Chapter XI: Part 11

He came downstairs and took up his indoor life as usual, though out of doors he no longer rode about on his grey horse. The entire overseership of the estate devolved on Peter, with the additional burden that his responsibility was without authority—his father insisted on retaining the headship and on revising or overthrowing his decisions. Nothing could be done without reference to him, and his illness seemed to have made him queerly perverse. He insisted that an offer from a firm of timber-merchants for the whole of Little Sowden Wood should be refused, though Peter explained to him that at present the wood actually cost more in its upkeep than was realised by the underwood sales in the local market.

“Why should I have one of the finest woods on my estate smashed up by a firm of war-profiteers? Confound you, Sir! Many’s the fox that hounds have put up in Sowden, and the place was thick when Conster started building.”

“But we’re in desperate need of ready money, Father. We can’t afford to start repairs at Glasseye, and this is the third year we’ve put off. There’s Monkings, too,—the place is falling to pieces, and Luck says he’ll quit if he has to wait any longer.”

“Quit?—Let him. He needn’t threaten me. Tenants aren’t so scarce.”

“Good tenants are. We aren’t likely to get a man who farms the land as well as Luck. He got the Penny field to carry seven bushel to the acre last year. He’s clockwork with the rent, too—you know the trouble we have over rent.”

“But I won’t have Sowden cut down to keep him. Timber! I thought we were done with that shame when the war ended, and we’d lost Eleven Pounder and Little Horn.”

“But I can’t see anything more shameful in selling timber than in selling land, and you sold that Snailham piece last year to——”

Peter tried to retrieve his blunder, but his mind was not for quick manœuvres and all he could do was to flush and turn guiltily silent. His father’s anger blazed at once.

“Yes—we sold land last year, and a good business we made of it, didn’t we! The bounder thought he’d bought my daughter into the bargain. He thought he’d got the pull of us because we were glad to sell. I tell you, I’ll sell no more of my land, if it puts such ideas into the heads of the rascals that buy it, if it makes all the beastly tenants and small-holders within thirty miles think they can come and slap me on the back and make love to my daughters and treat me as one of themselves. I’ll not sell another foot as long as I live. When I die, Sir, you may not get a penny, but you’ll get the biggest estate in East Sussex.”

Peter groaned.

§ 12

Gervase did not think it advisable to go near his family when the time came for him to leave Vinehall for Thunders Abbey. He would have liked to see his mother, but knew too well that the interview would end only in eau de Cologne and burnt feathers. Since he was exiled, it was best to accept his exile as a working principle and not go near the house. He knew that later on he would be given opportunities to see his parents, and by then time might have made them respectively less hostile and less hysterical.

So he wrote his mother a very affectionate letter, trying to explain what he was going to do, but not putting any great faith in her understanding him. He told her that he would be able to come and see her later, and sent his love to Doris and Peter and his father. He also wrote a line to Mary. His personal farewells were for Stella and Jenny only.

To Stella he said goodbye the day before he left. He found her making preparations for her own departure. She and her father were leaving for Canada as soon as Mrs. Peter Alard was through her confinement, which she expected in a couple of weeks. The practice had been sold, and the escape into a new life and a new country was no longer a possible resort of desperation but a fixed doom for her unwilling heart.

All she had been able to do during the last weeks had been to let her father act without interference. Her entire conflict had been set in withholding herself from last-moment entreaties to stay, from attempts at persuading him to withdraw from negotiations over the practice, from suggestions that their departure should be put off to the end of the summer. So negative had been her battle that she had never felt the thrill of combat—instead she felt utterly crushed and weary. She felt both dead and afraid ... the only moments in which she seemed to live were the moments in which she encountered Peter, passing him occasionally on the road or meeting him in a neighbour’s house. They were terrible moments of fiery concentrated life—she was glad afterwards to fall back into her stupor. She and he had had no more private conversations—she was able to pursue her negative battle to the extent of avoiding these—but his mere presence seemed to make alive a Stella Mount who was dying, whose death she sometimes thought of as a blessing and sometimes as a curse.

When she saw Gervase, so quiet and sweet-tempered and happy, she wondered if she would possibly be like that when her love for Peter was dead, as his for her was dead. But then his love for her was not dead—that was the whole point; like Enoch, it was translated—it was not, because God had taken it. As she looked into his peaceful eyes, her own filled with tears. She wondered if he had won his battle so quickly because it had been a slighter one than hers, or because he was better armed. Probably because of both. He was younger than she, his passions still slept in his austere, hard-working youth—and would probably awake only to find themselves reborn in his religious life—also, she realised that he might be naturally spiritual, whereas she had never been more than spiritually natural—a distinction. He was a man born to love God as she had been born to love men, and she knew that, in spite of all he said, he would have found his beloved sooner or later without any help of hers.

“Goodbye, dear Gervase,” she said, and pressed his hand.

“Goodbye, Stella”—surprisingly he kissed her, like another girl. She had not thought he would dare kiss her at all, and this warm, light, natural kiss—the kiss of a gentle friend—showed her a self-conquest more complete than any she had imagined—certainly than any she would ever know. She might be strong enough to deny her kisses to Peter, but she would never be able to give him the kiss of a friend.

