This mysterious euphoria had first come to her soon after her mother’s death, when she had indeed believed herself to be lost. Fits of uncontrollable weeping and sobbing took her. By no effort could she check them although everybody scolded her, pointing out that her father’s loss was infinitely more severe and that she should endeavour to comfort him. She grew very thin and began to cough. A physician, brought from Severnton, talked of a decline. A change of scene and sea air were recommended.
She was despatched on a visit to an old school friend at Clifton. After two months she was thinner than ever. Her father then took her for a ramble to the Cheddar Gorge, a wonder of nature which he had always wished to visit. It was interesting and awful, but Jenny still wept, perhaps because it provided no sea air.
Thence they went to explore the Somerset coast and took a fancy to the great wooded cliffs east of Countisbury where the streams of Exmoor plunge through narrow gullies into the sea. Wandering in one of them Dr. Newbolt fell into conversation with a stranger, a lodger at a farm nearby, and Jenny went on down the ravine by herself. Sometimes the stream vanished beneath curved and twisted rocks, although she could always hear it falling, falling, towards the black sea floor far below.
Presently she could go no further. She sat down and fell into so violent a fit of weeping that she thought her lungs must burst. The spasm relaxed suddenly. After a period of complete exhaustion she looked about her, and discovered that she was in Xamdu.
This was a name which she and Romilly had formerly given to the house in the river at Corston. But it had an earlier association. The first Xamdu had been suggested by a screen belonging to Romilly’s grandmother. A landscape with no distances went up and up from the bottom to the top. Nothing was near. Nothing was far away. All objects were the same size. A belt of clouds lay across it at intervals, and then it continued as before. Trees writhed and rocks curved over a stream falling for ever down to a flat grey sea where people in round hats were fishing in a boat like a basket. Other people wandered in the gorge or sat cross-legged looking pensively at the stream.
In those early days she and Romilly had tried to believe it possible that they might, by some spell or charm, get into that place. Corston itself only became Xamdu when they grew old enough to relinquish that first wild hope. But now, without effort, she was there.
A loud hallooing from above assailed her ears but she took no notice of it at all. She sat where she was. She was in Xamdu and her father, shouting for her, was on some other planet. Presently he came scrambling down with his new friend, looking as near to being angry as his habitual good humour allowed. When he saw Jenny, however, his expression altered. Both men looked at her very oddly. She rose to greet them, announcing placidly that this was Xamdu.
Hastily they agreed. Of course it was Xamdu, but would she not come back with them to the carriage? Between them they pushed and pulled her up the steep slope. She saw that they thought her mad and began to explain what she meant, describing the screen at Corston. The stranger exclaimed that he knew exactly what she meant. He had seen such landscapes himself in Eastern screens. But why did she call it Xamdu?
‘Ah!’ said her father, ‘she has got that name from a book of mine. A great favourite. I am seldom without it; I have it in the carriage with me up above.’
He explained about the copy he had made from an old folio, and how a printer fellow in Severnton had made a very neat affair of it. The stranger expressed a strong desire to read it. Since they were now on a clear path they left Jenny to her own devices and, all the way back to the carriage, discussed strange landscapes, alligator holes in North Carolina, and wonders of that sort. When they reached the carriage her father pressed the loan of his book upon the other, promising to call for it later. They parted with the greatest cordiality.
As soon as they had driven off, however, Jenny got the severest scolding she had ever heard her father give to anyone. Her bellowing and bawling, down in that ravine, he said, must have been audible from Minehead to Lynmouth. The stranger had evidently believed her to be mad. She must promise never so to expose herself again. And that had been the last of her wailing fits.
Dr. Newbolt put down the improvement of her spirits to the sea air and took her on a very rough trip to Lundy Island in order to increase the dose. But he never got back his book. He called on his new acquaintance once, taking with him all the particulars and terms of the Severnton printer, and thought that the fellow seemed to be a good deal less cordial, although he had expressly asked for these particulars. He made no effort to conceal the fact that the visit was unwelcome and a bore, and stared so glassily that at last he drove the intruder away.
