“Ah, your time’s too long, or it’s too short, or it’s just right but you’re too old. Cradle and grave’s my portion. Fat old thing! he called me.”
Dinah’s brown hair was ruffled across her pleasant face and she looked a little forlorn, but corpulence dispossessed her of tragedy. “I be thin enough a-summer-times, for I lives light and sweats like a bridesmaid, but winters I’m fat as a hog.”
“What all have you to grumble at, then?” asked Rose, who had slid to the ground and lay on her stomach staring up at her friend.
“My heart’s young, Rose.”
“You’ve your husband.”
“He’s no man at all since he was ill. A long time ill, he was. When he coughed, you know, his insides come up out of him like coffee grouts. Can you ever understand the meaning of that? Coffee! I’m growing old, but my heart’s young.”
“So is mine, too; but you got a family, four children grown or growing.” Rose had snapped off a sprig of the mustard flower and was pressing and pulling the bloom in and out of her mouth. “I’ve none, and never will have.” Suddenly she sat up, fumbled in her pocket, and produced her purse. She slipped the elastic band from it, and it gaped open. There were a few coins there and a scrap of paper folded. Rose took out the paper and smoothed it open under Dinah’s curious gaze. “I found something lying about at home the other day, and I cut this bit out of it.” In soft tones she began to read:
The day was void, vapid; time itself seemed empty. Come evening it rained softly. I sat by my fire turning over the leaves of a book, and I was dejected, until I came upon a little old-fashioned engraving at the bottom of a page. It imaged a procession of some angelic children in a garden, little placidly-naked substantial babes, with tiny bird-wings. One carried a bow, others a horn of plenty, or a hamper of fruit, or a set of reed-pipes. They were garlanded and full of grave joys. And at the sight of them a strange bliss flowed into me such as I had never known, and I thought this world was all a garden, though its light was hidden and its children not yet born.
Rose did not fold the paper up; she crushed it in her hand and lay down again without a word.
“Huh, I tell you, Rose, a family’s a torment. I never wanted mine. God love, Rose, I’d lay down my life for ’em; I’d cut myself into fourpenny pieces so they shouldn’t come to harm; if one of ’em was to die I’d sorrow to my grave. But I know, I know, I know I never wanted ’em, they were not for me, I was just an excuse for their blundering into the world. Somehow I’ve been duped, and every woman born is duped so, one ways or another in the end. I had my sport with my man, but I ought never to have married. Now I’d love to begin all over again, and as God’s my maker, if it weren’t for those children, I’d be gone off out into the world again tomorrow, Rose. But I dunno what ’ud become o’ me.”
The wind blew strongly athwart the yellow field, and the odour of mustard rushed upon the brooding women. Protestingly the breeze flung itself upon the forest; there was a gliding cry among the rocking pinions as of some lost wave seeking a forgotten shore. The angular faggot under Dinah Lock had begun to vex her; she too sunk to the ground and lay beside Rose Olliver, who asked:
“And what ’ud become of your old man?”
For a few moments Dinah Lock paused. She too took a sprig of the mustard and fondled it with her lips. “He’s no man now, the illness feebled him, and the virtue’s gone; no man at all since two years, and bald as a piece of cheese—I like a hairy man, like—do you remember Rufus Blackthorn, used to be gamekeeper here?”
Rose stopped playing with her flower. “Yes, I knew Rufus Blackthorn.”
“A fine bold man that was! Never another like him hereabouts, not in England neither; not in the whole world—though I’ve heard some queer talk of those foreigners, Australians, Chinymen. Well!”
“Well?” said Rose.
“He was a devil.” Dinah Lock began to whisper. “A perfect devil; I can’t say no fairer than that. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Oh come,” protested Rose, “he was a kind man. He’d never see anybody want for a thing.”
“No,” there was playful scorn in Dinah’s voice; “he’d shut his eyes first!”
“Not to a woman he wouldn’t, Dinah.”
“Ah! Well—perhaps—he was good to women.”
“I could tell you things as would surprise you,” murmured Rose.
“You! But—well—no, no. I could tell you things as you wouldn’t believe. Me and Rufus! We was—oh my—yes!”
“He was handsome.”
