Chapter XIV: Adam Speaks

Seven moons, one after another, peeped through Cherrydale’s trees that broke the bareness of the land about. It was going to be a white Yule; such as Christmas cards are made from. Every step of Cherrydale’s lanes, now, would have made Christmas vignettes. Every bush was ablossom with puffs of snow, as though trying to mimic May. White roofs, window-ledges, gardens.

Dawns came up over the dumb, sheeted hills with torch of gold blazing over a world in its winding-sheet.

At noon the village would be trying to shovel itself a path from each one of the little doors, and a path down the one street, only to have it covered again in the night-time. Afternoons had sapphire and emerald skies against which hips and haws that had managed to poke through tumbles of snow, burnt blood-red. The brooks, wandering in all directions, were lamp-black. When the sun sank the moon came up. The hills changed from blinding white to lavender and rose-pink, then--into silver, under that moon, after the sapphire of the sky had faded into that wash of Iceland green that heralded night. Every stone wall was snow-blown. Some were entirely hidden.

The rough, broken landscape was buried under a soft graciousness without one single line of ugliness. It was a super-beauty that had in it something almost uncanny.

Cherry had not been out with his pack for a whole week.

But he was not worrying.

He was pedlar monarch in the dale.

A year and a half had given Cherry a good grip on the feminine heart of the little villages.

His success as the Little Pedlar was becoming as assured as had been that of the Big Porter.

Nan had as yet had no relapse.

There was peace in the Cherry castle.

But Cherry had one care. He was not satisfied about Polly.

The making of her into a woman appeared to have put a strain upon her. She was thin. She never sat down in the old easy, adolescent way. He missed the foolish lightness of her giggle. She had let all her frocks down.

She was working hard, of course. Every week she was singing somewhere. The religious bodies found that fresh Harker voice an asset--and a cheap asset.

Even Nan noticed that “our Polly” was altering.

It was “our Polly” now--not “that bitch.”

The fear of God, in Nan’s case, had worked out on the side of greater politeness and the scrubbing brush.

Nan was Christmas-decorating, though it was yet eight days to Christmas.

She was mounted on a pair of squat wooden steps, hanging Moses and Daniel with fancy paper trimmings, in a kitchen that had red firelight and lamplight.

Tea was spread--wafting for Polly.

“She’s here!” said Nan.

She was.

Rag went into his usual delirium.

For a pedigree dog Rag was a demonstrative, uncontrolled savage. He began to lick Polly’s boots as she came into the range of firelight.

Polly had indeed changed.

But the blurred softness ensuing from her plumper condition had hidden some of her beauty, it seemed, now. Even the slight look of strain that had grown into her expression had added that touch of character without which any face fails to attract for long.

“Anything from Becky?” she asked.

She asked it as she had never failed to ask. Without rhyme or reason Becky had suddenly stopped writing to her.

“There’s a letter there from Narrowfields,” her mother told her.

Polly flew to it with a touch of her old lightness.

“Is it from Becky?” asked Cherry.

“H’m,” said Polly, excitedly.

She knelt down on the fender to read it.

“Summat up, Polly?” queried her Dad, watching her face.

“Ooo,” she murmured. “Ooo,” and broke into a passion of tears.

Nan picked up the letter and read it.

“She’s come to a misfortune,” said the shrew. “She says she goin’ to the workhouse----”

Polly sobbed again.

She sat sniffing at intervals over her tea. But the attitude of her parents towards Becky did not encourage her to follow the course she had thought to take--to ask Becky to come there.

Polly was not built to beat things down.

After her second cup of tea she ceased to cry.

Apparently she regarded Becky as lost.

“Pansy laid an egg this morning,” she told her parents less sniffily after a while.

“Good lass, Pansy!” said Cherry. “Tha didn’t think she’d lay paving-stiones, did ta, Polly?”

“Ooo, it was such a nice little egg,” said Polly.

“A _little_ egg?” said Cherry.

