The Hurly Burly and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

  “The wretches! They were so late they drove him near distracted, poor thing. Lazy rogues, but wait till master comes back, they’d better be careful!”

  And if any friendly person in the village asked her: “How are you getting on up there, Phemy?” she would reply: “Oh, as well as you can expect with so much to be done—and such men!” The interlocutor might hint that there was no occasion in the circumstances to distress oneself, but then Phemy would be vexed. To her, honesty was as holy as the Sabbath to a little child. Behind her back they jested about her foolishness; but, after all, wisdom isn’t a process, it’s a result, it’s the fruit of the tree. One can’t be wise, one can only be fortunate.

  On the last day of her elysium the workhouse master and the chaplain had stalked over the farm, shooting partridges. In the afternoon she met them and asked for a couple of birds for Weetman’s return on the morrow. The workhouse was not far away, it was on a hill facing west, and at sunset-time its windows would often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire. Very beautiful it looked to Phemy.

  II

  The men had come to work punctually, and Phemy herself found so much to do that she had no time to give the pony an apple. She cleared the kitchen once and for all of the pails, guns, harness, and implements that so hampered its domestic intention, and there were abundant signs elsewhere of a new impulse at work in the establishment. She did not know at what hour to expect the prisoner, so she often went to the garden gate and glanced up the road. The night had been wild with windy rain, but morn was sparklingly clear though breezy still. Crisp leaves rustled along the road where the polished chestnuts beside the parted husks lay in numbers, mixed with coral buds of the yews. The sycamore leaves were black rags, but the delicate elm foliage fluttered down like yellow stars. There was a brown field neatly adorned with white coned heaps of turnips, behind it a small upland of deeply green lucerne, behind that nothing but blue sky and rolling cloud. The turnips, washed by the rain, were creamy polished globes.

  When at last he appeared she scarcely knew him. Glas Weetman was a big, though not fleshy, man of thirty, with a large boyish face and a flat bald head. Now he had a thick dark beard. He was hungry, but his first desire was to be shaved. He stood before the kitchen mirror, first clipping the beard away with scissors, and as he lathered the remainder he said:

  “Well, it’s a bad state of things, this—my sister dead and my mother gone to America. What shall us do?”

  He perceived in the glass that she was smiling.

  “There’s nought funny in it, my comic gal!” he bawled indignantly. “What are you laughing at?”

  “I wer’n’t laughing. It’s your mother that’s dead.”

  “My mother that’s dead, I know.”

  “And Miss Alice that’s gone to America.”

  “To America, I know, I know, so you can stop making your bullock’s eyes and get me something to eat. What’s been going on here?”

  She gave him an outline of affairs. He looked at her sternly when he asked her about his sweetheart.

  “Has Rosa Beauchamp been along here?”

  “No,” said Phemy, and he was silent. She was surprised at the question. The Beauchamps were such respectable high-up people that to Phemy’s simple mind they could not possibly favour an alliance now with a man that had been in prison; it was absurd, but she did not say so to him. And she was bewildered to find that her conviction was wrong, for Rosa came along later in the day and everything between her master and his sweetheart was just as before; Phemy had not divined so much love and forgiveness in high-up people.

  It was the same with everything else. The old harsh rushing life was resumed, Weetman turned to his farm with an accelerated vigour to make up for lost time, and the girl’s golden week or two of ease became an unforgotten dream. The pails, the guns, the harness crept back into the kitchen. Spiders, cockroaches, and mice were more noticeable than ever before, and Weetman himself seemed embittered, harsher. Time alone could never still him, there was a force in his frame, a buzzing in his blood. But there was a difference between them now; Phemy no longer feared him. She obeyed him, it is true, with eagerness, she worked in the house like a woman and in the fields like a man. They ate their meals together, and from this dissonant comradeship the girl, in a dumb kind of way, began to love him.

  One April evening, on coming in from the fields, he found her lying on the couch beneath the window, dead plumb fast asleep, with no meal ready at all. He flung his bundle of harness to the flags and bawled angrily to her. To his surprise she did not stir. He was somewhat abashed; he stepped over to look at her. She was lying on her side. There was a large rent in her bodice between sleeve and shoulder; her flesh looked soft and agreeable to him. Her shoes had slipped off to the floor; her lips were folded in a pout.

  “Why, she’s quite a pretty cob,” he murmured. “She’s all right, she’s just tired, the Lord above knows what for.”

  But he could not rouse the sluggard. Then a fancy moved him to lift her in his arms; he carried her from the kitchen and, staggering up the stairs, laid the sleeping girl on her own bed. He then went downstairs and ate pie and drank beer in the candlelight, guffawing once or twice: “A pretty cob, rather.” As he stretched himself after the meal a new notion amused him: he put a plateful of food upon a tray, together with a mug of beer and the candle. Doffing his heavy boots and leggings, he carried the tray into Phemy’s room. And he stopped there.

  III

  The new circumstance that thus slipped into her life did not effect any noticeable alteration of its general contour and progress. Weetman did not change towards her. Phemy accepted his mastership not alone because she loved him, but because her powerful sense of loyalty covered all the possible opprobrium. She did not seem to mind his continued relations with Rosa.

