Chapter TWO: § 1

Daniel had not remembered to order the sherry, so most of the morning was spent in driving in to Lewes to fetch it. Spot, the pony, was eighteen years old, and the trap must have been about twice as old as that, so the equipage lacked both speed and smartness. None the less Dan enjoyed the jog-trot over the Valley road, past Iford and Spring Barn and all the flat wildness of the Brooks, even though at least fifty motor-cars must have passed him and covered him with dust.

“Nearly got done in, Spot, that time--nearly sent west the two of us. Yah, you brute--I’ve got your number”--at the whisking rear of a Rolls-Royce--“road-hog, that’s what you are, ain’t he, Spot?”

After some mutual impoliteness with the wine-merchant, whose bill had not been paid, Dan brought back the sherry, and took his stand in the bar. He generally worked in the bar of mornings, to make up for his evenings elsewhere. The mornings were comparatively sedate--a stray labourer or two, or a tramp with the price of a pint on him, and generally a lot of conversation. Outside the Crown a comfortable couple of gigs were drowsing, but the George’s patrons usually came on foot, except at race time.

At last the clock struck two, sign of banishment or liberation, according to one’s circumstances and point of view. Dan came into the kitchen whistling, and buttoning Ernley’s British warm up to his chin.

“Where you going now, Dan?” asked his mother.

“Over to Batchelors’. They asked me to tea.”

“And when ull you be back?”

“Not till closing time. I promised Len I’d have supper with them.”

“Why, the boy’s never at home.”

“Well, mum--seeing as I’ve been on your jobs all the morning----”

“Oh, yes, I know you grudge everything you do for me.”

“But I don’t, mum. It’s only, as I’ve told you, I must see my friends.”

“You were over at Batchelors’ yesterday.”

“Well ... say, is there anything you want me here for this afternoon?”

“Nothing. I got Christopher to sit by me. He don’t want any sweetheart but his mother.”

“He’s only a kid--not old enough for girls.”

“I don’t like girls,” said Chris.

“Well, you wait till you’ve cut your teeth.”

“Anyways, when I take a girl, I’ll take somebody fresh, not another chap’s leavings.”

Once more Kitty Sheather saved her darling’s beauty; but this time she would not have done it if she had not run between them, for Dan was really angry.

“He’s a swine to speak so--and I’ll knock his head off some time when he ain’t hiding behind your petticoats.”

“Well, you chipped at him first--with your talk about cutting teeth.”

“I don’t care what I said. He’s a swine to speak so. I ain’t taking nobody’s leavings. I--I----”

Daniel spluttered.

“Whose coat are you wearing?” mocked Kitty. “Isn’t that somebody’s leavings?”

“Well, seeing as ... well, mother, you’ve got no call ... seeing as I bought your curtains ... leastways----”

His anger was turning to grief and was choking him. He was only one against two this afternoon--his father having gone for a “lay down” upstairs--and he could not stand any more of it. He muttered something thick and foolish and went out.

The air of the Down cooled him. His way to Batchelors’ lay across Heighton Hill--first by the little chalky path that wound up from the end of Bullockdean Street, and then by the green faint track that crossed the ridge into the wider valley of the Cuckmere. Before him spread the curves and swells of the down-top, cut into clear strips of colour by the plough--brown and gold and delicate green, with the round eye of a dew-pond looking up to the sailing clouds. Dan watched the birds that came with flurrying, dipping wings across the bottoms, and they seemed to join with the sailing clouds and the spreading Down in giving him an impression of freedom and vastness, which healed. Something like this the sea would feel if he were on it ... for the first time his father’s mad scheme had an attractive savour.... But, no--it was foolish to think of the sea; he was a landsman born--besides he loved the land--and he loved pre-eminently two who lived on land--his mother and Belle Shackford. Neither of his loves seemed in a flourishing way just then--his mother thought of no one but her youngest boy, and he feared that Belle, in spite of what he had said to Ernley last night, was turning to him only because she wanted a contrast, wanted comfort.... Poor Belle! But that didn’t make his loyalty any less. He owed his mother service, even if she did not appreciate it; and if all Belle wanted was comfort, then he owed her that.

