‘Ah,’ went on the grey man. ‘It wor our Alfred scared him off, back your life. He must’a flyed ower t’valley. Tha ma’ thank thy stars as ‘e wor fun, Maggie. ‘E’d a bin froze. They a bit nesh, you know,’ he concluded to me.
‘They are,’ I answered. ‘This isn’t their country.’
‘No, it isna,’ replied Mr. Goyte. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. He looked at his daughter-in-law as she crouched, flushed and dark, before the peacock, which would lay its long blue neck for a moment along her lap. In spite of his grey moustache and thin grey hair, the elderly man had a face young and almost delicate, like a young man’s. His blue eyes twinkled with some inscrutable source of pleasure, his skin was fine and tender, his nose delicately arched. His grey hair being slightly ruffled, he had a debonair look, as of a youth who is in love.
‘We mun tell ‘im it’s come,’ he said slowly, and turning he called: ‘Alfred — Alfred! Wheer’s ter gotten to?’
Then he turned again to the group.
‘Get up then, Maggie, lass, get up wi’ thee. Tha ma’es too much o’ th’bod.’
A young man approached, wearing rough khaki and kneebreeches. He was Danish looking, broad at the loins.
‘I’s come back then,’ said the father to the son; ‘leastwise, he’s bin browt back, flyed ower the Griff Low.’
The son looked at me. He had a devil-may-care bearing, his cap on one side, his hands stuck in the front pockets of his breeches. But he said nothing.
‘Shall you come in a minute, Master,’ said the elderly woman, to me.
‘Ay, come in an’ ha’e a cup o’ tea or summat. You’ll do wi’ summat, carrin’ that bod. Come on, Maggie wench, let’s go in.’
So we went indoors, into the rather stuffy, overcrowded living-room, that was too cosy, and too warm. The son followed last, standing in the doorway. The father talked to me.
Maggie put out the tea-cups. The mother went into the dairy again.
‘Tha’lt rouse thysen up a bit again, now, Maggie,’ the father-in-law said — and then to me: ‘‘ers not bin very bright sin’ Alfred came whoam, an’ the bod flyed awee. ‘E come whoam a Wednesday night, Alfred did. But ay, you knowed, didna yer. Ay, ‘e comed ‘a Wednesday — an’ I reckon there wor a bit of a to-do between ‘em, worn’t there, Maggie?’
He twinkled maliciously to his daughter-in-law, who was flushed, brilliant and handsome.
‘Oh, be quiet, father. You’re wound up, by the sound of you,’ she said to him, as if crossly. But she could never be cross with him.
‘‘Ers got ‘er colour back this mornin’,’ continued the father-in-law slowly. ‘It’s bin heavy weather wi’ ‘er this last two days. Ay — ’er’s bin northeast sin ‘er seed you a Wednesday.’
‘Father, do stop talking. You’d wear the leg off an iron pot. I can’t think where you’ve found your tongue, all of a sudden,’ said Maggie, with caressive sharpness.
‘Ah’ve found it wheer I lost it. Aren’t goin’ ter come in an’ sit thee down, Alfred?’
But Alfred turned and disappeared.
‘‘E’s got th’ monkey on ‘is back ower this letter job,’ said the father secretly to me. ‘Mother, ‘er knows nowt about it. Lot o’ tom-foolery, isn’t it? Ay! What’s good o’ makkin’ a peck o’ trouble over what’s far enough off, an’ ned niver come no nigher. No — not a smite o’ use. That’s what I tell ‘er. ‘Er should ta’e no notice on’t. Ty, what can y’ expect.’
The mother came in again, and the talk became general. Maggie flashed her eyes at me from time to time, complacent and satisfied, moving among the men. I paid her little compliments, which she did not seem to hear. She attended to me with a kind of sinister, witch-like graciousness, her dark head ducked between her shoulders, at once humble and powerful. She was happy as a child attending to her father-in-law and to me. But there was something ominous between her eyebrows, as if a dark moth were settled there — and something ominous in her bent, hulking bearing.
She sat on a low stool by the fire, near her father-in-law. Her head was dropped, she seemed in a state of abstraction. From time to time she would suddenly recover, and look up at us, laughing and chatting. Then she would forget again. Yet in her hulked black forgetting she seemed very near to us.
The door having been opened, the peacock came slowly in, prancing calmly. He went near to her and crouched down, coiling his blue neck. She glanced at him, but almost as if she did not observe him. The bird sat silent, seeming to sleep, and the woman also sat hulked and silent, seemingly oblivious. Then once more there was a heavy step, and Alfred entered. He looked at his wife, and he looked at the peacock crouching by her. He stood large in the doorway, his hands stuck in front of him, in his breeches pockets. Nobody spoke. He turned on his heel and went out again.
I rose also to go. Maggie started as if coming to herself.
‘Must you go?’ she asked, rising and coming near to me, standing in front of me, twisting her head sideways and looking up at me. ‘Can’t you stop a bit longer? We can all be cosy today, there’s nothing to do outdoors.’ And she laughed, showing her teeth oddly. She had a long chin.