§ 13

The next day Gervase drove off to Thunders Abbey, and went by way of Icklesham. It was a windless afternoon; the first scent of primroses hid in the hollows of the lanes, and the light of the sun, raking over the fields, was primrose-coloured on the grass. The browsing sheep and cattle cast long shadows, and the shadows of the leafless trees were clear, a delicate tracery at their roots.

As he drove up and down the steep, wheel-scarred lanes he watched familiar farms and spinneys go by as if it were for the last time. He knew that he would see them all many times after this, but somehow it would not be the same. Gervase Alard would be dead, as Jenny Alard was dead, and he felt as Jenny had felt the night before her wedding—glad and yet afraid. He remembered her words—“Can’t you understand?—It’s because I don’t feel big enough ... afraid.” He, too, felt afraid of his new life, and for the same reason—because he knew he was not big enough. Yet, in spite of her fear, Jenny had gone on, and now she was happy. And he was going on, and perhaps he would be happy, too.

He found her baking little cakes for tea. She tapped on the kitchen window when the lorry rattled into the yard, and he came in and took her in his arms, in spite of her protest that she was all over flour.

“Hullo, Gervase! this is splendid—I haven’t seen you for ages.”

She was wearing a blue gingham overall, and with her face flushed at the fire, and her background of brick, scrubbed wood and painted canisters, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than he could ever have imagined possible. She had grown plump, too, since her marriage, and her eyes had changed—they looked bright, yet half asleep, like a cat’s eyes.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, Jen. I’m off to Thunders.”

“When?—Tomorrow?”

“No—this very evening. I’ll go straight on from here.”

“Gervase!”

She looked sad—she understood him less than ever now.

“Father Lawrence wrote two days ago and said they were able to take me—and I’ve nothing to wait for. Father won’t see me. I’ve written to Mother—I thought it better than farewells in the flesh.”

“And Stella?”

“I’ve said goodbye to her.”

“Gervase, I know—I feel sure you’re only doing this because of her.”

“Well, I can’t show you now that you’re wrong, but I hope time will.”

“I hope it won’t show you that you’re wrong—when it’s too late. My dear——” she went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders—“My dear, you’re so young.”

“Don’t, Jen.”

“But it’s true. Why can’t you wait till you’ve seen more of life—till you’ve lived, in fact?”

“Because I don’t want to give God just the fag-end of myself, the leavings of what you call life. I want to give Him the best I’ve got—all my best years.”

“If Stella had accepted you, you would have married her, and we shouldn’t have heard anything about all this.”

“That’s true. But she refused me, and it was her refusal which showed me the life I was meant for. The fact that I loved Stella, and she would not have me, showed me that God does not want me to marry.”

He seemed to Jenny transparent and rather silly, like a child.

“But you’re only twenty-one,” she persisted gently, as she would with a child. “You’d have been sure to fall in love again and marry someone else.”

“And there’s no good telling you I’m sure I shouldn’t. However, my dear, I’m not going to prison on a life sentence—I can come out tomorrow if I don’t like it; and probably for a year or so the whole community will be trying to turn me out—they’re as much afraid of a mistake as you are.”

“I don’t trust them. They only too seldom get hold of men in your position.”

“My dear, don’t let’s talk any more about me. It’s making us quarrel, and probably this is the last time I shall see you for months. Tell me how you’ve been getting on. Has the County called yet?”

“Not so as you’d notice. As a matter of fact, the Fullers left cards the other day. Agney’s far enough off for it not to matter very much, and I think Mrs. Fuller has a reputation for being broad-minded which she’s had to live up to. But I’m getting to like Ben’s friends—I told you I should. There’s the Boormans of Frays Land and the Hatches of Old Place, and a very nice, well-educated bailiff at Roughter, who collects prints and old furniture. I see a lot of them—they’ve been here and I’ve been to their houses; and as Mrs. Godfrey and the girls keep to their own part of the house, I’ve got my hands full from morning to night, and don’t have much time to think about anything I may have lost.”

“It seems to suit you, anyhow. You look fine.”

“I feel splendid. Of course, I couldn’t do it if it wasn’t for Ben. I don’t pretend I’ve found everything in the life agreeable, after what I’ve been used to. But Ben makes everything worth doing and worth bearing.”

“And that’s how it is with me. Can’t you understand now, Jen?—I’ve got something, too, which makes it all worth doing and worth bearing—though I don’t pretend, any more than you do, that I expect to find everything in my life agreeable.”

“I’ll try to understand, Gervase; but I don’t suppose I’ll succeed—and you really can’t expect it of me.”

“All right, I won’t, just yet.” He picked his cap and gloves off the table—“I really must be going now.”

“Won’t you stay and have some tea? I’ve got over the failure stage in cakes—I really think these will be quite eatable.”

“No, thanks very much, I mustn’t stay. It’ll take Henry quite two hours to get to Brighton.”

She did not seem to hear him—she was listening. He could hear nothing, but a moment later a footstep sounded in the yard.

“There he is,” said Jenny.

She went out into the passage and closed the door behind her.