As he walked over the Down’s back, past the dew-pond and Five Lords Bush, he wondered how many times he had taken that way on Ernley’s errand. Often during the summer and continually during the autumn he had tramped to Batchelors’, to inquire, to explain, to reconcile. He had carried notes in his pocket, and messages in his head--he had had to bear the blame of Belle’s freezing, with occasional rewards in the praise of her melting. He had seen her angry, sorrowful, relenting, glad, tender, obdurate, despairing. He knew all her moods, all the changes in her voice, all the changes in her eyes. Surely he had never known a woman so well; and yet with all his knowledge he had come to love her--indeed, out of knowledge and with knowledge had grown his love. He had begun to love her before the autumn was well on its way--that is some weeks before the final quarrel, which, with one brief interval of reconciliation, had lasted over two months. And now he was free--loosed by Ernley--to go and see her on his own behalf. She had always a kind welcome for him, and he felt this could not have been unless she felt towards him pretty much as he had guessed and said. He did not flatter himself that she loved him as she had loved Ernley--but then he did not expect that, would scarcely have wanted it. He had felt the distant scorch of that fire, and he knew it belonged to an order of things he did not understand.

Ernley was right--it was terrible to love like that. Dan didn’t hold with the wickedness of it, and though he had helped, he had always grieved. Love ought to be a warm, friendly, comfortable thing--a glowing hearth, not all the house on fire. Though of course, if you asked him, he knew well enough all the wickedness was due to that James Munk not letting them marry, and keeping Ernley out of the business, so as he hadn’t a penny he could call his own. If Ernley and Belle could have married and settled down there wouldn’t have been all this flare up. For he knew Belle, knew her sort, knew that all the trouble was because she wasn’t a wife, and had been made for nothing else. Of course Ernley was different--you couldn’t say he was made for nothing but a husband. Still, old Ernley would have settled down if he’d been given a chance. Now it was too late--the house of love was burnt, and those who had tried to keep house in it wandered separately, searching for a roof.

§ 2

Batchelors’ Hall stands in the flat waste of fields between the Firle downland and the lower Dicker. It looks down on the windings of the Cuckmere through a ragged spinney, remains of the ancient state of trees with which it was once surrounded. Some hundred years ago Batchelors’ was still the Manor of the two Dickers, but during the last century it had crumbled from manor to farmhouse, as its estates waned from the holding of two parishes to a few hundred acres of indifferent arable and boggy grass.

To-day it stood unprosperous and untidy, a mere tenant farm, beautiful perhaps to the inexperienced eye, that can ignore fruitfulness run to waste as it feasts on lichened walls, great roof bossed with stone-crop, and those sharp, sinister gables of pre-Tudor imagining--but tragic to those with knowledge to see it as it was, forlorn and rotten, like one of the derelict trees beside the Cuckmere.

To Daniel Sheather the most wonderful part of Batchelors’ was its barn, flanking it on the west, and indeed a very cathedral among barns. Its acre of roof flowed red and golden over a hundred beams, supported inside by wooden pillars that made aisles of its vastness. It had the dim, sweet smells of an old church, and a church’s queer lights and glooms--it had little warm homely corners, and great arches and aisles and shafts of drifting light, full of mysterious motes, that raked across its darkness, and displayed like altars the piles of oats and hay and linseed, the root-slicer and the straw-rope-twister and other agricultural shrines.

Daniel would have liked always to meet Belle Shackford in the barn, to talk to her there in the homeliness and dimness of it, away from her family, away from her home with its cheapness and decay. But instead he had to see her in the sitting-room at Batchelors’, a room crowded enormously with cheap, modern furniture, the walls papered with a heavily striped black-and-white paper trailed over with roses. The same paper was in the dining-room, where they always had tea. The Shackfords lived in what they called the “new part” of the building--that is to say, a wing which had been added disastrously in the Regency. Here they had high ceilings and high windows with soaring sashes, instead of the low-beamed ceilings and casement windows that were to be found in the rest of the house. It was far too large for them to inhabit the whole, so they left the old, the essential Batchelors’, either empty or full of farmhouse and family stores, and lived in the rooms best adapted to the eldest Miss Shackford’s ideas on furniture and household decoration.