Shortly afterward the Newbolts got news of an accident to one of the children at the Parsonage and set off for home in a hurry, forgetting the book until they had gone too far to return for it. At the time this oversight gave Dr. Newbolt little uneasiness, even though he had forgotten the borrower’s name. His own bookplate was on the title page and he was confident that his property would be returned in due course. It never was — an omission which deeply shocked him. He would seldom allow that there could be any really wicked people in the world but he now came to the conclusion that there must be one — the scoundrel who had got his book.
Jenny continued to enjoy, at intervals, all the ecstasy of Xamdu. She came to recognise it, not as a place but as a state of being into which she passed occasionally. On these excursions time signified little and facts were altered. All was reshaped and re-interpreted according to another kind of perception, suddenly bestowed and as suddenly withdrawn. She felt it to be a better and a truer world and she still gave to it the name devised by herself and Romilly for a fancied existence which they had hoped to discover. They had been right so to hope. Its felicities were absolute. A green leaf could satisfy her completely by being simply itself — a green leaf. There was no gulf between promise and fulfilment, and every object perceived carried its own clear meaning.
She also came to realise that these moments of exaltation must be concealed. The values, judgements, and motives then prevailing with her would have been thought inexcusably singular by everybody in Stretton Courtenay. Her good was not their good, her necessities not theirs. They would say that nobody had any business to feel as she did until they had gone to Heaven and that, even there, one ought to feel differently. For her own comfort, and for the comfort of those about her, she kept her heretical notions to herself.
Since those about her seldom paid her any attention she had been pretty safe until Venetia came home from school. Concealment thereafter became more difficult. Venetia’s sharp eyes missed nothing and she soon spied enough to disturb Jenny’s security. With no one else did Venetia give rein to her temper. When displeased she generally preserved her composure, although she saw to it that the culprit was paid out sooner or later. Only with Jenny did she fail in self-command, as though the close proximity of a creature so unlike herself was more than she could bear. An odd kind of conflict had sprung up between them — all vindictive attack on Venetia’s side, and on Jenny’s a passive but effective withdrawal.
On one occasion, when irritated because Jenny had forgotten to mend a torn flounce for her, Venetia struck home.
‘I should have known better than to expect it. You have been in one of your transports.’
‘What … what do you mean?’
‘You know very well what I mean, although you try to hide it. You depart into the clouds, and must pass an agreeable time there, for you don’t answer one, and never know what o’clock it is, and behave generally as though you were half-witted.’
‘I might sometimes be a little absent …’ said Jenny, beginning to tremble.
‘Completely absent!’
‘But this flounce … I think it’s the first time I ever …’
‘Oh, I don’t say that your … absences … cause anybody much inconvenience. We get on very well without you. We ain’t so much dependent on you for our comfort as we say we a
re. But it’s the thing to say, you know, about any woman of thirty who has not got a husband: What would her family do without her? It’s for your own sake you’d better be careful. It doesn’t do to be so very eccentric.’
Jenny was in part shielded from this onslaught by the fact that self-consequence, which might have been wounded, had, in her case, long been mortified out of existence. She did not mind attacks upon her vanity; she had none. But she took warning and kept out of Venetia’s way when seized by a transport. If possible she invented some errand on the far side of the parish and vanished for a time.
She now sat smiling in the wood, looking about her at the clouds and the trees, and listening to the sound of an axe in a distant clearing. She felt herself to be a part of it, as though she were one instrument in some great orchestra.
When she returned to the Parsonage she slipped in by the kitchen door. She put some apples, some lumps of coarse brown sugar, a piece of bacon, some bread and cheese, and a book or two into a large bag. Before slipping out again she told the cook that she must go over to Corston Common and that she might be away for some time.
