by E. F. Benson
“Lor’! Why, if it isn’t Dennis!” whispered Nancy. “Why, wherever have you been?”
“Turn the light on the door, and let’s :find the handle,” said he.
She directed the lantern towards it, and he-opened it. Nancy stepped inside and went on talking in a high nervous whisper, as he extricated the key from his soaked pocket, and locked the door.
“And what a time for you to be out,” she said, “with nothing on but a pair of bags and them soaking wet! What would anyone think to see you going about half-naked like that, a fair mad thing! There’s a bit of candle on the table. Light it, and I’ll put out the lantern. Where’ve you been?”
Dennis’s radiance still transfigured him. It was no use to struggle back into his jersey, and he just tied the arms of it round his neck.
“Over the hills for a run,” he said. “And you?”
“Why, just seeing a lady friend down in St. Columb’s,” she said. “I stayed a bit longer than I meant, thinking that the rain would stop, but it got worse nor ever. I slipped out after supper instead of going to bed, for I wanted a breath of fresh air, so stifle hot was it in the kitchen to-night!”
Insensibly the black secrecies of the house were stealing round them like wisps of fog. She looked closely at Dennis as he held the candle: radiant he was still and flushed with running and dripping with rain, and the thought that this beautiful wild boy with his young manhood bubbling within him was bone of her bone and had been nurtured at her breast roused in her a sort of shallow shame for herself, such a clean white thing he was. Steadily his clear eyes regarded her, and an unspoken amusement uncurled his lips. Obviously he did not believe a word she said.
“Dennis, you won’t tell on me?” she said.
“Along of your going to see your lady friend in St. Columb’s?” he asked. “What’s there worth the telling? Late hours she keeps, don’t she, and eh, that’s a lovely little lantern she gave you to light your steps. That’ll have come from London town. I’ll be taking that back to her in the morning. What’s her house and her name?”
“It’s true,” said the silly woman, “I’ll swear—”
“Don’t you trouble to do that, you might get visited for it!” Suddenly he bubbled with silent laughter. “And there’s a funny thing to think on,” he said, “that I gave Willie the knock-out for calling you a whore and me a bastard. Happen I am a bastard.”
Nancy began to whimper. It was no use wasting any more perjuries over her lady friend.
“And there’s pretty names to use to your mother,” she sobbed, “and asking her if you’re a bastard, you the spit and moral of what your dad was. I never thought to hear such things from you.”
“Well, lebbe then,” said Dennis. “You riled me ‘cause of your silly lies, and I spoke rough. What you do is no job of mine, and why should I let on about it? Stop blubbing, Mother; there’s no sense in that, and let’s get up quick and quiet to bed.”
Dennis stood in the passage, while his mother reached up for her door-key and vanished within, then let himself into his room. The blind was flapping in the wind, and he pulled it up and looked out once more into the night that had given him those sexless and almost discarnate hours. But now the spell was broken, he was back in the black house where everyone had secret businesses. A damned ill-chance to have met his mother just now, though it was lucky for her that she was no later, for surely he would have locked the studio door, and she would have had a night in the garden. But it was scarcely news to him that she had a man down to St. Columb’s, it did not come anyhow with any shock of surprise: he felt now that it had been somewhere hidden in his consciousness that she was like that, and to-night the knowledge had popped out. Well, ’twas her business: a rotten poor time she must have had at the farm all these years, and why shouldn’t a woman take a bit of pleasure as well as a man?
He slipped off his dripping trousers and mud-smothered shoes, and rubbed himself down with a blanket from his bed: then his eye fell on the string that communicated with Nell next door. Perhaps she was awake, and he pulled it very gently to tell her he was back: if she was asleep it would not disturb that admirable slumberer. From the other side of the partition came a jerk in answer, and he waited, with heart suddenly leaping in his throat, to see if there would be more. But evidently she had just acknowledged the news of his return.
He slid into bed. Some other night, when there was moonshine and the serenity of the stars, perhaps she would come with him, but that would be a different kind of running.
He rolled himself round in his blanket and fell asleep, hearkening to the drip of the rain on the magnolia leaves outside.
CHAPTER VI. THE STORM
THE rain had ceased during the night, and morning came warm and windless. Somewhere high up in the air were floes of greyish-yellow vapour veiling the sun, and below tattered fleeces of cloud forming and dispersing again. It was a stale, sticky day, with no refreshment in the air, and Dennis, when he went out to his work in the kitchen-garden of the farm felt slack in body and grumpy in mind. Weeding took him a couple of hours, and after that he set up a line for the drill where he would sow the peas. When that row was finished, he must shift his line three feet for the next: peddling, wearisome work it was, for ever bending down, then moving a yard on and bending down again. What the hell was wrong with him this morning? Reaction perhaps after his running last night, and a smouldering resentment against his mother. She had truckled to him when he slouched down to breakfast, and kept an appealing eye on him, as if she were afraid that he would go back on his promise and talk about bastards and lanterns and lady friends. And Nell was riled with him. For, as she had predicted, it was she who had had to wake him to-day, and he had damned her for jerking his hand against the bars of his bed. Plaguy things were women: he was better off before she began to trouble him, for he and Willie had understood each other better than he and Nell. Not a word had she to say to him this morning: she was tight of mouth as a dog-fish when he had asked her for a slog of bread, and she had given it him without a glance or a smile, and gone off to the scullery waggling her behind as she walked. He had followed her there, but there was nothing but sulks and dignity: a sound spank would have done her good. He and Willie would have had that right in no time: they’d have called each other damned fools, and sat stubborn for a minute or two, and then one would just have grinned at the other, and that would have been finished. Or another mode of reconciliation would have been that they’d have met on the pier when the day’s work was over, and the young fellows sat about on the parapet, and there would have been no need for words at all, but they’d have strolled off together with shoulders touching to clubhouse or hillside.