“There’s a lot of strength in first eggs,” Polly informed him. Polly as an authority on food-values was too comical. Cherry burst into laughter.

“Bring it for th’ lad,” he said. “I need all th’ strength I can get.”

“Eh--tha art a greedy swine!” said Nan.

“If everybody looked after No. 1,” said Cherry, amiably, “there’d be no No. 2’s, would there?”

For a generous man he had the old passion of liking to appear a selfish brute.

“Granny’s cough any better?” asked Cherry.

His week of snow-bound martyrdom had kept from him the doings of the village.

Polly nodded.

Granny had impressed upon Polly that if ever she told of her “ill doos,” she would cut her off with a shilling.

“She’ll live to be a hundred,” said Cherry. “Well, here’s health to the best mother-in-law in the world, and to my wife’s husband.” Something glug-glugged out of a bottle, into his cup. It was sufficiently near Yule for the action to be justified.

“Want some, missus?” he asked.

Nan hesitated a little.

Then--the vision of the devil made her turn her back on temptation.

“Well,” quoted Cherry, “one in a house is enough.” “We’ll have a goose,” he said, dreamily. “One o’ them big, bumping-weight fellows wi’ yellow feet an’ fat as creases your chin. We’ll have open house. We’ll----”

“Tha doesn’t know what’ll happen afore Christmas,” Nan told him, grimly.

Nan was always sitting on coffins to survey the world, now.

After tea Polly went upstairs and Nan went down to see Granny.

Polly had reached a crisis in her life. Polly was burning up love-letters, valentines, photos. Adam Wild had asked her to meet him before choir practice and walk with him to Witch Gate and back. Adam had indeed ploughed his furrow deep.

“Music?” queried Cherry, as she came down, her portfolio in her hand.

She nodded.

Music! All life was music, to-night. Forever and forever, and forever, she was going to be happy. Music! The world itself was music, as she stepped out into it, a huge, spreading blossom of crystal purity, lying under a white moon, in a great silence. She sang as she went down the hillside. It was an old French gavotte. Adam had told her how brocaded dames and fine beaus had danced to it. As she lilted it they seemed to trip along with her, down the white hillside, dancing, dancing. Then, she recalled Becky--just for a moment. Becky was sad. Should one friend be glad when another was sad? But--Oh! How could she be sad? Adam Wild had asked her to walk to Witch Gate and back with him. _Walk with him._

She became fey.

She danced down the hillside, changing her song. It was Tartini’s “Devil-Dance,” now. Little imps seemed to trip down the hillside with her now, dancing, dancing, rig-a-jig, jig, under the light of the moon. She stopped and began to gather handfuls of white snow and to toss it away, watching it sparkle. But--the cold made her hands ache. Her hands that she had been so vain of were chapped now, always. Sometimes they bled. But always she had the ecstasy of knowing that she was getting a little nearer to that ideal woman of Adam Wild’s--strong, hard-working, _useful_, “hodden, grey.”

To-night he was going to ask her to be his mate.

She was sure of it.

He had made love to her in every way but that of common speech--ever since Bob went away, especially. He had endeavoured to mould her mind, and the giggling Polly had painfully plodded through books she did not like. Always he had given her to understand that he did this because her destiny was mixed in with his.

When she had showed him the pats of butter she had made--all by herself--when Sarah was sick, he had told her she was going to be a fine little wife for a farmer, and his Airedale brown eyes had said which farmer.

At the bottom of Thomas Hill were two flat fields, intersected only by a low hedge. No foot had trodden their whiteness. They sparkled fairily under the moon.

What fantasies are not hidden in the heart of girlhood?

Down the glistening track of the moonbeams on the first of these white fields Polly waltzed, whistling Tartini’s “Devil-Dance,” up and down, down and up, from one end of it to the other, her shadow dancing with her, whilst she drew all that glory of whiteness into her very soul, and the memory of those days when she had felt sick, and lost, and up against bars, in Narrowfields, was danced under her feet. A strong man, a good man, a man who could take care of her--cared for her, foolish, joy-loving, peril-daring little Polly.

