Chapter VI: Book III: The Elder Children (1)

§ 1.

For some time after Naomi's death Reuben was sick with grief. Her going had been so cruel, so unexpected--and he could not forget how they had found her, her eyelashes wetted with tears.

He also missed her in the house--her soft pale face and gentle ways. He forgot the sallowness and the peevishness of later years, and pictured her always with creamy roseal skin and timid voice. He was the only one who missed her. Mrs. Backfield's softer feelings seemed to have been atrophied by hard work--she grew daily more and more like a machine; the children were too young to care much, and Harry was incapable of regret. However, the strange thing about Harry was that he did indeed seem to miss someone, but not Naomi. For the first time since little Fanny's death he began to ask for her, and search for her about the house--"Where's the pretty baby?--oh, save the pretty baby!" he would wail--"she's gone, she's gone--the pretty baby's gone."

Reuben, as was usual with him, tried to drown sorrow in hard work. He spent his whole day either in the yard or in the fields or out on Boarzell. He was digging a ditch round his new land, to let off the winter rain, and throughout the cool November damps he was on the Moor, watching the sunset's fiery glow behind the gorse, seeing the red clay squash and crumble thickly under his spade--spouting out drops of blood. In time all this fire and blood brought him back into his old purpose. Gradually the lust of conquest drove away regret. He had no more cause for self-reproach than an officer who loses a good soldier in battle. It is the fortune of war. And Naomi had not died without accomplishing her work and giving him men to help him in the fight.

The young Backfields were beginning to grow into individualities. Albert, the eldest, was eight, and showed certain tokens of a wilful nature, which had not much chance where his father was concerned. Strange fits of dreaminess alternated with vigorous fits of passion. He was a difficult child to manage, for in addition to his own moods he had a certain corrupting influence over his more docile brothers. Reuben already kept him at work most of the day--either at the village school, or scaring birds from the orchard or the grain fields.

Robert and Peter also did their share, feeding fowls, weeding vegetables. Robert was a stolid, well-behaved child, a trifle uninteresting, but hard-working and obedient. Pete was Reuben's delight--a wonderfully sturdy little fellow, who often amazed his father and Beatup by his precocious feats of strength. To amuse them he would sometimes shoulder Beatup's tools, or pick up a bag of chicken-meal with his teeth--he could even put his back against a young calf and prevent it entering a gate or reaching its stall. Reuben was careful not to let him strain himself, but he loved to handle his son's arms and shoulders, feeling the swell of the muscles under the skin. He even taught him the rudiments of boxing; he had had some practice himself as a boy in the Fair sparring booth, and though of late years he had been too busy to keep it up, he was a good teacher for little Pete, who could soon lick all his brothers and even deliver respectable punishment on Beatup's nether limbs. Richard at the age of six was not of any great agricultural value, but at the village school he outshone the elder boys. Sometimes he gave Reuben anxious moments, for the smell of the midden now and then made him sick, which was scarcely a hopeful sign.

The younger children were to their father so many bundles--meek and mute, but good to count as they sat at table with porridge bowls and staring eyes. It never occurred to him to pick any of them up and caress them. Indeed they had no very distinct personalities apart from Odiam, though Tilly sometimes looked uncomfortably like Naomi.

§ 2.

Towards the end of '53, Reuben bought a pedigree bull at Rye market. He knew that he could increase his importance and effectiveness in the neighbourhood if he started as a cattle-breeder, and there was also a sound profit to be made by the animal's hiring fees. The next year he bought ten acres more of Boarzell for grass.

He had now spent the whole of Naomi's dowry, and knew that he was not likely to get anything more out of old Gasson, whose housekeeper had during the last year smartly married him. However, he felt that the money had been laid out to the very best advantage, for Odiam was paying its way, and had, besides, of late become the most important farm in the neighbourhood except Grandturzel. Reuben watched Grandturzel jealously, though he was careful to hide his feelings. It had the advantage of forty acres of Boarzell, granted by the commissioners. Luckily old Realf was not very enterprising.

In spite of the farm's new activities, he found that he could still manage without engaging fresh labour. The odds and ends of work which his boys took off him and Beatup left them free to attack the bigger enterprises. And as Odiam grew the children would grow. Even now they were all impressed for service, except little George, who was delicate and, moreover, subject to fits. Their work was varied--they scared birds from the crops, fed the poultry, collected the eggs, drove the cows to and from pasture, fed the pigs, ran errands to the neighbouring farms. In course of time Albert learned milking, and could saddle old Crump the roan, or put him into the gig.

Then, in the house, the little girls were useful. Mrs. Backfield was not so energetic as she used to be. She had never been a robust woman, and though her husband's care had kept her well and strong, her frame was not equal to Reuben's demands; after fourteen years' hard labour, she suffered from rheumatism, which though seldom acute, was inclined to make her stiff and slow. It was here that Caro and Tilly came in, and Reuben began to appreciate his girls. After all, girls were needed in a house--and as for young men and marriage, their father could easily see that such follies did not spoil their usefulness or take them from him. Caro and Tilly helped their grandmother in all sorts of ways--they dusted, they watched pots, they shelled peas and peeled potatoes, they darned house-linen, they could even make a bed between them.

Needless to say there was not much playtime at Odiam.

§ 3.