  Towards midsummer one evening Glastonbury came in in the late dusk. Phemy was there in the darkened kitchen. “Master!” she said immediately he entered. He stopped before her. She continued: “Something’s happened.”

  “Huh, while the world goes popping round something shall always happen!”

  “It’s me—I’m took—a baby, master,” she said. He stood chockstill. His back was to the light, she could not see the expression on his face, perhaps he wanted to embrace her.

  “Let’s have a light, sharp,” he said in his brusque way. “The supper smells good, but I can’t see what I’m smelling, and I can only fancy what I be looking at.”

  She lit the candles and they ate supper in silence. Afterwards he sat away from the table with his legs outstretched and crossed, hands sunk into pockets, pondering while the girl cleared the table. Soon he put his powerful arm around her waist and drew her to sit on his knees.

  “Are you sure o’ that?” he demanded.

  She was sure.

  “Quite?”

  She was quite sure.

  “Ah, well, then,” he sighed conclusively, “we’ll be married!”

  The girl sprang to her feet. “No, no, no! How can you be married? You don’t mean that—not married—there’s Miss Beauchamp!” She paused and added a little unsteadily: “She’s your true love, master.”

  “Ay, but I’ll not wed her!” he cried sternly. “If there’s no gain-saying this that’s come on you I’ll stand to my guns. It’s right and proper for we to have a marriage.”

  His great thick-fingered hands rested upon his knees; the candles threw a wash of light upon his polished leggings; he stared into the fireless grate.

  “But we do not want to do that,” said the girl dully and doubtfully. “You have given your ring to her, you’ve given her your word. I don’t want you to do this for me. It’s all right, master, it’s all right.”

  “Are ye daft?” he cried. “I tell you we’ll wed. Don’t keep clacking about Rosa—I’ll stand to my guns.” He paused before adding, “She’d gimme the rightabout, fine now—don’t you see, stupid—but I�
�ll not give her the chance.”

  Her eyes were lowered. “She’s your true love, master.”

  “What would become of you and your child? Ye couldn’t bide here!”

  “No,” said the trembling girl.

  “I’m telling you what we must do, modest and proper; there’s naught else to be done, and I’m middling glad of it, I am. Life’s a seesaw affair. I’m middling glad of this.”

  So, soon, without a warning to anyone, least of all to Rosa Beauchamp, they were married by the registrar. The change in her domestic status produced no other change; in marrying Weetman she but married all his ardour, she was swept into its current. She helped to milk cows, she boiled nauseating messes for pigs, chopped mangolds, mixed meal, and sometimes drove a harrow in his windy fields. Though they slept together, she was still his servant. Sometimes he called her his “pretty little cob,” and then she knew he was fond of her. But in general his custom was disillusioning. His way with her was his way with his beasts; he knew what he wanted, it was easy to get. If for a brief space a little romantic flower began to bud in her breast it was frozen as a bud, and the vague longing disappeared at length from her eyes. And she became aware that Rosa Beauchamp was not yet done with; somewhere in the darkness of the fields Glastonbury still met her. Phemy did not mind.

  In the new year she bore him a son that died as it came to life. Glas was angry at that, as angry as if he had lost a horse. He felt that he had been duped, that the marriage had been a stupid sacrifice, and in this he was savagely supported by Rosa. And yet Phemy did not mind; the farm had got its grip upon her, it was consuming her body and blood.

  Weetman was just going to drive into town; he sat fuming in the trap behind the fat bay pony.

  “Bring me that whip from the passage!” he shouted. “There’s never a dam thing handy!”

  Phemy appeared with the whip. “Take me with you,” she said.

  “God-a-mighty! What for? I be comen back in an hour. They ducks want looking over, and you’ve all the taties to grade.”

  She stared at him irresolutely.

  “And whose to look after the house? You know it won’t lock up—the key’s lost. Get up there!”

  He cracked his whip in the air as the pony dashed away.

  In the summer Phemy fell sick, her arm swelled enormously. The doctor came again and again. It was blood-poisoning, caught from a diseased cow that she had milked with a cut finger. A nurse arrived, but Phemy knew she was doomed, and though tortured with pain she was for once vexed and protestant. For it was a June night, soft and nubile, with a marvellous moon; a nightingale threw its impetuous garland into the air. She lay listening to it and thinking with sad pleasure of the time when Glastonbury was in prison, how grand she was in her solitude, ordering everything for the best and working superbly. She wanted to go on and on for evermore, though she knew she had never known peace in maidenhood or marriage. The troubled waters of the world never ceased to flow; in the night there was no rest—only darkness. Nothing could emerge now. She was leaving it all to Rosa Beauchamp. Glastonbury was gone out somewhere—perhaps to meet Rosa in the fields. There was the nightingale, and it was very bright outside.

  “Nurse,” moaned the dying girl, “what was I born into the world at all for?”