“Ooo!” she said.

She floundered into a bush.

Snow was powdered over her.

She looked dazedly at the moon.

The fit of ecstasy was over.

She walked demurely towards the place where she was to meet Adam.

She saw his shadow on the whiteness of the snow.

The boys that had waited for her like this!

But--never one whose shadow she had loved.

He saw her coming.

She tried to walk steadily.

But her knees shook under her.

The foolish heart was glad and afraid.

To think that a man like Adam Wild should care for a foolish creature like Polly Cherry! She couldn’t quite credit it, yet.

“Which way?” he asked.

Adam’s voice was not quite steady, either. He had come out to punish this girl who had meant to fool his brother. Her face, looking in his direction, as he waited--had unnerved him. He had done his work well.

“Up the hill,” chose Polly. “Right up into the stars.”

Her giggle was tremulous.

It was funny to choose the path for the high-handed Adam.

Before them rose an upland field of white. A little path was trodden up its face. A dog had rolled down it. Polly’s feet tripped along. Their two shadows went before. They kept almost guiltily apart, those two shadows. Adam’s looked like a Cossack’s, for his hat was exaggerated on the snow. Polly’s hat took the shape of a poke bonnet.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Adam.

“I was thinking,” said Polly, “about Becky christening you ‘John Willy, from heaven.’”

Adam laughed.

He stopped to show her Orion.

Then they went on again.

The world seemed trying to dissolve itself into light. Stars overhead, and underfoot, drifted snow flashing like powdered gems.

The singing of snow-frosted rushes was the only sound about them as they topped the slope, walking towards Witch Gate, going by the golf-links, white, smooth and with only the shadows of the barriers upon them.

They discussed Handel--set him above all others.

Then they got on to Grieg--and quite suddenly, Polly was singing one of Grieg’s cradle songs, exquisite as it floated between snow and stars. Then they discussed cradle songs in general, and Adam sang what he thought was the finest one in existence--an outlaw’s cradle song, about being rocked in the heather, and defying the world. They had really to keep on talking.

At last they stopped.

The path went downwards.

Witch Gate was in sight, a white village set by a black sheet of water. They could hear dogs barking from its road far below them.

Adam leaned on a gate, Polly stood beside him. Adam went into the history of Witch Gate. So long as they kept talking--talking, they did not feel the awkward silence. They stood so long by the gate that Polly’s feet got quite cold.

“We shall have to go back,” said Adam.

He had meant to tell her by the gate, but his courage had failed.

Between the gate and reaching the downward slope they fell back on music, once more.

It was as they began to ascend the slope, with Cherrydale going to burst on them at any moment, that Adam nerved himself for the actual confession.

“We can rest here a little,” he said.

Polly stopped. She was in a dream.

“I suppose,” said Adam, making himself hold on to that ploughshare of justice, “you will wonder why I asked you to come to Witch Gate with me?”

“H’m,” she nodded.

Her voice was almost inaudible.

She was looking down at the snow.

“I thought--you and Miss Thorpe--were very friendly,” said Adam. “Do you think she would marry me?”

He had told her now that he just thought her a little fool--that all this fooling of his had meant nothing.

For pity’s sake he did not look at her for a moment.

But her long silence made him fear she had gone dumb.

She was holding on to a fence, staring at him.

If she had gone into hysterics he would not have been surprised. She was struggling. She was so white he recalled a pink blush and pink sun-bonnet on a far away morning and felt sick.

“I thought you might know if she liked me,” he added.

“I--I--don’t know----” said Polly.

If there had not been Sagg Farm!

Her cloak blew out from her listless grasp.

He had a fool’s impulse to fold it round her.

But the older passion held sway.

Set yourself to do a thing, and do it.

That was the creed of the Wilds.

