The Outcast and the Rite, page 6
She looked down at the circle of flowers, and it seemed in the green twilight that already the edges showed a brownish tinge; but they stood firmly, and the leaves had not yet begun to droop, those strange leaves that felt warm as her fingers closed upon them. The moss, too, was warm. In the dim loneliness of the wood she would have liked to feel that softness against her bare skin. She could lie there with her hair about her shoulders all the afternoon till the heat was gone, unseen, unknown; in this light her body would look green, like a dead thing. For an instant the thought startled her, but she stretched upwards with her hands into the shadowed air and felt life pulse in the fingers, and was reassured. It would take a lot to put out that life, running so strongly. But what was the use of it?
She knew how she wanted to give herself, but her heart rebelled at the thought of the one-sided bargain. It would be fine to flare up like a great flame; but in a while that would be done with, and he might change or be false, and the power, the great force of her body, be withered away. Youth gone. Love gone. So soon, and for so little.
The flowers were dying. They seemed to droop and fail like animals, and the petals were discoloured with a darkening stain that spread as she watched, like blood. With a sudden spurt of impulse, unaccountable, she threw them from her, and the crown fell upon the stone and hung there. She laughed aloud, defiantly. Let the Old Face have them, the ugly things; dead already.
The words beat their way into her mind. That was what she would be if she married Arthur, dead, and buried in a bed with a man beside her who didn’t even know that she was not alive any more. She would go walking about, and talking; but something would be dead. It wasn’t right. It was against something. Life ought to come first. But with Steve, would that be life, any more than the other? Ah yes, even there in that dirty house, in poverty, even though it didn’t last, it would be life. There would be something to show for the years, not happiness, but a longing satisfied, a purpose fulfilled. Life ran deep, its meaning and end were dark as this wood—dark as Parvus at noon.
A sudden horror came upon her, a dreadful fear of the darkness that could so reveal hidden things. She scrambled to her feet and stood, holding her fear in check, madly seeking with her eyes the way she had come. She found a broken branch and another, and followed slowly down the almost invisible track of her own passage, slowly, her heart stilled with terror, not daring to run lest she should lose her reason and be caught for ever by the menacing trees, the vile flowers. Slowly, stepping high as though in some solitary measure, she made her way down the hill, and her staring, shifting eyes found at last the glow of warm light from the road.
Now it was almost evening, and the leaves began to waver in a faint breeze. They whispered, and once there was a sound almost of laughter. The crown of flowers that had fallen upon the stone hung there still, and sent out upon the air that warm and sleepy odour as of beasts lying close; but the flowers were not dead. They hung there, living; and they were still alive when a great wind came up from the south two days later and scattered them.
3 The Outcast
It was after seven when I came, tired, to Chantry St Owen, walking sharply through the closing October night. It was a small village, and the street lamps were infrequent, but the red blinds of a tap-room guided me, and I knocked at the door beside them. A woman opened it. I asked for a bed, and she stood aside to let me pass into the light before she answered. In those parts they were accustomed to see strangers with packs coming in for shelter at nightfall, and they can tell at a glance the mock tramp from the real. My hostess did her reckoning more quickly than most. She marshalled me into a room on the right of the door and stood over me while I shouldered off my pack. It was a forbidding room, a parlour. The vast table seemed hardly to allow space for the chairs to stand ranged about it in a hollow square; no breath of wind had ever tumbled the woollen balls that edged its cloth. There was an oval mirror framed in red plush and painted with water-lilies, and above the flimsy sideboard with its gothic niches occupied by china pigs and yellowing photographs, a picture hung, vaguely religious in significance. There was no fire. Through the open door, from the bar across the passage, I saw a warm light leaping and glowing on the walls, and turned towards it, but was quelled by the woman’s eye. ‘This is the parlour,’ the eye seemed to say, ‘and you, by your shoes and other signs, are accustomed to parlours. You will therefore stay here and give no further trouble. Noblesse oblige.’
So I sat meekly on one of the unyielding chairs, and was even grateful to it, for my feet had borne my weight for the last three hours and they now confessed to weariness. The hostess took up my pack and bore it away, probably to inspect its contents at her leisure. She said nothing about a fire. I was still warm, with the inner heat of my body coming tingling through to the skin, but from pure laziness I should have liked a fire, to stare at the tireless flames, the wild thing tamed to a hearth. Hunger, which fatigue had deadened, began to stir in me. I pictured to myself, and could almost savour, the meal which would appear in a few minutes’ time. There would be a cottage loaf with the top torn off, and the crumb showing flaky and white; butter; cheese in a flowered dish with a wedge-shaped cover and gilded handle; best of all, there would be beer, ladylike in a jug. I waited, stretching out my legs, contemplating in a pleasant lassitude the new shoes which now were ripening to a brown and satisfying glow. So much for a week, and a week’s weathers. I was too tired to summon memories or anticipation, and drowsed, staring down at my toes, feeling the blood course and throb in my body. The blessed weariness was on me that makes of sleep a pleasure more luxurious than the loves of a caliph. Silence impelled me. Slowly my head drooped forward.