He was left alone in the big kitchen. The fire and the kettle hummed together to the ticking of the clock, and there was a soft, sweet smell of baking cakes. The last of the sunshine was spilling through the window on to the scrubbed, deal table, and over all the scene hung an impalpable atmosphere of comfort, warmth and peace. Outside in the passage he could hear the murmuring of a man’s and a woman’s voices.... His eyes suddenly filled with tears.

They were gone when Jenny came back into the room with Ben, who had evidently been told the reason for his brother-in-law’s visit, for he shook hands in clumsy silence.

“How do you do?” said Gervase—“and goodbye.”

Ben still said nothing. He neither approved nor understood young Alard’s ways. Religion was for him the ten commandments, Parson’s tithes, and harvest thanksgivings—anything further smacked of Chapel and the piety of small-holders. But he was too fond of Gervase to say openly what was in his heart, and as he was not used to saying anything else, he was driven into an awkward but well-meaning silence.

“I’m glad you’re taking Henry with you,” said Jenny, attempting lightness—“It would have been dreadful if you’d had to leave him behind.”

“Yes—‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed’ wouldn’t have been in it. But I’m taking him as my dowry. They’ll find some use for him at Thunders—he’s got at least one cylinder working. If they hadn’t wanted him I’d have given him to Ben—just to encourage him to start machinery on the farm.”

“I’d sooner keep my horses, thank you,” said Ben, relieved at having something to say at last. “Give me a horse-ploughed field, even if it does take twice the labour.”

“But you’ll be getting a tractor soon, won’t you? That’s another idea altogether, and you’ll never find horses to beat that.”

Thus talking of machinery the three of them went to the door, and said goodbye under cover of argument.

“You’ll see me again before long,” cried Gervase, as he drove off.

“Will you be able to write to us?”

“Of course I will—look out for a letter in a day or two.”

With hideous grindings, explosions and plaints, the lorry went off down the drive. As it disappeared between the hedgerows, Jenny felt her heart contract in a pang of helpless pity.

“Oh, Ben ... he’s so young—and he’s never had anything.”

She would have cried, but her husband’s arm slipped round her, drawing her back into the darkening house.

§ 14

Jenny had been candid with Gervase in her account of herself. She was happy—supremely so—but there was much that would have been difficult were it not for the love which “made everything worth doing and worth bearing.” She had nothing to complain of in Ben himself. He was after marriage the same as he had been before it—gentle, homely, simple and upright, with a streak of instinctive refinement which compensated for any lack of stress on the physical cleanliness which was the god of her former tribe. It is true that he expected more of her than Jim Parish, for instance, would have done. The sight of Jenny rising at half-past six to light the kitchen fire, cooking the breakfast, and doing all the housework with the help of one small girl, did not strike him as the act of wifely devotion and Spartan virtue that it seemed to her and would have seemed to Jim. It was what the women of his experience did invariably, and with a certain naïve thickheadedness he had not expected Jenny, taken from a home of eight o’clock risings, to be different. But in all other ways he was considerate—ways in which the men of her class would most probably not have considered her; and she soon became used to the physical labour of her days. Indeed, after the first surprise at his attitude, she realised that anything else would have brought an atmosphere of unreality into the life which she loved because it was so genuine. Farmers’ wives—even prosperous farmers’ wives—did not lie in bed till eight, or sit idle while the servants worked; and Jenny was now a farmer’s wife—Mrs. Ben Godfrey of Fourhouses—with her place to keep clean, her husband and her husband’s men to feed, her dairy and her poultry to attend to.

But though she loved Ben, and loved working for him, there were other things that were hard, and she was too clear-headed not to acknowledge the difficulties she had chosen. She often longed to be alone with her husband, instead of having to share him with his mother and sisters. According to yeoman custom, his wife had been brought into his home, which was also his family’s home, and she must take what she found there. Jenny realised that she might have been worse off—she was genuinely fond of Mrs. Godfrey and Lily and Jane, and their separate quarters gave her a privacy and a freedom she would not have had on many farms—but she would have been less sensitive to the gulf between her new life and the old if she had been alone with Ben. His women, with their constant absorption in housework—making it not so much a duty to be done and then forgotten as a religion pervading the whole life—with their arbitrary standards of decorum, and their total lack of interest in any mental processes—often begot in her revolt and weariness, especially when her husband was much away. She had not known till then how much she depended on stray discussions of books and politics, on the interchange of abstract and general ideas. Ben himself could give her these stimulations, for the war had enlarged his education, and his love for her made him eager to meet her on the ground she chose. But his work often took him into the fields soon after dawn, and he would not be privately hers again till night, for the meals at Fourhouses were communal and democratic; not only Mrs. Godfrey and her daughters, but the stockman, the cow-man, the carter and the ploughboys sat down to table with the master.

Moreover, after a month or two, she began to feel her estrangement from her people. She did not miss her old acquaintances among the county families, but she felt the silence of her home more than she would ever have imagined possible. No one from Conster—her father or mother or Doris—had come near her or sent her a word. There had been the same silence up at Starvecrow which surprised her more, for she and Vera had always been friends—though of course Vera had her own special preoccupations now. Rose had called, but evidently with a view to replenishing her stores of gossip for Leasan tea-parties, and Jenny had done all she could to discourage another visit. Mary generally came over from Hastings once a week, but hers were only the visits of a fellow-exile.