During the next ten years the farm went forward by strides. Reuben bought seven more acres of Boarzell in '59, and fourteen in '60. He also bought a horse-rake, and threshed by machinery. He was now a topic in every public-house from Northiam to Rye. His success and the scant trouble he took to conciliate those about him had made him disliked. Unprosperous farmers spoke windily of "spoiling his liddle game." Ditch and Ginner even suggested to Vennal that they should club together and buy thirty acres or so of the Moor themselves, just to spite him. However, money was too precious to throw away even on such an object, especially as everyone felt sure that Backfield would sooner or later "bust himself" in his dealings with Boarzell.

After all, he had only fifty-six acres out of a possible three hundred, and had not made much profit out of them, judging by the austerity of ways at Odiam. Horse-rakes and steam-threshers could not blind his neighbours to the absence of muslin curtains and butcher's meat. "And the way he's working them pore childer, too ... all of 'em hard at it from mornun till evenun, surelye ... enough to make their mother turn in her grave, pore girl ... not but wot she hadn't every reason to expect it, considering the way he treated her," etc. etc.

At Flightshot Manor comment was more enlightened.

"I can't understand, papa," said Anne Bardon, "how you can go on selling land to that odious Backfield."

"Well, my dear, he pays me good money for it, and I'm in precious need of that just now."

"But in time the whole Moor will fall into his hands--see if it doesn't. And he's a Tory, a reactionary. It would be a dreadful thing for the parish if he became a big landowner."

Anne's politics were the most vigorous in the family.

"My dear, if anyone else would buy the Moor, I'd be only too pleased to sell it to them. But so far there hasn't been a nibble. Backfield's the only man who has the temerity to think he could make anything out of a desert like Boarzell, and I must say I admire his pluck."

"It's only because he has no imagination. He's a thick-skinned brute, and I hate the idea of a man like that becoming powerful. Why don't you give the land back to the parish? Acknowledge that grandpapa's inclosure has failed, and let the people have their common again."

"It's all very well for you to talk, Anne," said her brother Ralph, "you have your godmamma's fortune, and don't need to think of money. But papa and I have to think of it, and after all we're making a little, a very little, out of Boarzell--just enough to keep up the Village Institute. As time goes on, and Backfield gets richer and more ambitious, we shall sell larger pieces at higher rates, and then we'll be able to repair those wretched cottages at Socknersh, and do a lot more besides."

"I think it would be better if you gave up the Institute and let the cottages tumble down. It's no good trying to raise the people if you leave a man like Backfield loose among them."

"I think you exaggerate his importance, and fail to realise that of the improvements we are making in Peasmarsh. I can't help thinking, as most of the people round here think, that Backfield will, as they call it, 'bust himself' over the Moor. After all he's not educated, and an uneducated man is hampered even in the least intellectual undertakings."

"I do not agree with you, papa."

Anne turned away from her father and brother, and walked towards the window. She disliked arguing, she thought it undignified. She was a tall woman, about twenty-eight years old, severely yet rather imposingly dressed, with a clear complexion, grey eyes, and a nose which was called by her friends aquiline, by her enemies hooked. She despised the Squire in his truck with Odiam, yet she was too fair-minded not to see the considerations that weighed him. And even she, as she gazed from the window, at the southward heap of Boarzell--stony, gorsy, heather-shagged, and fir-crowned--could not withhold a certain admiration from the man who expected of his own arm and tool to subdue it.

§ 4.

The Crimean War had meant the stoppage for a time of Russian grain supplies, and Reuben had taken every advantage of this. He had some forty acres under grain cultivation, mostly oats, but also some good kinds of wheat and barley. In rotation with these were peas and clover, turnips and mangolds. He also had twenty acres of hops--the rest was pasture for his neat Dutch and Jersey cows, which, with the orchard and poultry yard, were still the most profitable if not the most glorious of his exploits. The bull had not proved so splendid an investment as he had hoped; the farmers of the district could not afford big hiring fees, and at present his space was too limited for extensive breeding of his own stock. However, he exhibited Alfriston King at Lewes Agricultural Show, and won a first prize for him. The next year he sold him to a big cattle breeder down Horeham way, and bought a cheaper but more serviceable animal for his own business.

His sons were now growing up--Albert was nearly eighteen, and Peter, though a year younger, looked a full-grown man, with his immense build and dark hairy skin. Pete was still the most satisfactory of Reuben's children, he had a huge and glad capacity for work, and took a real interest in Odiam's progress, though it was not his life, as it was his father's. It was strange, Reuben thought, that none of the other boys seemed to have a glimmer of enthusiasm. Though they had grown up under the shadow of Boarzell, and from their earliest childhood taken part in the struggle, they seemed still to think more about the ordinary things of young men's lives than the great victory before them. It was disappointing. Of course one expected it of girls, but Reuben's heart ached a little because the men children on whom he had set such hope and store cared so little about what was life itself to him. It is true that Robert worked well, nearly as well as Pete, but that was only because he was of a docile, tractable nature. He did not share his father's dreams--Boarzell to him was only a piece of waste ground with some trees on it.

As for Albert and Richard, they did not even work well, and they grumbled and shirked as much as they dared. They had ambitions, but so utterly at variance with Odiam's as to be worse than none. Albert wanted to be a poet and Richard to be a gentleman.