The family consisted of a father, three daughters and a son. Lucy was the eldest, a thin, smart girl, with a mass of carefully, elaborately dressed hair. All the Shackford girls had wonderful heads of hair, but Belle, the next sister, wore hers in untidy, tumbling heaps, like a stook of corn half-blown over by the wind. Indeed, it must be confessed that the whole appearance of Belle could have been described as untidy and tumbling. She was a big, tall girl, extraordinarily well-developed for her twenty years, with more pretensions to beauty than her sisters, but fewer to elegance. Like all the Miss Shackfords she was fond of clothes, and spent in finery most of the little money that came her way; but she was reckless in detail. Her skirts hung askew, her blouses gaped, revealing camisoles and chemises in whose integrity the pin had more share than the stitch. Daniel knew Belle’s underclothes by sight in a way which embarrassed his modest soul. The two other children were a rowdy girl of fifteen and a sedate boy a year younger. They had nothing in common except their teens and their derision of those sop-headed males who came to court their sisters.

Daniel approached the house with some diffidence, being uncertain which member of the family he would encounter first. Each would have a different attitude with which to overwhelm him. Lucy would be ladylike and superior, obviously comparing him to his disadvantage with her own suitor, who was a chemist’s assistant in Lewes. Nellie would make noisy fun of him; Tim would make a more deadly sort of quiet fun, and Belle would be just Belle--beautiful, blowsy, tragic, sweet and utterly confounding.

As it happened, he met their father. Fred Shackford was not a bad fellow, though all the neighbourhood said he was a damn bad farmer. He seemed almost to encourage Daniel’s courtship; perhaps because he saw that though young Sheather was inferior to young Munk in every point of position, education, breeding, air and wealth, he was superior in the one point of intention. His intentions were strictly honourable; in other words, strictly practical. He had every intention of marrying Belle and taking her away.

“Hullo! sir,” he cried cheerily from the doorstep. “Come to tea with the girls? They’re just starting.”

Daniel came in, breathing hard.

The three Miss Shackfords and their brother were sitting round the table in the dining-room with the black-and-white striped wallpaper. Lucy sat at the head in her best silk blouse, with her hair done a new way. Belle sat on one side in her old woollen jersey, which gaped to display sky-blue silk beneath, and her hair was done in the old way. Daniel shook hands all round, even with hateful Tim and Nellie, and sat down at the table, squeezed between Fred Shackford and Belle.

The conversation was colourlessly polite. It consisted chiefly of remarks about the weather and the pressing of the visitor’s appetite. Dan felt as sop-headed as he knew Tim and Nellie thought him. Belle always had this effect upon him, reducing him by her odd, mixed pressure of floppy beauty and keen tragedy to the likeness of a deaf and dumb idiot. She did not have it so much when they were alone; queerly enough he was never so overpoweringly conscious of her when they were alone as when he saw her in the midst of her family. It was when Belle joined with the others in talking to him about the weather, about the new sheep-dip they were going to try this year, about the prices of hops and wheat, that he found her utterly overwhelming. During the summer and autumn they had had many interviews of terror and intimacy, but these had never embarrassed him in the same way as this light rattling of the conversational counters round the family tea-table.

All the Shackford girls as well as Tim and their father worked on the farm, and their rough, toil-worn hands were in startling contrast with their silk blouses, lace collars and elaborately dressed hair.

“I’m dreading the lambing,” said Lucy. “I know what it means, with old Gadgett getting past his work and all. I’ll have perhaps half a dozen lambs in the kitchen. My, it’s a life!”

“I like lambs in the kitchen,” said Belle in her husky voice. “Dear little mites, it’s a happiness to give them their bottles.”