Willie was ever so pleased with himself just now, for that artist fellow, Giles, who had the house at the entrance of Kenrith Lane, had taken him on as house-servant. He served Giles’s meals, and cleaned up his studio and brushed his clothes and called him in the morning. Dennis had congratulated him on his enlarged prospects, which included fifteen shillings a week and all found, but he wondered how one man could make himself servant to another. For himself he could plough the land which would one day be his, and feed the horses, and midwife the ewes, and mate the itinerant bull to the cows, and slice the throats of the pigs when their time came. But he couldn’t think of himself as folding a fellow’s suit of clothes, or picking up his snotty handkerchief. You’ll be chewing his food for him next, Willie!” he had said, “and ’twas a pity I broke that front tooth of yours ...” Willie, for some reason, hadn’t answered him back proper, but had just said that his master was a decent chap, and could chew his food for himself. He was doing a picture that was always turned to the wall, except when he was at it, and he had bidden him not touch it. “Backside of some wench, I reckon,” Dennis had said, and that was a pretty good guess, for Willie, as was only natural, had looked at the picture and knew who it was, for the face in the looking-glass was admirably like the original.
Nancy was bustling about th
e kitchen when Dennis got back for the midday dinner, obsequiously anxious to please everybody, and earning contempt rather than gratitude for this amiability. John Pentreath’s thankfulness to the Lord for causing his ewes to throw so many doubles was less acute than it had been the night before: he was making up, in fact, for his abstinences, for his eye was pretty often on Nancy, and his hand on his bottle. But Nell seemed in the sulks still, and Mrs. Pentreath had not a word for any of them nor yet a mouthful of dinner for herself. She had not even troubled to move her chair up to the table, but sat close to the oven, for all the hot languor of the day, clicking her teeth in her mouth, as if she were tasting something, though assuredly no morsel had passed her lips, and her eyes moved this way and that, furtively observant. There was an air of tension and unease which Nancy’s amiabilities only emphasised.
Suddenly Mollie put her knitting down, and opening the kitchen door stood there a minute sniffing like a dog puzzling out a scent.
“There’s a sluice o’ rain coming,” she said, “and a gale — a gale of the Lord’s anger maybe, John Pentreath. A wild night there’ll be before dawn, and a day of trouble to follow. Get your Iambs safe in fold unless you want to lose them. Give them hurdles round, and a shelter above them, else they’ll be drowned sure as fate, and blown away like fleeces.”
“Lor’, and I do hate the wind,” said Nancy incautiously. “’Twas that which made me such a sleepyhead last night, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Dennis bent over his plate to hide an irrepressible grin, and neither he nor Nancy saw the spasm of mirth had popped out of Mollie’s face and back again quick as a lizard. John pushed back his chair with a scrape and tapped the antique barometer.
“’Tisn’t anything,” he said. “Just gone down a bit. Are you certain sure, Mollie?”
The very echo of his voice answered him.
“Just gone down a bit and that’s all,” said she. But she’s certain sure, is Mollie.”
“Damn you, don’t go mocking me,” he said with a sudden flame of anger.
“And don’t you go blaming me,” she said, “after I’ve warned you. Get a couple of men and Dennis, and build you shelters for your lambs and ewes, or you’ll be thanking the Lord t’other side of your mouth. That’s my word to you, John Pentreath, for all your damnings, I’ve said my say, and ’tis all you get from me. And make up the fire, Nell, for there’ll be a spice of cold for a seasoning I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Despite the comparative steadiness of the barometer, John Pentreath preferred to trust to his wife’s warning, and though it was Saturday afternoon, and the farmhands had knocked off work, he sent down to St. Columb’s for a couple of them to return, and they loaded a cart with hurdles, and went down to the meadow where this good company of mothers and lambs was feeding, to make shelter for them. Already there were signs that some change of weather was on the way; sharp puffs of wind blew intermittently from the south-west, which was the storm quarter; and round the sun, visible only like a white plate through the floor of vapour which now had spread over the whole sky, was a pearly halo at the distance of about ten diameters from it. Below, the air was notably clear, the cliffs of the promontory across the bay were as distinct as if seen through a telescope, and the sea lay waveless without a ripple breaking at its rims.