What there was in either Reuben or Naomi to make a poet of their eldest son would be hard to say. Perhaps it was the glow of their young love, so golden and romantic during the first year of their marriage. If so, there was something of bitter irony in this survival and transmutation of it. Odiam was no place for poets, and Reuben tried by every means in his power to knock the poetry out of Albert. It was not the actual poetry he objected to so much as the vices which went with it--forgetfulness, unpracticalness, negligence. Albert would sometimes lose quite half an hour's work by falling into a dream, he also played truant on occasions, and would disappear for hours, indeed now and then for a day or more, wandering in the fields and spinneys, tasting the sharp sweetness of the dawn and the earth-flavoured sleep of the night.

For though he did not care for Odiam he loved the country round it, and made a wonderland and a dreamland of it. He did not see in Boarzell Robert's tree-capped waste, though neither did he see his father's enemy and heart's delight. He saw instead a kind of enchanted ground, full of mysteries of sun and moon, full of secrets that were sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying. It seemed to have a soul and a voice, a low voice, hoarse yet sweet; and its soul was not the soul of a man or of a beast, but the soul of a fetch, some country sprite, that clumped, and yet could skip ... he used to feel it skipping with him in the evening wind when the dusk made the heather misty round his knees ... but he knew that it danced heavy-footed round the farm at night, clumping, clumping, like a clod.

Reuben had no sympathy with these fancies when they took his son out of hard-working common sense into idle-handed, wander-footed dreams, or when perhaps he found them scribbled on the back of his corn accounts. He did not spare the rod, but Albert had all the rather futile obstinacy of weak-willed people, and could be neither persuaded nor frightened out of his dreams.

However, though he was a great trouble to his father, he was not so irritating as Richard. He had the advantage that one could lay hands on him and vent one's fury in blows, but Richard had an extraordinary knack of keeping just on the safe side of vengeance. For one thing he was the best educated of all Reuben's children, and the result of education had been not so much to fill his mind as to sharpen his wits to a formidable extent. For another, he loathed to be beaten, and used all his ingenuity to avoid it. Reuben could flog Albert for going off to the Moor when he was told to clean out the pigsties, but he could not flog Richard for being sick at his first spadeful. As a matter of fact he did actually perpetrate this cruelty when Richard's squeamishness caused him any gross inconvenience, but there was no denying that the boy was on the whole successful in avoiding his dues.

Richard had been the brightest light in the Misses Harmans' school. His teachers had often praised him, and on one occasion suggested in their ignorance that he should take up a more intellectual trade than farming. Then when the Curate-in-Charge had inspected the school he had been struck by Richard's clever, thoughtful answers, and had, for some months after his leaving, lent him books. Reuben on discovering this, had gone over at once to the parsonage, and with all the respect due to a Minister of the Established Church, had informed Mr. Munk that he didn't want no nonsense put into his boy's head, and spades and spuds were for Richard's hands, not books.

"I'm going to mäake a farmer of un, your reverence."

"But he says he doesn't want to be a farmer."

"That's why I've got to _mäake_ un one, surelye."

§ 5.

Reuben had sold Alfriston King for two hundred pounds, and this new capital made possible another enterprise--he bought twenty head of sheep. For some time he had considered the advantages of keeping sheep. It was quite likely that his new land on Boarzell would be mostly pasture, at all events for some time to come, and sheep, properly managed, ought to be a good source of revenue as well as a hall-mark of progress. He did not want Odiam to be a farm of one idea; his father had kept it ambitionlessly to grass, but Reuben saw grain-growing, dairy-keeping, cattle-breeding, sheep-rearing, hops, and fruit, and poultry as branches of its greatness.

He decided that the sheep should be Richard's special charge--they, at all events, could not make him sick; and if he was kept hard at work at something definite and important it would clear his mind of gentility nonsense. Reuben also had rather a pathetic hope that it might stir up his ambition.

Richard grumbled of course, but discreetly. His brothers were inclined to envy him--Albert saw more romance and freedom in keeping sheep than in digging roots or cleaning stables, Pete was jealous of an honour the recipient did not appreciate, Robert and Jemmy would have liked a new interest in their humdrum lives. Richard was initiated into the mysteries of his art by a superannuated shepherd from Doozes, only too glad of a little ill-paid casual labour.

None of the Backfield boys was ever paid a penny of wages. Reuben's idea in employing them was to save money, besides he feared that his young men with full pockets might grow independent. It was essential to his plan that he should keep them absolutely dependent on him, otherwise they might leave home, marry without his consent, or at best fritter away their--or rather his--time by running after girls or drinking at pubs. It is true that now and then stalwart Pete made a few shillings in the sparring-booth at the Fair, but Reuben could trust Pete in a way he could not trust the other boys, so he did not offer much objection.

Pete had once given a shilling to Richard, who had bought with it a second-hand Latin grammar, which he kept carefully hidden under his pillow by night, and in his pocket by day. He had an idea that the mastery of its obscurities would give him a key to freedom, but he had had so far little opportunity of studying it, as he worked and slept with his brothers. Richard did not extort the same sympathy for his rebellion as Albert. Albert had a certain influence over Pete and Jemmy, which he maintained partly by a definite charm of personality, partly by telling them tales after they were in bed at night. They had never betrayed his copy of Byron, also bought with a shilling from Pete, but Richard dared not trust them with his Lilly. Some day he would manage to irritate them--show his contempt for their bearish manners, scoff at their talk, or otherwise insult them--and they would deliver him over, grammar and all, into his father's hands.