None of the Wilds had held it as more of an iron law than this last struggler to retain the old soil that had grown round the roots of so many of them.

They walked back, down to Cherrydale.

Polly walked with difficulty.

The world was one huge blur of white that hurt her eyes. Her eyes smarted with tears she did not dare to shed. The moon was a leering, idiotic face.

“I think Miss Thorpe will make you a good house-wife,” she said once.

Her attempt to speak brightly hurt Adam.

He felt sorry that he had dealt her this blow before the choir practice. She would have to sing.

If only she had not been such a little fool.

If only there had not been Sagg Farm.

They entered the little chapel.

The others had arrived.

“Are you sick, Polly?” whispered the little mezzo.

Polly shook her head.

“You look so white,” said the other.

“Do I?” asked Polly. “I’m a bit cold.”

Music! She had never, never dreamed music could be so awful, that she could hate it so much. There was an eternity of it. Every note was like a funeral wail.

Fancy the “Conquering Hero” sounding like that. It was all wrong. Something was the matter with it. When she had to stand up and sing the nightmare reached its height. It _was_ a nightmare. She was sure of it. She was singing, and had made two mistakes and the others were staring at her, and she was trying to laugh.

But at last it was all over.

They came out into the moonlight.

The great smarting behind Polly’s eyes was fire now.

The trees they passed weren’t real.

They were dead images of trees with awful weights of snow on them.

The others went to make a great snowball and roll it down from Witch Gate slope.

Adam said he would walk “agate” with Polly.

“Are you going to see Miss Thorpe, now?” asked Polly.

They were walking under the shadows of two elms, white, ghostly things.

Adam nodded.

He had half done his task to-night.

He would go on to the Thorpes’.

“Well,” said a hard little voice, “you might go and ask Susan for her money and her life, but you’re a little late. Your brother Bob is going to marry her. So--Sagg Farm is gone.”

Adam stared at Polly in the moonlight.

He received two concurrent shocks.

The first was--the news of Susan, the sound of Sagg Farm falling. The other was--Polly’s fixed, scornful look, in which he saw himself a madman, with a mania, who had set all things after that mania.

Blind bat!

Susan had been in love with his brother.

He recalled that walk to Cherrydale Fair.

He looked dazedly at Polly.

He half stretched his hand out to her--appealingly.

She drew back.

Her look was unutterable.

Polly had found herself.

The pride of that long line of Cherry dames had awakened.

“Not,” she said in that hard, frosty voice, “if you crept on your hands and knees.”

With which she left him.

A door closed.

She had passed into Granny’s.

In the vernacular, Adam had lost the halfpenny and the cake. Strangely enough, he was most bothered about the cake, now. He felt afraid of going up to Sagg Farm, Sagg Farm that had stood between him and the sunshine of youth, of care-free manhood--and this foolish girl whom he had only considered from a point of view of usefulness--as a housekeeper.

He struck up towards the Clouds.

An hour’s steady walking over the crisp snow made him feel a little less demoralised. At some moments he felt he could win Polly over. At others the memory of that look of hers burnt in his brain. It was like having one’s inner meanness discovered by a child.

On and on, until the glory of white hills rose around him into a sky of moonshine blue, drifting clouds like other snow mountains.

Then--across the snow something bounded towards him.

It was the Thorpe dog.

Even as he stopped, to pat it--he knew whose were the two figures coming along, lover-close.

Susan and Bob had been to look at the spot where they had buried the sheep.

They came up to him.

The brothers had never spoken since that night of the quarrel. Sometimes since Bob had worked for the Thorpes, Adam had passed him on the road.

The dog gave a glad bark to draw their attention to him.

Mean!

That was what Polly Cherry’s glance had said he was.

“Good-night, Miss Thorpe,” said Adam.

The two lovers stared, recognising the man in the shadow of the stone wall.

“Good-night,” said Susan.

She was giving Bob a little nudge with her elbow. Adam saw her. She was reminding him that he was youngest.