It was easy to find a suitable place for the fold, for right out in the centre of the field stood three sizable elms at a distance of some twelve yards from each other, and these would make fine buttresses for a row of hurdles lashed strongly together, with stakes driven in to support them. Another row of stakes was hammered in to leeward of this line, and more hurdles laid across them and firmly tied, made a roof for protection overhead. From the north and the east there was little to fear: besides, on those two sides of the field were shale-built walls affording good shelter should the wind, by some unusual chance, shift round and blow from those quarters.
They were wise old dames, these ewes, when the care of their young was on them. Some had been standing sniffing the air in their intervals of cropping; they seemed to agree with Mollie that there was something threatening in the day, and before the roofing of their shelter was complete, many of them had moved up near the hurdles or into the lee of the elm trunks, seeking cover from a wind that as yet blew only in puffs of no great violence. Before long there was a good company of them there, some lying down with their lambs by them, others still cropping at the grass with wide spread legs, to let the young tug at their teats, but they too were gravitating towards shelter. Strong sturdy little beggars the lambs were: never had there been so promising a lot. And now a mist was drawing in from the sea; thick it was, and the moistness of it formed like a heavy dew on Dennis’s jersey and his hair: it was queer that it should come up now, when there was wind about.
John Pentrearh was determined to run no risks about his flock. Each hurdle had a couple of stakes on the leeward to support it, and they were stout timbers, driven in deep, so that no violence of gale could uproot them, and the roofing hurdles were corded together and stayed to the ground. There were three hours’ hard work to get it all to his mind, and before they went home they rounded up the few sheep that still strayed about the field, barren ewes for the most part, and drove them into the protected area.
“Come wind or rain they’re out of harm now,” he said to Dennis as they walked back together to the farm. “I doubt I’ve been over-careful, but when your granny talks like that, ’tis wise to heed her. God, I want a drink after all that hammering of stakes.”
“Reckon she’s right,” said Dennis. “See, the mist’s all dispersed again, and not a breath of wind: that’s queer. But there’s wind up above: look at the clouds torn to tatters, and it’s banking up thick in the south-west.” Already the curtain of greyish-yellow vapour that had hung all day across the heavens was breaking up: rents appeared in it, showing the remote blue beyond, but in the south-west, as Dennis had said, a great indigo stretch of cloud, hard and coppery-red at the edges, was beginning to spread upwards. But the flock had been made safe from all assaults of wind and rain, and on arriving at the farm, Dennis found that Nell had got over her fit of sulks, for she looked at him with shy appealing glances. He had meant to go down to St. Columb’s to seek out Willie, and spend till supper time with him; in that less complicated masculine companionship, and let Nell see that her airs and poutings didn’t worry him, but now, when she asked him to hold her skein of wool for her as she wound it up into a ball, he was wax to her, and he sat down opposite her with spread arms, and her winding hands travelled along the span between them, turned the corner where the skein lay between his thumb and his fingers, and went back along the lines again. By degrees his open knees closed on hers, and there they sat silent and aware. Never yet had he had even a kiss from her, nor yet from any other girl, save one who came up behind him in the dark as he sat with his Willie on the pier at St. Columb’s a long while back, and put an arm round his neck and kissed him before he knew what she was after. He could remember the pressure of her breast on his shoulder, and how it had roused in him then no sort of desire, but a vague repulsion: puffy bumpy bodies girls seemed to have. But it was not like that with him now.
The skein-winding got done; and Nell lit the lamp, for it had grown very dark in the kitchen, and then, while she and Nancy busied themselves with the preparations for supper, Dennis went out again to see that the ewes and lambs had settled down in their shelters. That indigo bank of cloud in the west had spread up half-way across the sky, and the last rays of the setting sun piercing through a rent in it, turned the edge to a dusky glow, as if a red-hot wire had been laid along it. There was still not a breath of wind, but the air had grown very much colder, and the ewes and the lambs were huddled together in a compact company behind the hurdles. That was as it should be, and he turned back, going round by the field where stood the circle of stones. Some Midsummer Eve, surely, he and Nell would be dancing there together, for that was a spell that no couple in St. Columb’s, des
irous of children, would neglect. But first must come that leaping across the embers of the bonfire that made it sure that they would be wed before the year was out. He walked across the blackened cobbled pavement where it had been laid year by year, far back beyond all reckoning; from there he could see the roofs of St. Columb’s and the pier. Usually by this time the harbour would be empty and the lights of the fishing fleet be twinkling in the bay, but to-night they were all at anchor behind the pier, not a boat had gone forth: perhaps the fisher folk knew that this would be no night to be at sea. Utterly still it was, and now he noticed that there was not a sound of bird-song, and this was just the hour when it should have been at its fullest: thrush and blackbird and robin and willow-wren should all have been at it. And throughout the afternoon the gulls had been winging inland: a great flock passed overhead as he stood there, and he watched them join a company on the ploughed fields below. To the east across the bay another bank of dark cloud had risen high behind the promontory: the birds looked like specks of flake-white against it as they hovered before settling.