His new occupation, however, gave him undreamed-of opportunities. One of the advantages of shepherding was that it alternated periods of strenuous work with others of comparative idleness. During these Richard would pore over his "hic, hæc, hoc," and parse and analyse on bits of waste paper. He learned very quickly, and was soon casting about for means to buy a Greek grammar. He felt that his father could not possibly keep him at the farm if he knew both Latin and Greek.

Thus Richard lived through the feasts and fasts of the Shepherd's Year. In spring there were hazy, drowsy days when he sat with his book under the hedge--some hole close by where he could stuff it if Reuben came that way--now and then lifting an eye to the timid, foolish faces buried in the sun-stained meadow-grass. Then later came the dipping, the collie Havelock barking and blustering at one end of the bath, while old Comfort poked the animals through it with his crook, and Richard received them terrified and evil-smelling at the other side. He grew furious because his hands were all sore and blistered with the dip. Reuben laughed at him grossly--"Yur granny shall mäake you a complexion wash, surelye!"

Then came the shearing, that queen of feasts. The local band of shearers called at Odiam for the first time, and were given an inaugural welcome. Richard sulked at the honour paid him as shepherd--he felt it was indeed a case of King among Sweepers. However, in point of fact, he enjoyed the actual shearing well enough. It was a warm July day, the air full of the scent of hayseed; the sheep came hustling and panting into the shearing-pens, and the shearers stripped them with songs and jokes and shouts of "Shear close, boys!" There was also ale in buckets, brought out by a girl hired for the occasion, who was stout and pretty and smiled at Richard. And it was good to watch the yellowish piles of fleece grow at one's knees, and comical to see the poor shorn sheep stagger up from the ground, all naked and confused, hardly knowing themselves, it seemed.

When the shearing was done there was supper in the kitchen at Odiam, with huge drinks of "black ram," and sheep-shearing songs such as "Come, all my jolly boys," and "Here the rose-buds in June." Also the Sussex Whistling Song:

"There was an old Farmer in Sussex did dwell,
And he had a bad wife, as many knew well."

But Richard did not enjoy the supper as much as the shearing, for most of the men over-ate themselves, and all of them over-drank. Also the pretty serving-girl forsook him for Albert, who on one occasion was actually seen to put his arm round her waist, and hold it there till a scowl from his father made him drop it.

Then in winter came the lambing, which is the shepherd's Lent. Richard and the old man from Doozes kept long vigils in the lambing hut, and those nights and days were to young Backfield dreams of red, fuggy solitude, the stillness broken only by the slip of coals in the brazier, or the faint bleating of the ewes outside--while sometimes mad Harry's fiddle wept down the silences of Boarzell.

Richard began to take a new interest in his flock--hitherto they had merely struck him as grotesque. Their pale silly eyes, their rough, tic-ridden fleeces, their scared repulsiveness after the dipping, their bewildered nakedness after the shearing, had filled him either with amusement or disgust; but now, when he saw them weakly lick the backs of their new-born lambs, while the lambs' little tails quivered, and tiny, entreating sounds came from their mouths, he found in them a new beauty, which he had found nowhere else in his short, hard life--the beauty of an utterly loving, tender, and helpless thing.

He had his Lilly with him in the hut, for there were long hours of idleness as well as of anxiety, but he was careful to hide away the book if Reuben came to inspect; for he knew that his father would have sat through the empty hours in concentration and expectancy, his ears straining for the faintest sound. He would have thought of nothing but the ewes, and he looked to everyone to think of nothing else. But Richard studied Latin, and the old Doozes man put in plenty of light, easily startled sleep.

§ 6.

Towards the end of February there was a period of intense cold, and some heavy falls of snow. Snow was rare in that south-east corner, and all farm-work was to a certain extent dislocated. Reuben would have liked to spread blankets over his corn-fields and put shirts on his cattle. Adverse weather conditions never failed to stir up his inborn combativeness to its fiercest. His sons trembled as his brain raged with body-racking plans for fighting this new move of nature's. Richard was glad to be away from farmyard exertions, most of which struck him as absurd. He was now busy with the last of his lambing, the snow blew against the hut from the north-east, piling itself till nothing was to be seen from that quarter but a white lump. Inside was a crimson stuffiness, as the fumes of the brazier found their way slowly out of the little tin chimney. Sometimes before the brazier a motherless lamb would lie.

There was a lamb there on the last evening in February, its tiny body and long, weak legs all rosed over with the glow. Above it Richard crouched, grammar in hand. There had been a lull in the snowstorm during the afternoon, but now once more the wind was piping and screaming over the fields and the whiteness heaping itself against the wall.

Suddenly he heard a knock at the door, and before he could answer, it flew open, and the icy blast, laden with snow, rushed in, and whirled round the hut, fluttering the pages of Lilly's grammar and the fleece of the lamb.

"Shut that door!" cried Richard angrily, and then realised that he was speaking to a lady.

She had shut the door, and stood against it, a tall, rather commanding figure, in spite of her snow-covered garments and dishevelled hair.

"Oh--ma'am!" said Richard, rising to his feet, and recognising Miss Anne Bardon.