In her heart, the estrangement which Jenny felt the most was between herself and Peter. She had not expected such treatment from him. She had expected anger and disappointment, certainly, a stormy interview, perhaps, but not this blank. Sometimes she told herself he was anxious about Vera, and that his own troubles had combined with her misbehaviour to keep him away. She forced herself to patience, hoping uncertainly that the fortunate birth of an heir would bring old Peter to a better frame of mind.

Meanwhile, she was reviving her friendship with Mary, or rather was building up a new one, for in old times she had felt a little afraid of her elegant, aloof sister. She was not afraid of Mary now—indeed, from the vantage of her own happy establishment she almost pitied this woman who had left so much behind her in dark places.

Mary liked Ben—but her temperament had set her at a great distance from his homely concreteness. Though she stood by her sister in her adventure, she evidently could not think “what Jenny saw in him,” and she was openly full of plans for his improvement and education.

“Why don’t you lift him up to your level instead of stooping to his? You could easily do it. He’s deeply in love with you, and, in my opinion, very much above his own way of life. Fourhouses is a good estate and he’s got plenty of money to improve it—with a little trouble he could make it into a country house and himself into a small squire.”

“Thanks,” said Jenny—“that’s what I’ve just escaped from—country houses and squires—and I don’t want to start the whole thing over again. Why should Ben try to make himself a squire, when the squires are dying out all over the country, and their estates are being broken up and sold back to the people they used to belong to?”

“Jenny, you talk like a radical!—‘God gave the land to the people’ and all that.”

“My husband’s a vice-president of the Conservative Club. It isn’t for any political reasons that I don’t want to fight my way back into the county. It’s simply that I’m sick of two things—struggle and pretence. Situated as I am, I’ve got neither—if I tried to keep what I gave up when I married Ben, I’d have both.”

“It’s all very well for you to talk like this now—when everything’s new. Even I know what the first months of marriage can be like.... But later on, when things have sobered down, you’ll feel different—you’ll want to see some of your old friends again, and wish you hadn’t shut them out.”

“If you mean the Parishes and the Hursts and the Wades and all that lot, nothing I could ever do would make them my friends again. You see, they’re friends of Father’s, and, considering his attitude towards my marriage—which would be the same whatever I did to ‘raise’ myself—they can never be friends of mine. It isn’t as if I’d moved thirty miles off and had a new sort of ‘county’ to visit me. I’m in the middle of the old crowd, and they can never be friendly with me without offending my people. No, I must be content with Ben’s friends—if I tried to ‘improve’ him we’d lose those, too, and then I’d have nobody.”

“I daresay you’re right, my dear—you sound practical, anyway. And I’ve no right to teach anyone how to arrange their lives.... It’s queer, isn’t it, Jen? I took, generally speaking, no risks when I married. I married a man I loved, a man of my own class, whom my people approved of—and look at me now. You, on the other hand, have taken every imaginable risk—a runaway match, a different class, and the family curse....”

“You’ll have to look at me twelve years hence to compare me with you.”

“I think you’re going to be all right, though—even if you don’t take my advice.”

“I’m sure I shall be all right. You see, I’m doing everything with my eyes open. You didn’t have your eyes open, Mary.”

“I know I didn’t. Very few women do. Most brides are like newborn kittens with their eyes shut.”

“Are you happy now?”

It was the first time she had dared ask the question. Mary hesitated—

“Yes, I suppose I am happy. I have enough to live on, I have my friends—I travel about, and see places and people.”

“Have you ever regretted that you didn’t marry Charles?”

“Regretted! Good Lord, no! The very opposite. I didn’t love him in that way, and we’d both have been wretched. Poor old dear! I’m glad I’d strength enough to spare him that, though I spared him nothing else....”

“Do you ever see him now?”

“Sometimes. He’s married, you know—a very young thing, who doesn’t like me too much. I didn’t expect him to marry, but I believe he’s happy. I hear that Julian is happy, too—he has two little boys and a baby girl. So I haven’t really done either of my men much harm.”

“No—it’s you who’ve suffered the harm. Why haven’t you married again, Mary? I’ve always expected you to.”

Her sister shook her head.

“I can’t—there’s something in me lacking for that. I can’t explain, and it sounds an extraordinary thing to say, but I feel as if I’d left it with Julian. I don’t mean that I still love him or any nonsense like that—I hadn’t loved him for a year before I left him ... but somehow one doesn’t get rid of a husband as easily as the divorce-courts and the newspapers seem to suppose.”

“If you’d married again you’d have forgotten Julian.”

“No, I shouldn’t, and I should have made another man unhappy—because of what’s lacking in me. I know there are lots of women who can go from the church to the divorce court and from the divorce court to the registrar’s, and leave nothing behind them in any of these places. But I’m not like that—I left my love with Julian and my pride with Charles. Sometimes I feel that if only I’d had the strength to stick to Julian a little longer, we’d have weathered things through—I’d have got back what I’d lost, and all this wouldn’t have happened. But it’s waste of time to think of that now.... Don’t worry about me, Jen. I’m happy in my own way—though it may not be yours, or many women’s, for that matter. I’ve just managed to be strong enough not to spoil Charles’s life—not to drag him down—so I’ve got one good memory.... And I’m free—that means more to me than perhaps you can realise—and I enjoy life as a spectator. I’ve suffered enough as an actor on the stage, and now I’m just beginning to feel comfortable in the stalls.”