2
THERE WAS A farm called Millthorne, above Corston, on the edge of that region which had come to be known as ‘the black fields.’ Crowther, the farmer, was said to be hard with his people. Giles would have got rid of him, had it not been for the difficulty of finding another tenant. Millthorne lay too near to the smoke, which was thought to damage the crops.
A listless line of women and children were hoeing a field that Saturday. When noon struck from Stretton Church they threw down their hoes and trooped to a shady spot where they had left their dinner. All went save one, who turned and went slowly across the field to a gate on the farther side of it. He had seen Miss Jenny leaning on the gate, watching him, and hoped that she might have brought him something to eat. She was waiting for him under a hedge, on the other side of the gate.
His name was Dickie Cottar and he was nine years old. He lived with his grandmother in a tumbledown cottage belonging to Crowther. Of his mother, who had left the country soon after his birth, nobody had heard news for a long time. Amongst the dozen fathers bestowed upon him by local gossip, one was always mentioned in undertones. Romilly, during the interval between his breach with Jenny and the final quarrel with his father, had taken to keeping very disreputable company. There was, however, some reluctance to believe the child his. Bessie Cottar, at one time barmaid in an alehouse at Slane St. Mary’s, a rendezvous frequented by all the young rakes of the neighbourhood, gave herself airs enough without that. The Brandons themselves ignored the story.
For Jenny the child had a strong affinity with her playmate of twenty years back, whom she remembered, perhaps, better than anyone else did. Romilly had been taller and sturdier, he had lived better, but in all else the likeness was astonishing. She had come, in a way, to think of the child as her own. She should have been his mother; she would have been, had she and Romilly married when they planned.
He had been about three years old when she first caught sight of him, peeping at her from under a bed in his grandmother’s hovel. That look had taken her back to a very early memory. An infant herself, she had trotted behind her mother on a visit to the Priors. They were taken to a great room where Mrs. Brandon lay in and where a number of tall ladies bent over a cradle containing the new-born Sophy. Jenny had spied a pair of bright eyes looking at her from under the bed flounces; little Romilly had crept there into hiding. She crept in beside him and they lay in that great dark cavern, listening to the ladies talking and waiting for the delightful moment when they should be missed. It had been the first of their joint escapades. She had later been whipped for it. Romilly had not — a distinction which they both thought very natural.
Romilly! she thought, meeting the eyes of the little creature under the cottage bed.
From that time she had taken him under her care. She gave him food, made little shirts for him, and later taught him to read and write. Her visits caused less gossip than might have been expected. Old Mrs. Cottar thought it best to say very little about them to her neighbours. Parson might not like so much notice to be taken of the boy, should he come to hear of it. The food and the shirts were very welcome, since Bessie had never sent home a penny for the child’s keep.
Jenny, when Dickie joined her, silently spread out the food upon the grass. There was no need to ask if he was hungry. He was always hungry. He fell upon the food, while she watched him. Presently she asked if he had learnt any new tunes for his fiddle. He shook his head.
‘I han’t played that this long while.’
‘Oh Dickie! What a pity!’
It was a fiddle which she had contrived to get for him, a couple of years earlier, upon learning how much he longed for one. An old man, living close to Corston, had promised to teach him. She had sold a brooch and bought him a little fiddle in Severnton; for a time it had given great delight to both of them. He learnt quickly and showed some talent.
‘My Granny, if she hears me play that, she clouts me for wasting time.’
‘But a child must have time for play!’
‘I’m no child. This will be my last summer at haysel, Master Crowther say.’
‘He’ll put you to a man’s work!’
‘He’ll put me to no work. He don’t want no more men at Millthorne.’
Jenny sighed and picked up the book from the grass, upon which he said, almost angrily:
‘I can’t stay to read, Miss Jenny. If I’m not back at my hoe with the rest I’ll get the stick.’
Her look of sorrow made him impatient. For some years they had been close friends but now he felt that he had outgrown her company. He was a man, with a man’s cares, of which she understood so little that she did not even ask what he was to do if Crowther had no work for him. His grandmother would not keep a lubberly boy of nine; she had said sometimes, contemptuously, that Miss Jenny was crazy, and he began to believe it. Yet, with a faint contempt for her, he also felt some remorse. She had been very good to him. He relented and took the book from her.