"I trust I'm not in the way," she said rather coldly, "but the storm is so violent, and the drifts are forming so fast, that I hope you will not mind my sheltering here."

Richard was embarrassed. Her fine words disconcerted him. He had often watched Miss Bardon from a respectful distance, but had never spoken to her before.

"You're welcome, ma'am," he replied awkwardly, and offered her his chair.

She sat down and held her feet to the brazier. He noticed that her shoes were pulped with wet, and the water was pouring off her skirts to the floor. He did not dare speak, and she evidently did not want to. He felt the colour mounting to his face; he knew that he was dirty and unkempt, for he had been hours in the hut--his hands were grimed from the brazier, and he wore an old crumpled slop. She probably despised him.

Suddenly he noticed that the wet of her garments was dropping on the lamb. He hastily gathered it up in his arms.

"What a dear little creature!"

She spoke quite graciously, and Richard felt his spirits revive.

"His mother's dead, and I have to be looking after him, surelye."

"Poor little thing!"

She asked him a few questions about the lambing, then:

"You're one of Mr. Backfield's sons, are you not?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'm Richard."

"I've seen you before--in church, I think. Are you your father's shepherd?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Again I hope I am not in your way. I've been over to see the carter's widow at Socknersh--he died two days ago, you know, and she hasn't a penny to go on with. Then when I saw the storm coming I thought I would take a short cut home across the fields; I was caught after all--and here I am!"

She smiled suddenly as she finished speaking. It was a sweet smile, rather aloof, but lighting up the whole of her face with a sudden flash of youth and kindness. Richard gazed at her, half fascinated, and mumbled lamely--"you're welcome, ma'am."

She suddenly caught sight of his Latin grammar.

"That's a strange thing to see in a shepherd's hand."

He felt encouraged, for he had wanted her to see the difference between him and an ordinary shepherd, but had been too awkward to show her.

"I've had it three months--I can construe a bit of Horace now."

"Acquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem," said Anne.

"Onmes eodem cogimen," said Richard, and blushed.

There was silence, but not of the former discouraging sort. Richard was even bold enough to break it:

"I never knew ladies cud speak Latin."

"Some can. I was educated with my brother, you know, and when we construed Horace I was always five or six pages ahead. What made you want to learn Latin?"

"I want to git out o' this."

"Out of your farm duties, you mean?"

"Yes."

"But surely your father would let you adopt some other profession if he knew you did not like this one?"

Richard shook his head.

"He wants justabout all of us--we've got to push on the farm."

"Yes--I know he is ambitious, but surely he doesn't want unwilling helpers."

"Oh, he döan't mind who it is, so long as the work's done."

"And don't you care about the farm?"

"I, ma'am?--no. I want to be a gentleman."

Anne was growing interested. This farm boy was gloriously unlike others of his kind that she had met.

"And you think that if you learn Latin, it'll help you be a gentleman someday?"

"Yes--and Greek, when I've adone wud the Latin."

"Have you many books?"

"No--only this one."

"Then I must lend you some books."

Richard flushed with pleasure. After all he was not acquitting himself so badly with this fine lady. They talked together for a few more minutes, the boy trying to clip his speech like hers. He noticed how much shorter and crisper it was than his--while he said "döan't," she could say "don't" twice.

They were interrupted by the entrance of the Doozes shepherd, accompanied by a swirl of flakeless wind. The old man was astonished and rather scandalised to find Anne Bardon. She looked positively rakish sitting there in her steaming clothes, her hat over one ear, her hair in wisps, and her face more animated and girlish than any of his kind had ever seen it.

Old Comfort scraped and mumbled, and fussed over the lamb, which the two Latinists had entirely forgotten. Then Richard, seeing himself free and the sky clear, offered to help her through the drifts to Flightshot. She let him accompany her as far as the edge of the Manor estate, where the going was no longer dangerous.

"Your servant, ma'am," he said, as he opened the gate; and she answered classically:

"Vale!"

§ 7.

On the whole, the most unsatisfactory of Reuben's sons was Albert. Richard might be more irritating, but Albert had that knack of public sinning which gives a certain spectacular offensiveness to the most trivial faults. Any trouble between Reuben and his eldest son invariably spread itself into the gossip of ten farms; the covert misdoings of and private reckonings with the other boys gave place to tempestuous scandals, windy stormings, in which Albert contrived to grab the general sympathy, and give a decorative impression of martyrdom.

At the same time he tantalised Reuben with vague hints of enthusiasm, sometimes almost making him think that, undependable and careless as he was, he had in him certain germs of understanding. But these were mere promises that were never fulfilled. Albert would whet Reuben's hopes by asking him questions about the country round: Why was such and such a farm called Stilliand's Tower or Puddingcake? Why were there about six places called Iden Green within a square of twenty miles? Was there any story to account for the names of Mockbeggar, Golden Compasses, Castweasel, or Gablehook? But directly Reuben digressed from these general questions to the holy particulars of Odiam and Boarzell, he would lose his interest and at last even his attention, escaping into some far-wandering dream.

Reuben could not understand how his sons could care so little about that which was all things to him. He had brought them up to his ambitions--they were not like Naomi, thrust into them in later, less-impressionable years. He had not been weak with them, and not been cruel--yet only Pete was at all satisfactory. However, he was not the man to sit down and despair before his obstacles. He made the best of things as they were--ground work out of his lads, since he could not grind enthusiasm, and trusted to the future to stir up a greater hope. He somehow could not believe that his boys could go through all their lives not caring for Odiam.