“Don’t,” said Jenny.

She could not bear any more—this was worse than Gervase. To have spent all the treasure of life on dust and wind was even worse than to give up that treasure unspent. She found the tears running out of her eyes as she put her arms round Mary—softness of furs and sweetness of violets, and in the midst of them a sister who was half doll and half ghost.

§ 15

Towards the end of March, Peter’s daughter was born. He bore the disappointment better than anyone had expected. But lately it had not seemed to him to matter very much whether the child were a boy or a girl. His horizons were closing in upon him—they had even shut out his own inheritance, with the new powers and freedoms it would bring, and he could not look so far ahead as the prospects of his heir. Even Gervase’s defection had not stirred him long. In his first shock of outrage and disgust he had motored over to Thunders Abbey and tried to persuade his brother to come back with him, but finding him obdurate, his emotions had collapsed into a contempt which was queerly mixed with envy. If Gervase preferred these debased states of life—first in a garage and then in a monastery—to the decencies of his position as an Alard, then let him have what he wanted. It was something to know what one wanted and take it unafraid. Gervase might be a traitor, but he was not a fool.

So Peter heard unmoved Dr. Mount’s announcement that a little girl had been born, and only a trifle less unmoved received the woolly bundle of his little daughter into his arms. He did not, as some men, awake to a new sense of fatherhood at the touch of his first-born. His failure as a husband seemed to affect him as a father. He did not ask himself what he would have felt if the child had been a boy. The only question in his heart was what he would have felt if it had been Stella’s child ... but that was a useless question.

Vera was secretly glad to have a girl. She had always wanted a daughter, and lately, as her mind had detached itself more and more from her husband’s wishes, the want had become anxious. A boy she always pictured as a second Peter—heavy, obstinate, his heart set on things she did not care about—but a girl would be a companion, and her own. There would be, she felt, some chance of her growing up like her mother and sharing her mother’s adventures in intellect and beauty; also, in that new florescence of her race which had accompanied her pregnancy, she felt that her daughter would be truly a daughter of Abraham, whereas her son would be born into a public-school tradition and the heirship of a big estate—a child of the Goyim. So she stretched out her arms gladly when the baby girl was put into them, and as she looked down into the mysterious, ancient little face of the newborn, her heart leapt with joy and pride to see the tokens of her blood already discernible, not so much in its later Hebraic characteristics as in some general oriental quality, older than Abraham.

“There’s nothing of the Goy about her, is there?” she said to her mother, who had come to be with her in her confinement.

“No, indeed, there’s not. She takes after us. It’s curious how they nearly always do in a mixed marriage.”

But, in the midst of her own gratification, Vera was glad to find that her husband was not bitterly disappointed. Poor old Peter! He had been estranged from her, she knew, and had wanted to marry the Mount woman, but she could forgive him in the triumph of her recovery. She had the child, and was rapidly getting well. When she was herself again she would win him back. She knew how ... it never failed.

In her presence Peter made his disappointment seem even less than it really was. The sight of her lying there in loveliness both opulent and exhausted—knowing vaguely what she had suffered and accepted—stirred in him a strange, admiring pity which forbade an unthankful word. He bore no resentment against her now. It was not her fault that she stood between him and Stella. Probably he had treated her badly—she might have suffered nearly as much as he.... And he was glad she had her reward.

But even when looking tenderly down on her, speaking tenderly to her, he could not picture himself going on with their marriage again. When his family and acquaintance tried to cheer him up for the disappointment of having a girl, they always said, “But it’s only the first, Peter...” “The first never really matters....” and all the time he was feeling that there could not be another. It was a preposterous feeling, he knew, for, after Gervase’s defection, it was imperative that he should have an heir; and men are not like women in these things. He had never had Stella—he could never have Stella. Why should he feel this aversion from doing his duty as a husband and an Alard? He did not know—but he felt it, almost to shrinking. He felt that his marriage was at an end—broken and yet binding—for Stella could not take him after divorce any more than she could take him without it. And everyone said “It’s only the first”.... “It’s just as well for the girl to come first—to be the oldest.”...

A few days after the baby’s birth Vera had a letter from Jenny, congratulating her and sending her love to Peter. She did not ask her brother to come over and see her, but Peter guessed what was behind her message. In the loneliness of those first days when the house seemed full of women and affairs from which he was shut out, he had a longing to go over to Fourhouses, and see Jenny and be friends again. But he was held back, partly by a feeling of awkwardness, a sense of the explanations and reproaches his visit would involve, partly by a remaining stiffness against her treachery, and most of all by a dull stirring sense of envy—the same as, though more accountable than, the envy he had felt for Gervase. Here again was someone who knew what she wanted and had got it, whom the family had not bound fast and swallowed up—and the worst of it all was that, unlike Gervase, she had got what Peter wanted, too. In vain he told himself that she could never be happy with Godfrey, could never adapt herself to the life she had chosen, that her plunge would be no more justified than his withdrawal. He dared not go near Fourhouses all the same.

