant, carried beyond time and space; but the moment gone she was at once her ordinary practical self again, homely and matter-of-fact, with a humorous edge to her tongue. Her simple cheerfulness, which seemed to take everything in its stride, reassured Matthew and made him like her the more. There was no word of love between them: such a word would have shaken him with a sense of disloyalty: and because their relationship was unspoken it did not exist. There was no ghost, no invisible third, except once when Hilda said thoughtfully: ‘Tisn’t as if we was hurting anyone, is it?’ Matthew curtly agreed, brushing the subject away. ‘And we’re not going to,’ said Hilda. ‘See?’ It was both a promise and a warning, consistent with all that was left unsaid. What happened was nothing, implied no sequel. What happened had not happened, if one chose to think so.

  Nothing could have suited Matthew better. He had neither time nor inclination for afterthoughts. Since harvest many loads of manure had been carted to the fields, and dumped there, ready to be spread. Dick Edgcombe and Willy Hughes were cleaning ditches and trimming hedges: they could be depended on to make a good job of it. Quite a bit of the barley had already been threshed, but though there was a lot of straw the cast was light and the grain was fetching an indiffer
ent price. The need for rain was in everybody’s mind: people were tired of talking of it, yet could scarcely speak at all without dragging it in.

  ‘This dry,’ said Walter Patchett, once more stating the obvious, ‘he’s going on too long, master.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Matthew. ‘He is that.’ Though the war was well over, and the younger men were back again, old Patchett—old in his early sixties—was still Matthew’s mainstay when it came to talking things over. ‘The ground’s like iron, Walter.’

  ‘Poor look-out for ploughing,’ said Patchett, ‘let alone root crops. Swedes won’t hardly be worth the pulling, by the look of ‘em.’

  Matthew nodded. His glance travelled along the swede rows, but his thoughts were on his winter sowings.

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said, after a comfortable silence.

  ‘Like iron it is, said Patchett, reading his thoughts, ‘and that’s a true word. Down Morton’s place they tried ploughing the Long Severals last week, he says. Jack Rounce tell me, him as works along there. Shares wouldn’t take it at all, he says. Couldn’t get their teeth in it. Just threw up great gobbets, he says, hard as stone. And a fine powdery dust throwing up, he says, fit to choke you.’

  ‘For all that,’ said Matthew, with a touch of grimness, ‘I mean to plough the bean-stubble this week, even if I have to get ‘em to bring a steam plough to it.’

  ‘Nay, you’d never have one of them here, Muster Elderbrook. By the time you get un going, look, we’ll have rainfall.’

  ‘Wish we could, Walter. I shouldn’t complain.’

  ‘Come to think, I ain’t seen steam ploughs hereabouts for a pretty long time. Reckon they was more trouble than worth.’

  ‘We had one come here once on a time,’ said Matthew, ‘in my father’s day. But never again. They do the job all right, but they want room, and it adds up to a lot of money on a small acreage.’

  Patchett grunted contentedly, and moved off to the job in hand, leaving Matthew to his thoughts. That very night there was a sprinkling of rain, but no more. Not enough to notice, and not enough to make any difference, thought Matthew; but next morning he got Edgcombe on to ploughing the bean-stubble, as he had said. He himself was in at the start, to lend a hand with the horses. He was curious and anxious to see if the job could be done. He argued that Morton’s Long Severals, on account of its situation and slope, was a dry stretch at the best of times, and that he himself might have better luck on low-lying ground. He decided that three horses would not be one too many, and Dick Edgcombe agreed with him. Dick was quite his old self again, in spite of all that the army had done to him. He had got over his hankering for a town job and was settled again into his old way of life. Seeing his easy country gait, his taciturn good temper, his patient handling of the horses, Matthew recalled with astonishment a day in the middle of the war when Dick, home on leave, called to pay his respects: a different person from the old Dick, a person very conscious both of himself and of his uniform. All that was past, and Dick, in his silent deliberate fashion, seemed as keen to plough the bean-stubble, for the sowing of winter oats, as Matthew was to have it done.

  Molly was the leader, a big black mare, tried and trusted. Matthew put a hand on her head, while Dick took a hold on the plough handles.

  ‘Do your best, old girl,’ said Matthew. ‘Off we go then!’

  There were several abortive beginnings. It was impossible at first to make any depth. The shares dragged lightly over the ground, merely scratching the surface. So they stopped, and made a new start. Not much better, but a little. They managed one length with tolerable success, but at the turn their troubles started again. The horses were already in a sweat.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ said Matthew, changing places with Dick. ‘Kimmup, Molly!’ Bringing the team round in a ragged arc, they were off again, on the return journey. ‘We’re managing, Dick!’ shouted Matthew cheerfully. ‘We’re pulling it off, boy!’ he cried, quite in his father’s manner. And at the end of the furrow master and man exchanged triumphant grins, as they paused for the turn. ‘It’s like trying to plough up Market Square,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dick. ‘If they want any more cobbles, we can tell ‘em where to come.’