“I’ll remember that when the time comes,” said Lucy. “I don’t say I shouldn’t like to see them sucking if I’d time to enjoy it, but I haven’t, and that’s plain. There’s nothing makes you care so little about animals as farming,” she remarked, as a side-piece of conversation to Dan.

“I reckon there ain’t,” was his lame reply.

“Oh, I dunno,” said Belle; “it isn’t the animals I mind, it’s the work.”

“Animals mean work,” said Lucy, “especially when you’re like us and can’t afford a decent shepherd’s pay. We wouldn’t keep Gadgett another month if it wasn’t that he takes eighteen bob a week, and all the young chaps belong to the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, and think they’ll work from nine till four, as if a farm was the same as a factory----” She tossed her head to finish the sentence.

“Len’s getting a bit down in the mouth over Brakey Bottom,” ventured Dan.

“Oh, I don’t pity a man. I don’t see that there’s any cause for a man to get low because he has to work hard. But when it comes to girls, it’s a shame. Six o’clock I got up yesterday, and in bed at eleven, and to-day up at six again. I tell you my back’s aching. And I want to go up to London next week and see my feeonsay’s people. They live quite near Westbourne Grove, and always take upper circle tickets when they go to the theatre. Oh, I like London, I do.”

“I don’t,” said Belle, with a sidelong glance through the window at the dark flow of the Down against the sunset.

“Nor do I,” said Shackford, “if it’s going to fetch my girls away to theatres. Always gadding these girls are, Mr. Sheather; always after theatres and pictures and shops. All except Belle, that’s to say”--remembering his visitor’s Intentions--“she’s more fond of the country like. But Lucy--she’s sometimes in to Eastbourne twice a week for the shops.”

“And Belle, too, father,” said Lucy hotly; “she came with me both these last times, and spent a shilling more than I did. And she hasn’t any appearances to keep up like I have--engaged to a young man in good circumstances. I must dress up to my position.”

“Hold your tongue,” said her father.

The conversation was now showing signs of leaving those rarefied levels on which Daniel could not breathe; but just as he was almost beginning to enjoy it, Miss Shackford swept it back on to the heights.

“If everyone’s finished,” she said icily, “I suggest we all go into the drawing-room and listen to the gramophone.”

§ 3

This adjournment was all according to the local rules of courtship, and Daniel had no sense of frustration as he and the Shackford family sat stiffly round the room on the “tapestried suite,” while the ancient bell-mouth gramophone gave forth such strains as “The Rag Time Violin” and “Honolulu Lu.” The first stages of a wooing were always conducted more or less in public, and he knew that he had moved forward rather than backward from those solitary meetings in the lane or on the down, when he had pleaded with Belle as Ernley’s advocate. The family acknowledged his pretensions by thus surrounding him and entertaining him; he was a suitor publicly proclaimed.

Neither was he conscious of any outrage done to the old walls--to Batchelors’ dignity of casement and gable, to the manorial memories of the ancient trees, nodding now against the first stars--by the gimcrack of this new-style farmhouse-parlour, its noisy colours and sounds. His experience held nothing of the quiet old ways, of the old oak and chintz, of the farmer’s daughters in ginghams and sun bonnets. Those things he considered rather to belong to the old folk of the cottages, to old Gadgett and others like him, who had not moved with the times. The Shackfords were essentially up-to-date, which did not mean that they were better farmers than their forbears, but that they had somehow brought into the mellow sweetness and rotting dignity of Batchelors’ the air of strayed townees. One might have imagined the old house longing to spew them and their furniture out of its venerable maw, in which they existed only as foreign, fermenting substance.