‘Maybe I could read a little piece. There’s none stirring yet. But I must go back when they do.’
‘Yes. Read just a little. It would be such a pity if you were to forget it all. You have taken such pains.’
‘It an’t much good to the likes of me,’ he muttered.
At one time he had taken very great pains, for it had seemed to him that some schooling might help him to look after himself better. He lived in horror of coming upon the parish, for then he might be despatched as an apprentice to the mills in the North. He had once seen a wagonload of such children go by, and he had never forgotten it. There had been a good proportion of idiots amongst them since the parish authorities generally stipulated that a certain quota of idiots must be taken off their hands in return for supplying a cargo of cheap labour.
Fear had spurred his studies, but he also liked reading for its own sake. When doing so he dropped the country accent with which he generally talked, and copied Jenny’s voice when reading to him, which she had done for many years. At such moments he not only looked, but sounded, like the lost Romilly.
Opening the book at random he began at the top of the page:
‘Yea, Truth and Justice then
Shall down return to men,
Th’ enamelled arras of the rainbow wearing.
With Mercy set between….’
Jenny, as she listened, sat smiling expectantly at the great white clouds floating lazily across the summer sky, as though, at any moment, they might part to send Truth, Justice and Mercy down to set a sorry world to rights.
To her they were not abstractions, although they dwelt in another place. They were as solid and personal as herself, or Dickie, or any of the people munching bread and cheese on the far side of the field. She knew their faces and could recognise their voices. Truth and Justice might have frightened her had they not been ruled by that appointed companion. Without Truth no facts
could be scanned, without Justice no verdict passed. But the last word, she was confident, would for ever rest with Mercy.
3
I KNEW THAT he was good and religious, thought Ellen triumphantly. I could never love a man who is not.
She and Latymer were the only members of the Priors party to stay for the Sacrament. Mrs. Brandon, Charlotte, and Bet had hurried out with Romilly, determined that, this time, he should greet his neighbours civilly. Rumours of last Sunday’s performance had greatly shocked them. The governess, whose soul was apparently at the disposal of her employers, had been ordered to take the children home. Amabel had cried off church on the plea of a headache.
The uneasiness, the antagonisms, which had filled that small enclosure during Morning Service, dissolved as soon as Latymer had shut the pew door on the last of them. All now was security and confidence. The two young creatures knelt in their high walled seclusion, listening to the voice of the unseen Dr. Newbolt, and whispering responses. Latymer thought of the cold little church on the moors at Braythorpe, and of his father’s voice, now silent for ever. Ellen thought that her companion had been very nearly perfect before; this proof that he was good and religious removed all possible doubt.
They stayed there for a long while after they should have gone up to the altar. It did not occur to her that he was waiting until she made a move. As the youngest of the Brandons she had never led the way, but had followed where others went. Dr. Newbolt waited for a minute or so, expecting to see the Priors party emerge. Venetia then settled the matter by sailing up the aisle, Jenny and the Arbuthnots in her wake. Others followed. Their slow footsteps echoed through the silent church. Latymer at last whispered:
‘Should we not go?’
Ellen jumped up in confusion. They stepped out of their pew into a group of poor people coming up the aisle from the free benches at the back. These had waited until all the Quality had received the Sacrament, and the tardy appearance of a lady and gentleman caused some confusion. Some drew back. Others scurried forward. At the altar rail Ellen found herself separated from Latymer, and felt a stab of disappointment. On her way back, down the chancel, she saw that the intruder had not been one of the Stretton cottagers; she got a glimpse of an unfamiliar face, gaunt and pallid, under an apology for a widow’s cap. None of our people, she thought, would have pushed in like that. Nor would they come to church looking so! She is almost in rags!
A Night in Cold Harbour Page 7