Albert continued weakly and picturesquely to offend. He was now nearly twenty-one, and had begun to run after girls in a stupid way. Reuben, remembering how sternly he had deprived himself of pleasures of this kind, ruthlessly spoiled his son's philanderings ... but the crime he could not forgive, which set the keystone on his and the boy's antagonism, was the publication of some verses by Albert in the _Rye Advertiser_.

To begin with, it was a Liberal paper, and though the verses were of a strictly non-political kind, dealing chiefly with Amelia's eyes, it seemed to Reuben shockingly unprincipled to defile oneself in any way with Radical print. But even without that the thing was criminal and offensive.

"I wöan't have no hemmed poetry in my family!" stormed Reuben, for Albert had as usual stage-managed a "scene." "You've got your work to do, and you'll justabout do it."

"But fäather, it didn't täake up any of my time, writing that poem. I wrote it at my breakfast one mornun two months ago----"

"Yes, that's it--instead of spending twenty minnut at your breakfast, you spend forty. You idle away my time wud your hemmed tricks, and I wöan't have it, I tell you, I wöan't have it. Lord! when I wur your age, I wur running the whole of this farm alone--every ströak of work, I did it. I didn't go wasting time over my meals, and writing rubbidge fur low-down Gladstone päapers. Now döan't you go sassing me back, you young good-fur-nothing, or I'll flay you, surelye!"

Albert could not help a grudging admiration of his father. Reuben could be angry and fling threats, and yet keep at the same time a certain splendour, which no violence or vulgarity could dim. The boy, in spite of his verses, which were execrable enough, had a poet's eye for the splendid, and he could not be blind to the qualities of his father's tyranny, even though that tyranny crushed him at times. Reuben was now forty-three; a trifle heavier in build, perhaps, but otherwise as fine and straight a man as he had been at twenty. His clear brown skin, keen eyes, thick coal-black hair, his height, his strength, his dauntless spirit, could not fail to impress one in whom the sense of life and beauty was developing. Albert even once began a poem to his father:

"You march across the mangold field,
And all our limbs do shake...."

But somehow found the subject more difficult to grapple than the fascinations of Amelia.

With Richard things were different. He despised Reuben as bestial, and sometimes jeopardised his skin by nearly showing his contempt. He now had a peculiar friendship with Anne Bardon. They had met accidentally a second time, and deliberately half a dozen more. In Richard Anne had made a discovery--he appealed to her imagination, which ran on severe lines. She sympathised with his ambition to break free from the grind and grossness of Odiam, and resolved to help him as much as she could. She lent him books, and guided him with her superior knowledge and education.

Their meetings were secret, from her family as well as his. But they were dignified--there was no scurrying like rabbits. Richard's work kept him mostly on the Flightshot borders of Odiam, and often the grave Anne would walk down to the hedge, and help him construe Tacitus or parse from Ovid. There was an old tree by the boundary fence, in the hollow of which she put new books for him to find, and into which he would return those he had finished. She was very careful to maintain the right attitude towards him; he was always her humble servant, he never forgot to call her "ma'am."

But the disciple of Anne Bardon could aspire to be master among other men. Richard began to startle and amuse his family by strange new ways. He took to washing his neck every morning, and neatly combed his hair. He cut up an old shirt into pocket-handkerchiefs. He began to model his speech on Miss Bardon's--clipping it, and purging it ridiculously. Reuben would roar with laughter.

"'Pray am I to remove this dirt?'--Did you ever hear such präaperness and denticalness?--all short and soft lik the Squire himself. You wash out all that mucky sharn, my lad, if that's wot you mean."

§ 8.

Robert Backfield was a member of Peasmarsh choir. He had a good, ringing bass voice, which had attracted the clerk's notice, and though Reuben disapproved of his son's having any interests outside Odiam, he realised that as a good Tory he ought to support the Church--especially as the hours of the practices did not clash with Robert's more important engagements.

Peasmarsh choir consisted of about eighteen boys and girls, with an accompaniment of cornets, flutes, and a bass viol--the last played by an immensely aged drover from Coldblow, who, having only three fingers on his left hand, had to compromise, not always tunefully, with the score. The singing was erratic. Eighteen fresh young voices could not fail to give a certain pleasure, but various members had idiosyncrasies which did not make for the common weal--such as young Ditch, who never knew till he had begun to sing whether his voice would be bass or alto, all intermediary pitches being somehow unattainable--or Rosie Hubble from Barline, who was always four bars behind the rest--or even young Robert himself, who in crises of enthusiasm was wont to sing so loud that his voice drowned everyone else's, or in a wild game of follow-my-leader led the whole anthem to destruction.

Robert loved these choir practices and church singings. Though he never complained of his hard work, he was unconsciously glad of a change from the materialism of Odiam. The psalms with their outbreathings of a clearer life did much to purge even his uncultured soul of its muddlings, the hymns with their sentimental farawayness opened views into which he would gaze enchanted as into a promised land. He would come in tired and throbbing from the fields, scrape as much mud as possible off his boots, put on his Sunday coat, and tramp through the dusk to the clerk's house ... the little golden window gleaming to him across Peasmarsh street and pond was the foretaste of the evening's sweetness.