  Clorinda Walks in Heaven (1922)

  The Field of Mustard

  ON A WINDY AFTERNOON IN NOVEMBER THEY WERE gathering kindling in the Black Wood, Dinah Lock, Amy Hardwick, and Rose Olliver, three sere disvirgined women from Pollock’s Cross. Mrs. Lock wore clothes of dull butcher’s blue, with a short jacket that affirmed her plumpness, but Rose and Amy had on long grey ulsters. All of them were about forty years old, and the wind and twigs had tousled their gaunt locks, for none had a hat upon her head. They did not go far beyond the margin of the wood, for the forest ahead of them swept high over a hill and was gloomy; behind them the slim trunks of beech, set in a sweet ruin of hoar and scattered leaf, and green briar nimbly fluttering made a sort of palisade against the light of the open, which was grey, and a wide field of mustard, which was yellow. The three women peered up into the trees for dead branches, and when they found any Dinah Lock, the vivacious woman full of shrill laughter, with a bosom as massive as her haunches, would heave up a rope with an iron bolt tied to one end. The bolted end would twine itself around the dead branch, the three women would tug, and after a sharp crack the quarry would fall; as often as not the women would topple over too. By and by they met an old hedger with a round belly belted low, and thin legs tied at each knee, who told them the time by his ancient watch, a stout timepiece which the women sportively admired.

  “Come Christmas I’ll have me a watch like that!” Mrs. Lock called out. The old man looked a little dazed as he fumblingly replaced his chronometer. “I will,” she continued, “if the Lord spares me and the pig don’t pine.”

  “You—you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “That watch was my uncle’s watch.”

  “Who was he? I’d like one like it.”

  “Was a sergeant-major in the lancers, fought under Sir Garnet Wolseley, and it was given to him.”

  “What for?”

  The hedger stopped and turned on them. “Doing of his duty.”

  “That all?” cried Dinah Lock. “Well, I never got no watch for that a-much. Do you know what I see when I went to London? I see’d a watch in a bowl of water, it was glass, and there was a fish swimming round it . . .”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “There was a fish swimming round it . . .”

  “I tell you I don’t believe it . . .”

  “And the little hand was going on like Clackford Mill. That’s the sort of watch I’ll have me; none of your Sir Garney Wolsey’s!”

  “He was a noble Christian man, that was.”

  “Ah! I suppose he slept wid Jesus?” yawped Dinah.

  “No, he didn’t,” the old man disdainfully spluttered. “He never did. What a God’s the matter wid ye?” Dinah cackled with laughter. “Pah!” he cried, going away, “great fat thing! Can’t tell your guts from your elbows.”

  Fifty yards farther on he turned and shouted some obscenity back at them, but they did not heed him; they had begun to make three faggots of the wood they had collected, so he put his fingers to his nose at them and shambled out to the road.

  By the time Rose and Dinah were ready, Amy Hardwick, a small, slow, silent woman, had not finished bundling her faggot together.

  “Come on, Amy,” urged Rose.

  “Come on,” Dinah said.

  “All right, wait a minute,” she replied listlessly.

  “Oh God, that’s death!” cried Dinah Lock, and heaving a great faggot to her shoulders she trudged off, followed by Rose with a like burden. Soon they were out of the wood, and crossing a highway they entered a footpath that strayed in a diagonal wriggle to the far corner of the field of mustard. In silence they journeyed until they came to that far corner, where there was a hedged bank. Here they flung their faggots down and sat upon them to wait for Amy Hardwick.

  In front of them lay the field they had crossed, a sour scent rising faintly from its yellow blooms, which quivered in the wind. Day was dull, the air chill, and the place most solitary. Beyond the field of mustard the eye could see little but forest. There were hills there, a vast curving trunk, but the Black Wood heaved itself effortlessly upon them and lay like a dark pall over the outline of a corpse. Huge and gloomy, the purple woods draped it all completely. A white necklace of a road curved below, where a score of telegraph poles, each crossed with a multitude of white florets, were dwarfed by the hugeness to effigies that resembled hyacinths. Dinah Lock gazed upon this scene whose melancholy, and not its grandeur, had suddenly invaded her; with elbows sunk in her fat thighs, and nursing her cheeks in her hands, she puffed the gloomy air, saying:

  “Oh God, cradle and grave is all there is for we.”

  “Where’s Amy got to?” asked Rose.

  “I could n
ever make a companion of her, you know,” Dinah declared.

  “Nor I,” said Rose, “she’s too sour and slow.”

  “Her disposition’s too serious. Of course, your friends are never what you want them to be, Rose. Sometimes they’re better—most often they’re worse. But it’s such a mercy to have a friend at all; I like you, Rose; I wish you was a man.”

  “I might just as well ha’ been,” returned the other woman.

  “Well, you’d ha’ done better; but if you had a tidy little family like me you’d wish you hadn’t got ’em.”

  “And if you’d never had ’em you’d ha’ wished you had.”

  “Rose, that’s the cussedness of nature, it makes a mock of you. I don’t believe it’s the Almighty at all, Rose. I’m sure it’s the devil, Rose. Dear heart, my corn’s a-giving me what-for; I wonder what that bodes.”

  “It’s restless weather,” said Rose. She was dark, tall, and not unbeautiful still, though her skin was harsh and her limbs angular. “Get another month or two over—there’s so many of these long dreary hours.”