§ 16

The hopes on which the baby’s birth seemed to have fallen heaviest were Sir John’s. The old man had had none of Peter’s uncertainty or anxiety before the event—he had felt sure the child would be a boy. The news that it was a girl had been a terrible shock, and though it had not, as was feared at first, brought on another seizure, it was soon seen to have increased the nervous unsteadiness of his constitution. He alone, of all the Alards, did not join in the cry of “This is the first.” First or last, it was probably the only grandchild he would live to see, and he expressed his disappointment with the candid selfishness of old age.

“Here have I been waiting for a boy—counting on a boy—and it’s a girl after all. What good’s a girl to us? We’ve got plenty of girls—or those who were once girls”—and he glared at Doris—“all they do is either to disgrace us in the divorce-courts, marry the sweep, or turn into bad-tempered old maids. We’ve got enough girls. It’s a boy we want—with that Gervase gone off to be a monk. I’ve been badly served by my children.”

“But, Father, it wasn’t Peter’s fault,” urged Doris unskilfully.

“Wasn’t it, Ma’am? You _do_ know a lot—more than an unmarried woman ought to know about such things. I believe you even know that the baby wasn’t found under a gooseberry bush.”

“Oh, Father, don’t talk in such a dreadful way—He’s really getting quite awful,” she said as she let Peter out—“I sometimes think there’s something wrong with his brain.”

“There probably is,” said Peter.

Indeed, of late Sir John had grown alarmingly eccentric. His love of rule had passed beyond the administration of his estate, and showed itself in a dozen ways of petty dominion. He seemed resolved to avenge his authority over the three rebellious children on the two who had remained obedient. Not only did he put up a forest of forbidding notices over his estate, to keep out the general public, which had hitherto had free entrance to most of his fields and woods, but he forbade his own children to use certain paths. He would not let Peter come by the field way from Starvecrow, but insisted on his going round by the road. He would stop Doris on the threshold of an afternoon’s calling, and compel her to sit and read to him, by choice books which he calculated to offend her old-maidish susceptibilities. He found Doris better game than Peter, for whereas the son remained silent under his kicks, Doris never failed to give him all the fun he wanted in the way of protests, arguments, laments and tears. But from both he obtained obedience, through their dread of exciting him and bringing on another stroke.

His warfare was less open with his wife. He attacked her indirectly through the servants, who were always giving notice owing to his intimidation. Even Wills had once distantly informed his mistress that since Sir John did not seem to appreciate his services he might soon have to consider the advisability of transferring them elsewhere. Appleby had actually given notice, after a mysterious motor drive, from which Sir John had returned on foot—but had been persuaded by Peter to reconsider it and stay on. The female staff was in a state of perpetual motion. No cook would stand her master’s comments on her performances, no housemaid endure his constant bullying and bell-ringing. He had perversely moved into a top-floor bedroom, so as to be out of reach of his wife and Speller, who disliked stairs. Here he would make tea at five o’clock every morning with water from his hot-water bottle boiled up on a spirit lamp. This procedure filled Lady Alard with a peculiar horror when she discovered it; indeed, from her remarks it would appear that all her husband’s other misdoings were negligible in comparison.

§ 17

A few days before Easter, Peter came suddenly to Fourhouses. He came early in the afternoon, and gave no explanation either of his coming or of his staying away. Jenny was upstairs, helping her mother-in-law turn out the conjugal bedroom, when she heard the sound of hoofs in the yard. She ran to the window, thinking it was Ben come home unexpectedly from an errand to Wickham Farm, but had no time to be disappointed in the rush of her surprise at seeing Peter.

“There’s Peter—my brother—come at last!” she cried to Mrs. Godfrey, and, tearing off her dusting cap, she ran downstairs, still in her gingham overall. She wanted to open the door to him herself.

He could not have expected her to do this, for he was staring uninterestedly at his boots. Her gingham skirts evidently suggested a servant to him, for he lifted his eyes slowly, then seemed surprised to see her standing all bright and blowzed before him.

“Jenny!”

“Hullo, Peter! So you’ve come to see me at last.”

He mumbled something about having been passing through Icklesham.

“Won’t you come in?—the man’ll take your horse. Hi! Homard—take Mr. Alard’s horse round to the stable.”

“I can’t stop long,” said Peter awkwardly.

“But you must, after all this time—come in.”

She had meant to ask him why he had kept away so long and why he had come now; but when she found herself alone with him in the kitchen, she suddenly changed her mind, and decided to let things be. He probably had no reasonable explanation to offer, and unless she meant to keep the breach unhealed, she had better treat this visit as if there was nothing to explain about it.

“How’s Vera?” she asked.

“She’s getting on splendidly, thanks.”

“And the baby?”

“That’s getting on too.”

“Do tell me about it—is it like her or like you?”

“It’s like her—a regular little Yid.”

“Never mind—she will probably grow up very beautiful.”

Peter mumbled inaudibly.

Jenny looked at him critically. He seemed heavier and stupider than usual. He gave her the impression of a man worn out.

“You don’t look well.... Are you worried? I do hope you aren’t dreadfully disappointed the baby’s a girl.”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course not. The first one never does. You’re sure to have others ... boys.”

Peter did not answer, and Jenny felt a little annoyed with him. If this was the way he behaved at home she was sorry for Vera. It was curious how nervy these stolid men often were....