  At the next pause, to rest the horses, both men noticed that there was someone watching them from the shadow of the hedge. Neither had seen the stranger come into the field.

  ‘Looks like the fellow that calls himself Caidster,’ Dick Edgcome remarked incuriously.

  ‘Isn’t it his right name then?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘Never know, with his sort. Here today and gone tomorrow, with whatever they can pick up.’

  Knowing himself observed, Caidster came strolling across to where they stood discussing him.

  ‘Back again, Mr Elderbrook. Bad penny, eh?’

  There was more than a hint of insolence in the way he took his welcome for granted. A moment earlier Matthew had been wondering why everyone conspired to give this stray dog a bad name, but now he felt differently. Stray he was, seemingly, a creature without roots or responsibilities. There was a down-at-heel look about him, for all his jaunty air.

  ‘Well?’ said Matthew. ‘What do you want here?’

  He spoke with unaccustomed roughness; but the question was a natural one, and he was surprised, even startled, to see a sudden glint of malice in the greeny grinning eyes that stared so boldly into his.

  ‘I’d like a job, master.’

  The sneer in the word master did not escape Matthew, but though his dander was rising, as they said in these parts, he controlled himself and answered without heat. When Patchett called him master it was no more than an old country habit, a mode of civility implying no subservience but only such respect as any man may pay to another. But on the tongue of this ex-hireling who called himself Caidster it had a flavour both oily and satirical.

  ‘Nothing for you here,’ said Matthew curtly. ‘I’ve all the help I need.’

  The fellow’s grin fixed itself on distance. ‘Mebbe so, master. But another pair of hands’ll come in useful. I worked for you at harvest. Didn’t I now?’

  ‘It’s not harvest now,’ said Matthew. ‘Come along, Dick.’

  He put his hands on the plough again. Dick went to the head of the team.

  ‘You and me,’ said Caidster softly, ‘we’ll have a quiet talk sometime. See?’

  Matthew gave him a sharp astonished look. ‘Be off with you, man!’ he said. ‘I’ve told you there’s nothing doing here. Kimmup, Molly! Good girl!’

  § 4

  FOR years now the three brothers had been virtually strangers. There was no shadow of ill feeling among them, but each in the mind of the others (for they scarcely ever met) was a more or less unknown character having a merely nominal connection with the brother they had grown up with. After the first scattering of the sons their mother had been the chief link between them; and at Emily’s death it fell to young Nancy, so long as she remained at Upmarden, to sustain the maternal tradition by collecting and re-distributing the family news. Guy had been the least responsive to her efforts: ‘as soon get blood from a stone’, she was in the habit of saying, and with a certain tiresome iteration. But Felix was not much better; nor perhaps would Matthew have been; for family letter-writing, after all, was a woman’s job. Nancy nowadays had concerns of her own to occupy her. Her Fred had proved to be both ardent and industrious; his business prospered; and Nancy, making up for the years that the locust had eaten, was already the happy mother of four small children. The family dissolution was complete.

  In a world remote from Matthew, whose existence he seldom had occasion to remember, and infinitely remote from Guy, with whom he seemed to have lost touch altogether, Felix was now engaged in another kind of warfare than that from which he had been recently released. The year of the Versailles Peace Conference found him in one of the dingier neighbourhoods of East London, living and working, preaching a little but listening more, among people whose squalor was their native element. Fr
om Minsterbourne to Rattlebone Road was a long step; but in Hemner’s view, which Felix fully shared, the journey was well worth making. Soap-and-water austerity combined with hard work and high thinking was one thing: this new discipline was quite another. He had travelled a long way indeed; the ‘darkest Africa’ Arthur Surrey had desired for him could be scarcely further from Minsterbourne’s placid industry than was this huddle of mean streets in which, for a while, he had pitched his tent. That, when he stopped to look, was how he saw himself, and how he saw his fellow-man: as a pilgrim, moving across the dim-lit stage of mortal life from darkness to darkness, from the darkness of non-being to that ultimate darkness which was none other, faith asserted, than eternal light, too intense for our seeing. The routine of his work was the christening, marrying, and burying of his parishioners, and visiting the sick and the dying: the last a frequent duty, for in this densely populated district illness was plentiful and death no stranger. He had seen death often enough before, and in more violent shape. Many an unknown warrior had confided to him the last pitiful desires of the heart; and many others, too far gone for speaking, had heard the diminishing sound of his voice praying ‘that at the last we may come to his eternal joy’. At such moments, as on all occasions of prayer, Felix did not attempt to improve on the traditional forms, nor study to astonish heaven with thoughts of his own. He was content to be an instrument, an echo, or at most a messenger, knowing moreover that to a believing heart, or one wishing to believe, the music of familiar words had more power of comfort than anything he could devise. And since at the last every man is a child, whether aloof in his forlornness or groping for a hand in the dark, even a nursery rhyme, Felix believed, would be of more avail than pious exhortation.