“Oh, a pretty man!” Dinah acceded warmly. “Black as coal and bold as a fox. I’d been married nigh on ten years when he first set foot in these parts. I’d got three children then. He used to give me a saucy word whenever he saw me, for I liked him and he knew it. One Whitsun Monday I was home all alone, the children were gone somewheres, and Tom was away boozing. I was putting some plants in our garden—I loved a good flower in those days—I wish the world was all a garden, but now my Tom he digs ’em up, digs everything up proper and never puts ’em back. Why, we had a crocus once! And as I was doing that planting someone walked by the garden in such a hurry. I looked up and there was Rufus, all dressed up to the nines, and something made me call out to him. ‘Where be you off to in that flaming hurry?’ I says. ‘Going to a wedding,’ says he. ‘Shall I come with ’ee?’ I says. ‘Ah yes,’ he says, very glad; ‘but hurry up, for I be sharp set and all.’ So I run in-a-doors and popped on my things and off we went to Jim Pickering’s wedding over at Clackford Mill. When Jim brought the bride home from church that Rufus got hold of a gun and fired it off up chimney, and down come the soot, bushels of it! All over the room, and a chimney-pot burst and rattled down the tiles into a prambulator. What a rumbullion that was! But no one got angry—there was plenty of drink and we danced all the afternoon. Then we come home together again through the woods. Oh lord, I said to myself, I shan’t come out with you ever again, and that’s what I said to Rufus Blackthorn. But I did, you know! I woke up in bed that night, and the moon shone on me dreadful—I thought the place was afire. But there was Tom snoring, and I lay and thought of me and Rufus in the wood, till I could have jumped out into the moonlight, stark, and flown over the chimney. I didn’t sleep any more. And I saw Rufus the next night, and the night after that, often, often. Whenever I went out I left Tom the cupboardful—that’s all he troubled about. I was mad after Rufus, and while that caper was on I couldn’t love my husband. No.”
“No?” queried Rose.
“Well, I pretended I was ill, and I took my young Katey to sleep with me, and give Tom her bed. He didn’t seem to mind, but after a while I found he was gallivanting after other women. Course, I soon put a stopper on that. And then—what do you think? Bless me if Rufus weren’t up to the same tricks! Deep as the sea, that man. Faithless, you know, but such a bold one.”
Rose lay silent, plucking wisps of grass; there was a wry smile on her face.
“Did ever he tell you the story of the man who was drowned?” she asked at length. Dinah shook her head. Rose continued. “Before he came here he was keeper over in that Oxfordshire, where the river goes right through the woods, and he slept in a boathouse moored to the bank. Some gentleman was drowned near there, an accident it was, but they couldn’t find the body. So they offered a reward of ten pound for it to be found.”
“Ten, ten pounds!”
“Yes. Well, all the watermen said the body wouldn’t come up for ten days.”
“No, more they do.”
“It didn’t. And so late one night—it was moonlight—some men in a boat kept on hauling and poking round the house where Rufus was, and he heard ’em say: ‘It must be here, it must be here,’ and Rufus shouts out to them: ‘Course he’s here! I got him in bed with me!’”
“Aw!” chuckled Dinah.
“Yes, and next day he got the ten pounds, because he had found the body and hidden it away.”
“Feared nothing,” said Dinah, “nothing a
t all; he’d have been rude to Satan. But he was very delicate with his hands, sewing and things like that. I used to say to him: ‘Come, let me mend your coat,’ or whatever it was, but he never would, always did such things of himself. ‘I don’t allow no female to patch my clothes,’ he’d say, ‘’cos they works with a red-hot needle and a burning thread.’ And he used to make fine little slippers out of reeds.”
“Yes,” Rose concurred, “he made me a pair.”
“You!” Dinah cried. “What—were you—?”
Rose turned her head away. “We was all cheap to him,” she said softly, “cheap as old rags; we was like chaff before him.”
Dinah Lock lay still, very still, ruminating; but whether in old grief or new rancour Rose was not aware, and she probed no further. Both were quiet, voiceless, recalling the past delirium. They shivered, but did not rise. The wind increased in the forest, its hoarse breath sorrowed in the yellow field, and swift masses of cloud flowed and twirled in a sky without end and full of gloom.
“Hallo!” cried a voice, and there was Amy beside them, with a faggot almost overwhelming her. “Shan’t stop now,” she said, “for I’ve got this faggot perched just right, and I shouldn’t ever get it up again. I found a shilling in the ’ood, you,” she continued shrilly and gleefully. “Come along to my house after tea, and we’ll have a quart of stout.”
“A shilling, Amy!” cried Rose.
“Yes,” called Mrs. Hardwick, trudging steadily on. “I tried to find the fellow to it, but no more luck. Come and wet it after tea!”
“Rose,” said Dinah, “come on.” She and Rose with much circumstance heaved up their faggots and tottered after, but by then Amy had turned out of sight down the little lane to Pollock’s Cross.