“How are Father and Mother?” she asked, to change the subject—“I suppose you go up to Conster every day.”

“Twice most days. They’re not up to much—at least Father isn’t. He’s had some pretty good shocks lately, you know. He was dreadfully upset the baby’s being a girl—and that fool Gervase’s business was a terrible blow for him.”

“It was a blow for me too. I did my best to put him off it, but it was no use. My only comfort is that apparently it’ll be some time before he’s really let in for it. He may come to his senses before then.”

“I don’t think so. He’s as obstinate as the devil.”

“What—have _you_ tried arguing with him?”

“Yes—when I heard what he’d done, I drove over to Thunders Abbey or whatever it’s called, and did my level best to bring him back with me. But it was all no good—you might as well try to argue with a dead owl.”

“Good Lord!—you went over to Thunders, and tried to bring him back! Poor old Peter! But do tell me how he is, and what he’s doing. What sort of place is it?”

“Oh a great big barrack, spoiling the country for miles round. But they’ve got some fine land and absolutely all the latest ideas in farming—motor traction and chemical fertilisation and all that.”

“And was Gervase working on the farm?”

“No, Brother Joseph—that’s what the fool’s called now—Brother Joseph, when I saw him, was scrubbing out the kitchen passage on his hands and knees like a scullery maid. A dignified occupation for an Alard!”

“Poor old Gervase, how he’d hate that! But he’ll be all the more likely to come to his senses and give it up, especially when he’s got over his disappointment about Stella. I feel it’s really that which was at the bottom of it all.”

Peter did not speak for a moment. He leaned back in his wooden armchair, staring at the fire, which was leaping ruddily into the chimney’s cavern.

“Do you mind if I light my pipe?” he asked after a bit.

“Of course not—do. I’m glad you’re going to stay.”

He took matches and his tobacco pouch out of his pocket, and she noticed suddenly that his hands were shaking. For the first time a dreadful suspicion seized her. His heaviness—his nerviness—his queer, lost manner ... was it possible, she wondered, that Peter _drank_?

“Have you heard when the Mounts are leaving?” she asked him, stifling her thoughts.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Stella was here three days ago, and she said that they’ve at last settled about the practice. She seemed to think they might be free to go at the end of May.”

“Oh.”

“I expect Vera’s glad they didn’t go off in a hurry, and leave her with a new man for the baby. Dr. Mount’s the best maternity doctor for miles round.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

He was falling back into silence, and no remark of hers on any topic seemed able to rouse him out of it, though she tried once or twice to re-animate him on the subject of Gervase. He lounged opposite her in his armchair, puffing at his pipe, and staring at the fire, now and then painfully dragging out a “yes” or a “no.” She was beginning to feel bored with him and to think about her work upstairs. Was this all he had to say to her after three months’ estrangement?—an estrangement which he had never troubled to explain. She had been weak with him—let him off too easily—she ought to have “had things out with him” about her marriage. She had a right to know his reasons for forgiving her just as she had a right to know his reasons for shunning her.... He had treated her inexplicably.

She was working herself up to wrath like this when Peter suddenly spoke of his own accord.

“This place is like what Starvecrow used to be.”

“Used to be?—when?”

“Before Vera and I came to it—when the Greenings had it. Do you remember the kitchen fireplace?—it was just like this.”

“Starvecrow is far grander than Fourhouses now. I’m just a plain farmer’s wife, Peter—I’m never going to pretend to be anything else.”

“And Starvecrow was just a plain farm; but we’ve changed it into a country house.”

“Mary’s been wanting me to do the same for Fourhouses, but I’ve told her I’d be very sorry to. I like it best as it is.”

“So do I.”

“Then are you sorry you’ve altered Starvecrow?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s a lovely place, Peter. You’ve made a perfect little country house out of it. I’m sure you wouldn’t be pleased to have it the ramshackle old thing it used to be.”

“Yes, I should.”

“Well, Vera wouldn’t, anyhow. You and she are in a totally different position from us. I’m not keeping Fourhouses as it is because I don’t think it’s capable of improvement, but because I don’t want to put myself outside my class and ape the county. You’re just the opposite—you’ve got appearances to keep up; it would never do if you lived in the funny hole Starvecrow used to be in the Greenings’ time.”

“I loved it then—it was just like this—the kitchen fire ... and the fire in the office—it used to hum just like this—as if there was a kettle on it. The place I’ve got now isn’t Starvecrow.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know—but it isn’t Starvecrow. I’ve spoilt Starvecrow. I’ve changed it, I’ve spoilt it—Vera’s people have spoilt it with their damned money. It isn’t Starvecrow. Do you remember how the orchard used to come right up to the side wall? They’ve cut it down and changed it into a garden. The orchard’s beyond the garden—then it doesn’t look so much like a farm. A country house doesn’t have an orchard just outside the drawing-room windows....”

He had left his chair, and was pacing up and down the room. His manner seemed stranger than ever, and Jenny felt a little frightened.

“I’m glad you don’t want me to change Fourhouses,” she said soothingly—“I must tell Mary what you’ve said.”

“But I do want you to change it,” he cried—“I can’t bear to see it as it is—what Starvecrow used to be.”