Belle alone seemed to have a certain affinity with her surroundings. It might have been because her love of the Lights o’ Lewes, of cinemas and shops, was superficial rather than essential, that she had never craved for them except as means to an end, the end of love, seeking her romance in the lighted mouths of picture-palaces and under the dazzle of street lamps, as her grandmothers had sought it in the dark mouths of lanes and under the dazzle of the stars. Belle knew that love was slow-footed in the lanes but swift on the pavements in the light of the shops. It was up and down those golden pavements of Lewes, under the hanging nimbus of the town’s night, that she and Ernley Munk had first met and hunted each other. But she had been glad when the hunt passed out into the lanes and into the sheltered, reedy places of the Cuckmere. And now, when the hunt was over, when love had been caught and killed, she no longer wanted to go back into the town--she still preferred the quietness of the fields, the bareness of the Downs, the darkness of the reedy places of the Cuckmere.

To-night, when at last in a silence of the gramophone, Daniel rose to make reluctant farewells, she surprised him by offering to walk a part of the way home with him up the Down. This was not a recognized part of the courtship, and the freedom of the offer made him more doubtful than hopeful of her favour. Her family were surprised too, and not well pleased; they felt such forwardness might drive the suitor away. Poor Belle had always been too much given to freedoms.

“You’d never want to go out now--it’s growing dark,” said Lucy.

“I’ve been stuck to the yard all day,” said Belle, “and I want a stretch.”

She did not wait for out of doors to take it, but stretched herself as she sat there on the piano stool, spreading out her arms and throwing back her head, so that her strong, round neck looked like the trunk of a tree with the muscles at its base like roots in the earth, and her hair like flying branches.

“Belle!” exclaimed Lucy, and sniggered.

She rose, still stretching, to her feet.

“Come on,” she said to Daniel. “If I go now I can get a breath of air before it turns cold.”

Daniel made polite farewells all round, during which Belle huddled into one of the men’s overcoats hanging in the hall. Her hair was like a pale froth in the dusk as they walked through the yard, and out into the farmhouse lane which led towards the Down. Her face was dredged of colour and her eyes no longer held the warm blue sky, but the cold moon. Dan felt a little afraid of her, even though he was alone. He wondered whether perhaps she had come with him to give him a message for Ernley, to ask him to carry once more in his unwilling head words of submission and reconciliation. He had already carried so many, and one more would make too many now.

But she did not speak of Ernley, though after a time they fell into a desultory conversation. It struck him that after all she might have come out with him only because she was tired of the farm, tired of the yard with its endless small toils, tired of the kitchen and the parlour with their crowding and shrillness. She wanted quiet, she wanted coolness, she wanted rest, she wanted room. But she might have had these without his company ... then perhaps after all she had favoured him by coming with him. It seemed as if he, too, were a necessary part of her refreshment. He felt his cheeks glow, and he lost the thread of what she was saying--her voice beside him in the twilight was a song without words.

They came to the foot of the steep chalky path which ascends Firle and is known as the Bostal Way. Once no doubt it was a track on the turf of the hillside, now it was sunk deep, into a queer tunnel, which to-night was all black and white with the cast of its own shadows and the gleam of the chalk in the dusk. In the entrance of it Belle paused.

“I won’t go any farther--I’ll turn back here.”

She wasn’t going to speak of Ernley after all. He reproached himself for having lost any of the sweetness of her company in doubts and surmises. If only she would go a little farther with him and let him give himself entirely to the joy of her presence.

“Come up with me to the top of the hill--don’t go now.”

She shook her head, till her hair was like swimming light.

“No; I must get back now. Lucy ull want me to help with the supper--we have the men staying for it, you know.”

She was turning to leave him without handshake or formal farewell. Suddenly he knew he could not let her go till he had tried her.

His hand shot out of the darkness and took hers. He felt it warm and heavy in his--he pulled her to him by it, and at first, taken by surprise, she came, then began to hold back.

“Belle ... don’t ... I must.”

“No, Dan--oh, no----”

But he had pulled her to him and was holding her against him. He did not dare kiss her, but his body thrilled against hers, content merely to have it close, so that their hearts beat together.

Then suddenly her breathing thickened into a sob, she drooped towards him, seemed to melt into him, and the next thing he knew was that his mouth was holding hers--melting into it--the next that they had suddenly gone separate ways, he uphill and she down.