“Your children will be home,” said Rose as they went along, “they’ll be looking out for you.”
“Ah, they’ll want their bellies filling!”
“It must be lovely a-winter’s nights, you setting round your fire with ’em, telling tales, and brushing their hair.”
“Ain’t you got a fire of your own indoors?” grumbled Dinah.
“Yes.”
“Well, why don’t you set by it then!” Dinah’s faggot caught the briars of a hedge that overhung, and she tilted round with a mild oath. A covey of partridges feeding beyond scurried away with ruckling cries. One foolish bird dashed into the telegraph wires and dropped dead.
“They’re good children, Dinah, yours are. And they make you a valentine, and give you a ribbon on your birthday, I expect?”
“They’re naught but a racket from cockcrow till the old man snores—and then it’s worse!”
“Oh, but the creatures, Dinah!”
“You—you got your quiet trim house, and only your man to look after, a kind man, and you’ll set with him in the evenings and play your dominoes or your draughts, and he’ll look at you—the nice man—over the board, and stroke your hand now and again.”
The wind hustled the two women close together, and as they stumbled under their burdens Dinah Lock stretched out a hand and touched the other woman’s arm. “I like you, Rose, I wish you was a man.”
Rose did not reply. Again they were quiet, voiceless, and thus in fading light they came to their homes. But how windy, dispossessed, and ravaged roved the darkening world! Clouds were borne frantically across the heavens, as if in a rout of battle, and the lovely earth seemed to sigh in grief at some calamity all unknown to men.
The Field of Mustard (1926)
The Watercress Girl
I
When Mary McDowall was brought to the assize court the place was crowded, Mr. O’Kane said, “inside out.” It was a serious trial, as everybody—even the prisoner—well knew; twelve tons of straw had been thrown down on the roads outside the hall to deaden the noise of carts passing and suchlike pandemoniums, and when the judge drove up in his coach with jockeys on the horses, a couple of young trumpeters from the barracks stiffened on the steps and blew a terrible fanfare up into heaven. “For a sort of a warning, I should think,” said Mr. O’Kane.
The prisoner’s father, having been kicked by a horse, was unable to attend the trial, and so he had enlisted Mr. O’Kane to go and fetch him the news of it; and Mr. O’Kane in obliging his friend suffered annoyances and was abused in the court itself by a great fat geezer of a fellow with a long staff. “If you remained on your haunches when the judge came in,” complained Mr. O’Kane, “you were poked up, and if you stood up to get a look at the prisoner when she came in you were poked down. Surely to God we didn’t go to look at the judge!”
Short was her trial, for the evidence was clear, and the guilt not denied. Prisoner neither sorrowed for her crime nor bemoaned her fate; passive and casual she stood there at the willing of the court for a thing she had done, and there were no tears now in Mary McDowall. Most always she dressed in black, and she was in black then, with masses of black hair; a pale face with a dark mole on the chin, and rich red lips; a big girl of twenty-five, not coarsely big, and you could guess she was strong. A passionate girl, caring nothing or not much for this justice; unimpressed by the solemn court, nor moved to smile at its absurdities; for all that passion concerns with is love—or its absence—love that gives its only gift by giving all. If you could have read her mind, not now but in its calm before the stress of her misfortune, you would have learned this much, although she herself could not have formulated it: I will give to love all it is in me to give; I shall desire of love all I can ever dream of and receive.
And because another woman had taken what Mary McDowall wanted, Mary had flung a corrosive acid in the face of her enemy, and Elizabeth Plantney’s good looks were gone, gone for certain and for ever. So here was Mary McDowall and over there was Frank Oppidan; not a very fine one to mislead the handsome girl in the dock, but he had done it, and he too had suffered and the women in court had pity for him, and the men—envy. Tall, with light oiled hair and pink sleepy features (a pink heart, too, you might think, though you could not see it), he gave evidence against her in a nasal tone with a confident manner, and she did not waste a look on him. A wood-turner he was, and for about four years had “kept company” with the prisoner, who lived near a village a mile or two away from his home. He had often urged her to marry him, but she would not, so a little while ago he told her he was going to marry Elizabeth Plantney. A few evenings later he had been strolling with Elizabeth Plantney on the road outside the town. It was not yet dark, about eight o’clock, but they had not observed the prisoner, who must have been dogging them, for she came slyly up and passed by them, turned, splashed something in his companion’s face, and then walked on. She didn’t run; at first they thought it was some stupid joke, and he was for going after the prisoner, whom he had recognized.