The practices were held in the clerk's kitchen, into which the choristers would crush and huddle. On full attendance nights all elbows touched, and occasionally old Spodgram's bow would be jolted out of his hand, or someone would complain that Leacher was blowing his trumpet down his neck. Afterwards the choristers would wander home in clusters through the fields; the clusters generally split into small groups, and then the groups into couples. The couples would scatter widely, and vex their homes with late returnings.

Robert was first of all part of a cluster which included young Coalbran from Doozes, Tom Sheane from Dinglesden, the two Morfees from Edzell, Emily Ditch, and Bessie Lamb from Eggs Hole. Then in time the company reduced itself to Robert, Emily, and Bessie--and one wonderful night he found himself with Bessie alone. How they had chosen each other he could not say. All he knew was that for sometime she had become woven with the music into his thoughts. She was a poor labourer's daughter, living in a crumbled, rickety cottage on Eggs Hole Farm, helping her mother look after eight young children. She was only seventeen herself, sturdy yet soft, with a mass of hay-coloured hair, and rather a broad face with wistful eyes. Robert thought she was beautiful--but Robert thought that old Spodgram's playing and the choir's singing were beautiful.

Though they were technically a Couple, they never spoke of love. They never even kissed or held each other's hands, however tenderly the velvet darkness called. He told her about his work at Odiam--about the little calf that was born that day, or the trouble he had had, patching the rent in the pigsty, or how the poultry had not taken well to their new food, but preferred something with more sharps in it. She in her turn would tell him how she had washed little Georgie's shirt--taking advantage of a warm day when he could run about naked--how her mother had lamentable hard pains all down her back, how her father had got drunk at the harvest supper and tried to beat her.

Sometimes they looked in the hedges for birds' nests, or watched the rabbits skipping in the dusk. They would gape up at the stars together and call the constellations by names of their own--Orion was "the gurt tree," and Cassiopeia was "the sheep trough," and Pegasus was "the square meadow."

It was all very wonderful and sweet to Robert, and when at last he crept under the sheets in the apple-smelling garret he would dream of him and Bessie wandering in the Peasmarsh fields--or sometimes in those starry meadows where the hedges shone and twinkled with the fruit of constellations, and Charles drove his waggon along a golden road, and sheep ate from a flickering trough under a great tree of lamps.

§ 9.

Bessie tinted the world for Robert like a sunrise. All through the day he carried memories of lightless woods, of fields hushed in the swale, of the smudge of her old purple cotton beside him--of, perhaps, some dim divine moment when his hand had touched hers hanging at her side.

Then winter came, with carol-singing, and the choristers tramped round, lantern-led, from farm to farm. There in the fluttering light outside Kitchenhour, Old Turk, Ellenwhorne, or Edzell, Robert would watch Bessie's chicory-flower eyes under her hood, while the steam of their breath mingled in the frosty air, and they drooped their heads together, singing to each other, only to each other, "Good King Wenceslas," "As Joseph was a-walking," or "In the Fields with their Flocks."

As they were both simple souls, their love only made the words more real. Sometimes it seemed almost as if they could see up in the white glistering field behind the barn, the manger with the baby in it, the mother watching near, and the ox and the ass standing meekly beside them in the straw. Bessie said she felt sure that the shepherds watched their flocks by night in the little old meadow at the corner of Totease ... she once thought she had heard them singing. But she would not go and look.

As the year climbed up again into spring, a tender pity for Bessie mingled with Robert's love. It was not the pity which begets love, but the sweeter kind which is begotten of it. Robert forgot all about his own hard life, the monotonous ruthless grind of work, the absence of all softness, homeliness, or sympathy, the denial of all gaiety and sport. He thought only of Bessie's troubles, and would have given the world to lighten them. He longed to give her some little treat, or a present. But he had no money. For the first time he inwardly rebelled against the system which kept him penniless. None of the boys had any money, except Pete on Fair days--not even Albert, for the _Rye Advertiser_ did not pay its poets. For the first time Robert saw this as unjust.

March blew some warm twilights to Peasmarsh, and the choristers began their summer lingering. Bessie and Robert often took the longer way home by Ellenwhorne--he would not leave her now till they were at her cottage door, and often he would run home hare-footed from Eggs Hole, afraid that he might be shut out of Odiam, and perhaps his precious comradeship discovered and put under the tyrant's ban.

Then came an evening in April, when the air smelled of primroses and young leaves. The choir practice was early, and rifts of sunshine sloped up the clerk's kitchen, linking in one golden slant Robert's dark healthy face just under the ceiling, Bessie's shoulders pressed against his arm, the frail old hands of Joe Hearsfield on his flute, and the warm plum-brown of the bass viol close to the floor. To Robert it was all a dream of holiness and harmony. Old Spodgram confined himself almost entirely to two notes, Miss Hubble insisted on her four bars of arrears, young Ditch extemporised an alto of surprising reediness, and Robert bellowed the last lines of the last verse just as the other choristers were loudly taking in breath preparatory to line three--but the whole thing was to him a foretaste of Paradise and the angels singing ever world without end.

When the practice was over it was still light, and Robert and Bessie turned inevitably along the little bostal that trickles through the fields towards Ramstile. As usual they did not speak, but in each glowed the thought that they had a full two hours to live through together in the mystery of these sorrowless fields.