I said I must go. The peacock uncoiled and coiled again his long blue neck, as he lay on the hearth. Maggie still stood close in front of me, so that I was acutely aware of my waistcoat buttons.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you’ll come again, won’t you? Do come again.’
I promised.
‘Come to tea one day — yes, do!’
I promised — one day.
The moment I went out of her presence I ceased utterly to exist for her — as utterly as I ceased to exist for Joey. With her curious abstractedness she forgot me again immediately. I knew it as I left her. Yet she seemed almost in physical contact with me while I was with her.
The sky was all pallid again, yellowish. When I went out there was no sun; the snow was blue and cold. I hurried away down the hill, musing on Maggie. The road made a loop down the sharp face of the slope. As I went crunching over the laborious snow I became aware of a figure striding down the steep scarp to intercept me. It was a man with his hands in front of him, half stuck in his breeches pockets, and his shoulders square — a real farmer of the hills; Alfred, of course. He waited for me by the stone fence.
‘Excuse me,’ he said as I came up.
I came to a halt in front of him and looked into his sullen blue eyes. He had a certain odd haughtiness on his brows. But his blue eyes stared insolently at me.
‘Do you know anything about a letter — in French — that my wife opened — a letter of mine — ?’
‘Yes,’ said I. ‘She asked me to read it to her.’
He looked square at me. He did not know exactly how to feel.
‘What was there in it?’ he asked.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘She makes out she’s burnt it,’ he said.
‘Without showing it you?’ I asked.
He nodded slightly. He seemed to be meditating as to what line of action he should take. He wanted to know the contents of the letter: he must know: and therefore he must ask me, for evidently his wife had taunted him. At the same time, no doubt, he would like to wreak untold vengeance on my unfortunate person. So he eyed me, and I eyed him, and neither of us spoke. He did not want to repeat his request to me. And yet I only looked at him, and considered.
Suddenly he threw back his head and glanced down the valley. Then he changed his position — he was a horse-soldier. Then he looked at me confidentially.
‘She burnt the blasted thing before I saw it,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I answered slowly, ‘she doesn’t know herself what was in it.’
He continued to watch me narrowly. I grinned to myself.
‘I didn’t like to read her out what there was in it,’ I continued.
He suddenly flushed so that the veins in his neck stood out, and he stirred again uncomf
ortably.
‘The Belgian girl said her baby had been born a week ago, and that they were going to call it Alfred,’ I told him.
He met my eyes. I was grinning. He began to grin, too.
‘Good luck to her,’ he said.
‘Best of luck,’ said I.
‘And what did you tell her?’ he asked.
‘That the baby belonged to the old mother — that it was brother to your girl, who was writing to you as a friend of the family.’
He stood smiling, with the long, subtle malice of a farmer.
‘And did she take it in?’ he asked.
‘As much as she took anything else.’
He stood grinning fixedly. Then he broke into a short laugh.
‘Good for her’ he exclaimed cryptically.
And then he laughed aloud once more, evidently feeling he had won a big move in his contest with his wife.
‘What about the other woman?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Élise.’
‘Oh’ — he shifted uneasily — ’she was all right — ’
‘You’ll be getting back to her,’ I said.
He looked at me. Then he made a grimace with his mouth.
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Back your life it’s a plant.’
‘You don’t think the cher petit bébé is a little Alfred?’
‘It might be,’ he said.
‘Only might?’
‘Yes — an’ there’s lots of mites in a pound of cheese.’ He laughed boisterously but uneasily.
‘What did she say, exactly?’ he asked.
I began to repeat, as well as I could, the phrases of the letter:
‘Mon cher Alfred — Figure-toi comme je suis desolée — ’
He listened with some confusion. When I had finished all I could remember, he said:
‘They know how to pitch you out a letter, those Belgian lasses.’
‘Practice,’ said I.
‘They get plenty,’ he said.
There was a pause.
‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I’ve never got that letter, anyhow.’
The wind blew fine and keen, in the sunshine, across the snow. I blew my nose and prepared to depart.
‘And she doesn’t know anything?’ he continued, jerking his head up the hill in the direction of Tible.
‘She knows nothing but what I’ve said — that is, if she really burnt the letter.’
‘I believe she burnt it,’ he said, ‘for spite. She’s a little devil, she is. But I shall have it out with her.’ His jaw was stubborn and sullen. Then suddenly he turned to me with a new note.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you wring that b — — peacock’s neck-that b — — Joey?’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘What for?’
‘I hate the brute,’ he said. ‘I had a shot at him — ’
I laughed. He stood and mused.
‘Poor little Elise,’ he murmured.
‘Was she small — petite?’ I asked. He jerked up his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Rather tall.’
‘Taller than your wife, I suppose.’
Again he looked into my eyes. And then once more he went into a loud burst of laughter that made the still, snow-deserted valley clap again.
‘God, it’s a knockout!’ he said, thoroughly amused. Then he stood at ease, one foot out, his hands in his breeches pockets, in front of him, his head thrown back, a handsome figure of a man.
‘But I’ll do that blasted Joey in — ’ he mused.