“I was mad angry,” declared Oppidan, “I could have choked her. But Miss Plantney began to scream that she was blinded and burning, and I had to carry and drag her some ways back along the road until we came to the first house, Mr. Blackfriar’s, where they took her in and I ran off for the doctor.” The witness added savagely: “I wish I had choked her.”
There was full corroboration, prisoner had admitted guilt, and the counsel briefed by her father could only plead for a lenient sentence. A big man he was with a drooping yellow moustache and terrific teeth; his cheeks and hands were pink as salmon.
“Accused,” he said, “is the only child of Fergus McDowall. She lives with her father, a respectable widower, at a somewhat retired cottage in the valley of Trinkel, assisting him in the conduct of his business—a small holding by the river where he cultivates watercress, and keeps bees and hens and things of that kind. The witness Oppidan had been in the habit of cycling from his town to the McDowalls’ home to buy bunches of watercress, a delicacy of which, in season, he seems to have been—um—inordinately fond, for he would go twice, thrice, and often four times a week. His visits were not confined to the purchase of watercress, and he seems to have made himself agreeable to the d
aughter of the house; but I am in possession of no information as to the nature of their intercourse beyond that tendered by the witness Oppidan. Against my advice the prisoner, who is a very reticent, even a remarkable, woman, has insisted on pleading guilty and accepting her punishment without any—um—chance of mitigation, in a spirit, I hope, of contrition, which is not—um—entirely unadmirable. My lord, I trust . . .”
While the brutal story was being recounted, the prisoner had stood with closed eyes, leaning her hands upon the rail of the dock; stood and dreamed of what she had not revealed:
Of her father, Fergus McDowall; his child she was, although he had never married. That much she knew, but who her mother had been he never told her, and it did not seem to matter; she guessed rather than knew that at her birth she had died, or soon afterwards, and the man had fostered her. He and she had always been together, alone, ever since she could remember, always together, always happy, he was so kind; and so splendid in the great boots that drew up to his thighs when he worked in the watercress beds, cutting bunches deftly or cleaning the weeds from the water. And there were her beehives, her flock of hens, the young pigs, and a calf that knelt and rubbed its neck on the rich mead with a lavishing movement just as the ducks did when the grass was dewy. She had seen the young pigs, no bigger than rabbits, race across the patch of greensward to the blue-roan calf standing nodding in the shade; they would prowl beneath the calf, clustering round its feet, and begin to gnaw the calf’s hoof until, full of patience, she would gently lift her leg and shake it, but would not move away. Save for a wildness of mood that sometimes flashed through her, Mary was content, and loved the life that she could not know was lonely with her father beside the watercress streams. He was uncommunicative, like Mary, but as he worked he hummed to himself or whistled the soft tunes that at night he played on the clarinet. Tall and strong, a handsome man. Sometimes he would put his arms around her and say: “Well, my dear.” And she would kiss him. She had vowed to herself that she would never leave him, but then—Frank had come. In this mortal conflict we seek not only that pleasure may not divide us from duty, but that duty may not detach us from life. He was not the first man or youth she could or would have loved, but he was the one who had wooed her; first-love’s enlightening delight, in the long summer eyes, in those enticing fields! How easily she was won! All his offers of marriage she had put off with the answer: “No, it would never do for me,” or “I shall never marry,” but then, if he angrily swore or accused her of not loving him enough, her fire and freedom would awe him almost as much as it enchanted. And she might have married Frank if she could only have told him of her dubious origin, but whether from some vagrant modesty, loyalty to her father, or some reason whatever, she could not bring herself to do that. Often these steady refusals enraged her lover, and after such occasions he would not seek her again for weeks, but in the end he always returned, although his absences grew longer as their friendship lengthened. Ah, when the way to your lover is long, there’s but a short cut to the end. Came a time when he did not return at all and then, soon, Mary found she was going to have a child. “Oh, I wondered where you were, Frank, and why you were there, wherever it was, instead of where I could find you.” But the fact was portentous enough to depose her grief at his fickleness, and after a while she took no further care or thought for Oppidan, for she feared that like her own mother she would die of her child. Soon these fears left her and she rejoiced. Certainly she need not scruple to tell him of her own origin now, he could never reproach her now. Had he come once more, had he come then, she would have married him. But although he might have been hers for the lifting of a finger, as they say, her pride kept her from calling him into the trouble, and she did not call him and he never sought her again. When her father realized her condition he merely said “Frank?” and she nodded.
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Page 25