“Don’t be silly, Peter. Starvecrow is much better now than it ever used to be.”

He turned on her almost angrily—

“Goodbye.”

She felt glad he was going, and still more glad to hear her husband’s voice calling her from the yard.

“There’s Ben. Must you really be going, Peter?”

“Yes—I must.”

He walked out of the room, and she followed him—both meeting Ben on the doorstep. Young Godfrey was surprised to see his elder brother-in-law—he had made up his mind that Peter would never come to Fourhouses. He was still more surprised at his abstracted greeting.

“Hullo, Godfrey. Glad to see you—that’s a fine mare. Jenny, will you tell them to bring my horse round?”

“Yes.... Carter! Mr. Alard’s horse.... Peter can’t stay any longer, Ben. I told him you’d be sorry.”

“I’m sure I’m very sorry, Sir”—he blushed at his slip into deference, but was quite unable to say “Peter”—“Is Mrs. Alard doing well?” he asked clumsily.

“Very well, thank you.”

“I hope you’ll come and see us again soon,” said Jenny—“I’d like to show you the house.”

“Yes, I’ll come,” he returned absently, and went to meet his horse, which was being led to him across the yard.

§ 18

The sun was still high as Peter rode back through the crosscountry lanes to Starvecrow. The days were lingering now, and the fields were thickening for May. In the hay-fields the young crops were already marking their difference from the pastures with a rust of sorrel and a gilding of buttercups, and the hedges were losing their traceried outline in smothers of vetch and convolvulus.

Peter mechanically noted the progress of the winter sowings on Scragoak, Stonelink, and other farms he passed. These were all dependencies of Alard, and their welfare was bound up with Conster. Pleasant, homely places, their sprawling picturesqueness made up for any want of repair to all but the eye of his father’s agent. Peter saw the needs of most of them—rebuilding, rethatching, redraining—and his mind, mechanically and from force of habit, deplored the impossibility of taking action. The position seemed quite hopeless, for he could do nothing now, and things would be even worse at his father’s death, when the weight of death-duties and the pressure of mortgage holders would probably choke out the little life there was left in the Alard estates. But even this ultimate foreboding was only mechanical—his real emotions, his most vital pains, were all centred in himself.

He had spoken truly when he told Jenny that he could not bear the sight of Fourhouses. He could not even bear the thought of it. When he thought of that quiet, ancient house, with its bricked floors and wide, sunny spaces, with its humming kitchen fire and salt-riddled beam-work—above all when he thought of it as the home of loving hearts and the peace which follows daring—he felt unendurably the contrast of what he had made of Starvecrow. It was what Starvecrow used to be—it was what Starvecrow might have been ... for even if he had renounced the place he loved for the woman he loved, Starvecrow would have still gone on being the same, either as the home of another agent, or—if his father had really fulfilled his threat of selling it—the home of some honest farmer like Ben Godfrey, a man who would not only live in it but possess it, and give it back the yeoman dignity it had lost.

Starvycrow—Starvycrow.

What was it now? What had he made it? It was a small country house, perfectly furnished and appointed, with a set of model buildings attached. It was the home of a burnt-out love, of the husks of marriage, of a husband and wife whose hearts were foes and whose souls were strangers, of lost illusions, of dead hopes, and wasted sacrifices. That was what it was now. That was what he had made it.

He remembered words which long ago he had spoken to Stella.... “Places never change—they are always the same. Human beings may change, but places never do.” Those words were untrue—places can change, do change—Starvecrow had changed, he had changed it. While Stella, the woman, had not changed. She was still the same—the dear, the lovely ... and the unchanged, unchanging Stella might have been his instead of this changed Starvecrow. He had sacrificed the substance of life to a dream, a shadow, which without the substance must go up in smoke. He had sold his birth-right for a morsel of bread—or rather he had given away his bread for the sake of an inheritance in the clouds, which he could never hold.

His old hopes and his old fears had died together. Neither the fact that his newborn child was a girl, nor the final defection of Gervase the heir-apparent could make him hold his breath for Alard. These things had not killed his dreams, as once he had thought, but had merely shown that they were dead. The thought of his father’s death, which could not now be far off, and his own succession to the property, with all the freedom and power it would bring, no longer stirred his flagging ambition. When he became Sir Peter he could probably save the House of Alard in spite of death-duties and mortgagees. Without restrictions, master of his own economies, he could put new life into the failing estate—or at least he could nurse and shelter it through its difficult times till the days came when the government _must_ do something to set the Squires on their legs again.... But the thought had no power to move him—indeed Alard hardly seemed worth saving. It was a monster to which he had sacrificed his uttermost human need. Gervase had been a wise man, after all. And Jenny ... Jenny had done what Peter might have done. He and Stella might now have been together in some wide farmhouse, happy, alive and free. This child might have been her child.... Oh, how could he have been so blind? He had not known how much he really loved her—he had thought she was just like other women he had loved, and that he could forget her. She would go away, and she would manage at last to forget him; but he who stayed behind would never be able to forget her. He would live on and on, live on her memory—the memory of her touch and voice, her narrow shining eyes, her laughter and her kisses—live on and on until even memory grew feeble, and his heart starved, and died.