Then--to Bob Wild’s utter astonishment, his proud brother spoke.

“Forgi’e me, Bob,” he said simply.

And then the two hands had met and Susan was smiling.

There was nothing for it but that Adam should go with them and have some supper at the Thorpes’. He went.

Whilst his wonder grew that he could ever have thought Susan in love with him.

Moreover, in that strange reflection of himself that had looked at him, from Polly’s eyes, he didn’t feel that he had been fit to tie Susan’s shoe-laces. The fact that he would have married her--for her domestic virtues and the pot of brass--covered him with shame. He tried not to look like the criminal he felt.

Jabez, full of winks, Mrs. Jabez between tears and smiles, Ned Thorn, looking and laughing very loudly, would have told Adam the truth, even had he not met the couple over the Clouds.

He learnt that Uncle Nat was very poorly.

“Tha wants to go an’ keep him warm, Adam,” Mrs. Thorpe told him. “I shouldn’t wonder but he’s a bit o’ money.”

Adam smiled. “Uncle Nat is as poor as a crow,” he said. “But I’ll walk over and see him, to-morrow, maybe.”

When he passed Granny’s cottage on his way home, he saw Polly’s shadow cross the white blind.

He stood to watch it pass again, that girlish shadow, of the floating hair, and candlestick in hand. But the window grew dark. He climbed the hill after crossing the old wishing-bridge. Sarah was sitting up. The light came from the two windows and the gap under the door. It was the old demoniac grinning face that had struck his childish fancy as a child, when he hung on to his mother’s skirts, and she had told him tales of that grandfather of his, ingraining into his mind the idea of the awful thing it would be if ever they had to leave it.

“Father in bed?” he asked Sarah, on entering.

She turned an anxious face.

“I thought--it were him--now,” she said.

“Is he out?” asked Adam.

For the inn was closed.

They sat an hour waiting.

But old Wild did not come.

“Get the lantern, an’ we’ll go out look for him,” said Sarah, tearfully, at length. “Eh--Adam--it’s bin a mistake, lad, hangin’ on here. We ought to ha’ got out on it, when mother deed. The place has gotten on his nerves. Some men is like that.”

“We shall ha’ to get out, now,” said Adam, grimly. “I’ll tell that town-chap to do his worst--to-morrow.”

Even yet--he clung to some foolish hope of saving Sagg Farm.

He crossed the yard, and into the mistle.

He was worried about his father.

But the worst thought that entered his head was that the old man, half-drunk, had slipped in the dark, hurt himself, and could not get up.

He groped his way into the mistle.

Adam knew every inch of the place, even in the pitch dark. The lantern hung on a hook in the farthest corner. He went straight to it. As he went he collided with something between himself and the lantern-hook.

“Dad?” he queried.

He thought that his father had lost himself, in his drunken state; got into the mistle instead of the house. His hand went out. He touched something cold. He shrank back. The hair of his head stood on end as he struck a match, then his voice went out in a yell of appeal.

“Sarah!”

When Sarah arrived on the scene Adam had cut his father down.

The woman with the taper saw him with the old man, trying artificial respiration.

“I have killed an old man--an old man,” he was saying. “For bricks and mortar--I have killed an old man.”

Sarah, with a long breath, lit the lantern.

No change took place in the empurpled countenance.

From the roof of the mistle the suspending rope, cut by Adam’s knife, swung to and fro.

A little scrap of paper caught Sarah’s eyes.

It said so little, yet so much.

“Sag Farm has killed me. Forgive me, Addy. I couldn’t stick it.”

“We mun burn this,” said the ghost of a woman, bent also with her struggle under Sagg Farm.

“Nay,” said Adam.

The policeman arrived eight minutes later, and the doctor.

Life was extinct.

The crazy old farmer had been dead over an hour, even whilst the children sat anxiously over the supper table. The fact that they had not heard him come in was explained by his having left his boots at the foot of the hill, where they were found next morning, half-full of thaw rain and snow-broth from the dripping trees.