I ran down the hill, shouting with laughter.
FANNY AND ANNIE
Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fire. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, lighting the desultory, industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.
Of course he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same, with his meeting eyebrows, his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.
She opened the door of her grimy, branch-line carriage, and began to get down her bags. The porter was nowhere, of course, but there was Harry, obscure, on the outer edge of the little crowd, missing her, of course.
‘Here! Harry!’ she called, waving her umbrella in the twilight. He hurried forward.
‘Tha’s come, has ter?’ he said, in a sort of cheerful welcome. She got down, rather flustered, and gave him a peck of a kiss.
‘Two suit-cases!’ she said.
Her soul groaned within her, as he clambered into the carriage after her bags. Up shot the fire in the twilight sky, from the great furnace behind the station. She felt the red flame go across her face. She had come back, she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned dismally. She doubted if she could bear it.
There, on the sordid little station under the furnaces, she stood, tall and distinguished, in her well-made coat and skirt and her broad grey velour hat. She held her umbrella, her bead chatelaine, and a little leather case in her grey-gloved hands, while Harry staggered out of the ugly little train with her bags.
‘There’s a trunk at the back,’ she said in her bright voice. But she was not feeling bright. The twin black cones of the iron foundry blasted their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid. The train waited cheerfully. It would wait another ten minutes. She knew it. It was all so deadly familiar.
Let us confess it at once. She was a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she love him? No. She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited — or remained single — all these years.
‘Won’t a porter carry those?’ she said, as Harry strode with his workman’s stride down the platform towards the guard’s van.
‘I can manage,’ he said.
And with her umbrella, her chatelaine, and her little leather case, she followed him.
The trunk was there.
‘We’ll get Heather’s greengrocer’s cart to fetch it up,’ he said.
‘Isn’t there a cab?’ said Fanny, knowing dismally enough that there wasn’t.
‘I’ll just put it aside o’ the penny-in-the-slot, and Heather’s greengrocers’ll fetch it about half past eight,’ he said.
He seized the box by its two handles and staggered with it across the level-crossing, bumping his legs against it as he waddled. Then he dropped it by the red sweet-meats machine.
‘Will it be safe there?’ she said.
‘Ay — safe as houses,’ he answered. He returned for the two bags. Thus laden, they started to plod up the hill, under the great long black building of the foundry. She walked beside him — workman of workmen he was, trudging with that luggage. The red lights flared over the deepening darkness. From the foundry came the horrible, slow clang, clang, clang of iron, a great noise, with an interval just long enough to make it unendurable.
Compare this with the arrival at Gloucester: the carriage for her mistress, the dog-cart for herself with the luggage; the drive out past the river, the pleasant trees of the carriage-approach; and herself sitting beside Arthur, everybody so polite to her.
She had come home — for good! Her heart nearly stopped beating as she trudged up that hideous and interminable hill, beside the laden figure. What a come-down! What a come-down! She could not take it with her usual bright cheerfulness. She knew it all too well. It is easy to bear up against the unusual, but the deadly familiarity of an old stale past!
He dumped th
e bags down under a lamp-post, for a rest. There they stood, the two of them, in the lamplight. Passers-by stared at her, and gave good-night to Harry. Her they hardly knew, she had become a stranger.
‘They’re too heavy for you, let me carry one,’ she said.
‘They begin to weigh a bit by the time you’ve gone a mile,’ he answered.
‘Let me carry the little one,’ she insisted.
‘Tha can ha’e it for a minute, if ter’s a mind,’ he said, handing over the valise.
And thus they arrived in the streets of shops of the little ugly town on top of the hill. How everybody stared at her; my word, how they stared! And the cinema was just going in, and the queues were tailing down the road to the corner. And everybody took full stock of her. ‘Night, Harry!’ shouted the fellows, in an interested voice.
However, they arrived at her aunt’s — a little sweet-shop in a side street. They ‘pinged’ the door-bell, and her aunt came running forward out of the kitchen.
‘There you are, child! Dying for a cup of tea, I’m sure. How are you?’
Fanny’s aunt kissed her, and it was all Fanny could do to refrain from bursting into tears, she felt so low. Perhaps it was her tea she wanted.
‘You’ve had a drag with that luggage,’ said Fanny’s aunt to Harry.
‘Ay — I’m not sorry to put it down,’ he said, looking at his hand which was crushed and cramped by the bag handle.
Then he departed to see about Heather’s greengrocery cart.
When Fanny sat at tea, her aunt, a grey-haired, fair-faced little woman, looked at her with an admiring heart, feeling bitterly sore for her. For Fanny was beautiful: tall, erect, finely coloured, with her delicately arched nose, her rich brown hair, her large lustrous grey eyes. A passionate woman — a woman to be afraid of. So proud, so inwardly violent! She came of a violent race.
It needed a woman to sympathize with her. Men had not the courage. Poor Fanny! She was such a lady, and so straight and magnificent. And yet everything seemed to do her down. Every time she seemed to be doomed to humiliation and disappointment, this handsome, brilliantly sensitive woman, with her nervous, overwrought laugh.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 636