The sun set as they came to Ellenwhorne. They stood and watched it dip behind the little cluster of roofs and oast-houses in the west. The turrets of the oasts stood out black against the crimson, then suddenly they purpled, faded into their background of night-washed cloud.

The fields were very dark in their low corners, only their high sweeps shimmered in the ghostly lemon glow. Out of the rabbit-warrens along the hedges, from the rims of the woods, ran the rabbits to scuttle and play. Bessie and Robert saw the bob of their white tails through the dusk, and now and then a little long-eared shape.

The boy and girl were still silent. But in the consciousness each had of the other, kindled and spread a strange dear poignancy. They walked side by side through the dusk, now faintly cold. Dew began to tremble and shine on the grass, to pearl the brambles and glimmer on the twigs.

Robert looked sideways at Bessie. She was colourless in the dark, or rather coloured all over with the same soft grey, which gathered up into itself the purple of her gown and the pale web of her hair. In her eyes was a quiver of starlight.

Their feet splashed on the soaking grass, and suddenly Bessie stopped and lifted her shoe:

"It's justabout wet, Robby."

He looked.

"So it be--I shudn't have brought you through all this damp grass. We shud have gone by the lane, I reckon."

"Oh, no," she breathed, and her voice and the half-seen glimmer of her eyes troubled him strangely.

"Lookee, I'll carry you--you mustn't git wet."

She opened her lips to protest, but the sound died on them, for he stooped and swept her up in his arms. She slipped her hand to his neck to steady herself, and they went forward again towards the south.

Bessie was a sturdily built little person, but the weight of her was a rich delight, and if his arms strained, they strained with tenderness as well as with effort. Under them her frock crushed and gave out a fragrance of crumpled cotton, her hand was warm against his neck, and on his cheek tickled her soft hair. The shadows ran towards them from the corners of the field, slipping like ghosts over the grass, and one or two pale stars kindled before them, where the sky dropped into the woods.... An owl lifted his note of sadness, which wandered away over the fields to Ellenwhorne....

Her young face bowed to his neck, and suddenly his lips crept round and lay against the coolness of her cheek. She did not move, and he still walked on, the grass splashing under his feet, the rabbits scampering round him, showing their little cotton-tails in the dark.

Then his mouth stole downwards and groped for hers. Their lips fluttered together like moths. Then suddenly she put her arms round his neck, and strained his head to her, and kissed him and kissed him, with queer little sobs in her throat....

He still walked on through the deepening night and skipping rabbits. He never paused, just carried her and kissed her; and she kissed him, stroking his face with her hands--and all without a word.

At last they reached the lane by Eggs Hole Cottage, which with shimmering star-washed front looked towards the south. He stopped, and she slid to the ground. Then suddenly the words came.

"Oh, my liddle thing! My dear liddle thing ... my sweet liddle thing!"

"Robby, Robby...."

They kissed each other again and again, eagerly like children, but with the tears of men and women in their eyes.

"Robby ... I love you ... I love you so!"

"Oh, you liddle thing!"

They were hungry ... their arms wound about each other and their faces pressed close, now cheek to cheek, now with lips fluttering together in those sweet kisses of youth which have so much of shyness in their passion.

Suddenly a light kindled in the little house. Bessie slipped from him, and ran up the pathway into the dark gape of the door.

§ 10.

In August Reuben bought ten more acres of Boarzell, and the yoke tightened on Odiam. All had now been pressed into service, even the epileptic George. From morning till night feet tramped, hoofs stamped, wheels rolled, backs bent, arms swung. Reuben himself worked hardest of all, for to his actual labour must be added long tramps from one part of the farm to the other to superintend his sons' work. Besides, he would allow nothing really important to be undertaken without him. He must be present when the first scythe swept into the hay, when his wonderful horse-reaper took its first step along the side of the cornfield, he must himself see to the spreading of the hops over the drying furnaces in the oasts, or rise in the cold twinkling hour after midnight to find out how Buttercup was doing with her calf.

Pete made an able and keen lieutenant, but the other boys were still disappointing. It is true that Benjamin worked well and was often smart enough, but he had a roving disposition, which was more dangerous than Albert's, since it led him invariably down to the muddy Rother banks at Rye, where the great ships stood in the water, filling the air with good smells of fish and tar. Jemmy would loaf for hours round the capstans and building-stocks, and the piles of muddy rope that smelled of ooze, and he would talk to the sailormen and fishermen about voyages to the Azores and the Cape or to the wild seas south of the Horn, and would come home prating of sails and smoke-stacks, charts and logs, and other vain things that had nothing to do with Odiam. Reuben remembered that the boy's mother came of a family of ship-builders and sailormen, and he would tremble for Jemmy's allegiance, and punish his truancies twice as severely as Albert's.

Another trial to him now was that Robert seemed half-hearted. Hitherto he had always worked conscientiously and well, even though he had never been smart or particularly keen; but now he seemed to loaf and slack--he dawdled, slipped clear of what he could, and once he actually asked Reuben for wages! This was unheard-of--not one of Reuben's sons had ever dreamed of such a thing before.

"Wages!--wot are you wanting wages fur, young räascal? You're working to save money, not to earn it. You wait till all yon Moor is mine, and Odiam's the biggest farm in Sussex, before you ask fur wages."