After that first outburst in the mistle Adam said no more. The publication of the message in the local papers, the discussion in the village, the eyes that followed him, Adam bore without outward token of emotion. He had lost Sagg Farm. Indirectly, he had killed his father. Polly Cherry flirted with the bass in her old way. Nay, divers strange youths appeared in Cherrydale that very week-end. The Celt in Polly was roused. People began to ask Cherry which of the lads was _the_ one. He winked a knowing wink. He also had a little conversation with Polly, which left him just as much in the dark as before. Whilst Polly--Polly with over-bright eyes, a hard look that gave her a stronger resemblance to Belle Harker, covered up the paleness of her face with rouge--and covered it very badly. A few people said she ought to be expelled from the choir. But after all, her voice was a cheap asset, and no one could say anything definite. Whilst the anomaly of the human nature that could render “I know that My Redeemer Liveth” in angelic sweetness, and turn its back on Adam Wild, in his black clothes, to laugh with the bass, became one of those things only to be explained by a great inward conflict. The more the strain told in her face, the more rouge Polly used, the harder she laughed, the more she flirted, the more locks of her hair she sent out, calling back to her those devotees who had not forgotten her.

As for Cherry and Nan--they sat and looked at one another more than they had ever done in their lives.

Granny talked in vain.

Polly sat and smiled in a cold, tired, remote way.

All that she would vouch was, “Ooo, I’m tir’t of good people.” The Harkers were on top, now. And the Harkers, when once they got going, were a lot that didn’t know when to stop--till too late.

“Dear Polly, forgive me,” from the proud Adam, whilst Sagg Farm furniture was ticketed, had not the slightest effect. Pansy was carried back to him, by a small boy, also the dry books that had made her head ache.

Cherry was laying stuff in for Christmas.

He was also trying to think round the problem of--Peter, Peter who had been the last to answer the call of the siren’s hair.

If he had had feet he would have “punched” Peter till he had to stay in bed for a few weeks, by which time Polly might have been expected to have become normal. Something, said Cherry to Nan, “had thrown the lass off her trolley.” She would get back again. Maybe--if Peter could be kept out of the way. As he sat in his nook, he was very busy using his “three ounces.”

Adam Wild went to see Uncle Nat, who very thankfully took the five shillings Adam offered him for nourishments, whilst the idea that the poor old man was thought by the Thorpes to be worth “keeping warm” on the score of brass amused Adam--as far as he could be amused, in this black hour. Every day that he spent at Sagg Farm, now, was begrudged. It weighed on him like a black shadow of troubled conscience. A bill appeared on the farm walls, by the roadsides, on gable-ends, advertising all stock, household goods, utensils, farm implements, to be sold by auction in the yard behind the “Peep In.”

His graven image was gone.

Sometimes he walked about in the road looking up to see Polly’s shadow fall on that white blind. He realised now that that irritation she had made him feel that night, in the wheat-field, had been the beginning of _this_. He had looked down on her as a feather-brained, feather-hearted fool. The tables were reversed now. Some men see themselves as others see them in one moment. Adam had been such. Intellectually his inferior, physically weaker, she had condemned him--by the simplicity of a childish heart that regarded him in the light of a liar, a thief, and a coward, to have thought to walk to Susan Thorpe, take her money and her life, when it was her foolish self he liked.

That this hardness lay under the softness of the nature she had hitherto revealed, made him realise that the same county had bred her.

Christmas--the last Christmas in the old place, drew near. Bob Wild and Susan Thorpe were asked out for the first time in Cherrydale Church.

And the spectacle of Polly Cherry, in a great white muff and fur that made the rouge more noticeable, walking out with first one lad, then another, was close to him always--allied hauntingly with the memory of that cut rope swinging in the draught in the old mistle. His lips closed more firmly one on the other. Adam--was taking his medicine.

He took it like a hard Wild.

But the cup was not yet drunk to its lees.