Five minutes later I woke, cold. The inhospitable inn was silent, save for the creaking and whining of its sign, whereon, as I knew, a stately sheep was painted; in that country all inns bear the sign of the plough or the fleece. The parlour seemed no longer a refuge; it had grown larger and stuffier and less warm. It was absurd, I thought, watching the firelight dancing still upon the passage wall, that I should be compelled by the memory of that decorous eye to remain sitting here while a chill advanced perceptibly upon me. A gust swung the sign, protesting, and the shrill sound made my parlour more intolerable. I got up, stuffed my feet again into the shoes I had loosened, and advanced into the room across the passage.
It was cheerful, with red blinds, and a red flagged floor, and a fire. The landlord leant sideways on his bar, reading a closely folded sheet of newspaper. By the window sat an old man, nursing a pint pot, who stared at me as I entered, and suddenly drank from it with an air of having got the better of me, just as a dog will hurry over a bone he thinks is in danger. There was nobody else in the room.
The landlord turned when he heard me, and cut short my explanations with sufficient civility.
‘The missus is gone to get a bit o’ meat for supper. She’ll be back in no time. Sit ye by the fire. This is the last of the weather, I’ll lay.’
He came from his bar and indicated a chair, wooden but adequate to human curves, kicked the innocent fire, and returned to his paper after serving me with a half-pint. I sat, gladly thawing. The old man, after watching me for a time, abruptly finished his ale, and with a short sigh set down the pint pot, finally void of its treasure. He did not speak, nor did I. The landlord’s paper was too compactly folded to sound as he turned it; no footsteps came down the passage. It was a comfortable silence, broken at last by the opening of the tap- room door; a tall man, his boots muddy, came clumping in. The landlord did not look at the intruder, but taking a small glass, went immediately to a pink china barrel labelled Rum; the man waited while the clear spirit trickled down. When the glass was full, he received it carefully, and holding it in both hands, addressed us in general terms.
‘Comin’ on for wet,’ said he.
‘Clear to Beacon, weather’ll thicken,’ said the old man, speaking for the first time, in a strong voice that creaked like the stanchion of the sign outside.
‘You got her in just in time,’ said the landlord, abandoning his paper and ringing the coin into the till.
‘She’ll do,’ said the thin man, ‘but where’s the use? Come June it’ll be to do again.’
‘Not if it rains like it ought,’ said the old man, ‘That’s what yews want. A dry summer’ll kill any yew.’
‘If it rains till Christmas this one won’t take hold,’ the thin man responded.
He put the glass to his mouth and seemed to throw the contents down his throat. I could not see that he swallowed.
‘You got no right to say that,’ said the landlord.
‘I tell you, I know,’ the other answered, rather angrily.
‘Perhaps you do,’ the landlord said slowly, with a significant nod at the old man, ‘You never did like Jim Hewish.’
‘Nor I did,’ the thin man agreed, ‘but I wouldn’t go for to cheat a dead man. I planted his tree good and deep like I did the others. It’s good soil, all of it; churchyard soil. A tree’s nought to do but grow.’
‘And you say it won’t?’ the landlord asked, sarcastically.
‘I know it won’t,’ said the thin man more calmly, but with decision, ‘they’ll go on dying till Vicar’s tired o’ plantin’.’
‘Is it a special tree?’ I asked.
‘It’s what they put here for our memorial,’ the landlord answered. ‘There’s always been a hundred yews in Chantry churchyard. So Vicar says, and I think myself it was a good idea, we’d plant seventeen more, one for each man that was killed, like they was lying in their own earth, same as if they’d died here. Godsell planted ’em. Now he’s got this notion into ’is head that one of ’em won’t never do well.’
‘It’ll die, I tell you,’ said the thin man, ‘wherever they sets it.’
‘That’s him,’ said the old man, ‘restless and wandering. That was Jim Hewish. He can’t lie quiet.’
‘What’s that?’ said the landlord scornfully.
‘I don’t say it, but maybe it’s truth,’ the thin man answered. ‘He had Gippo blood, they do say. When we was in Palestine you could see it plain. He had the beaky nose and the high look same as those men you see on the hills above Jordan. He’d ’a took to their ways, too, but for discipline.’
‘Army’s no place for a man like that,’ the landlord said, his underlip pushed out.
‘Earth’s no place for a man like that,’ the thin man corrected him, ‘not to stay in. But he was great on a march. He loved the road. Never seemed to feel his feet under him. But he’d go silent when the rest of us was singing.’
‘That’s gipsy blood,’ said the old man, ‘they’ll go walking till they drop, so I’ve heard, same as he did.’
‘Ah,’ said the thin man, looking into the fire, and added, after a little silence, ‘He’d ’a been alive now but for that.’
‘Well,’ the landlord broke in roughly, ‘He’s dead now, right enough.’
‘Name on the monument, and all,’ the old man confirmed him.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure;’ said the thin man, ‘yew won’t grow for him.’
‘He’s dead all right,’ the landlord repeated, ‘you saw him yourself.’
‘So I did,’ said the thin man.
He went on, talking to me.
‘We never buried him. Left him there where the road tops the hill when the column retreated. Two days after, when we’d got our water and come back, he was there and picked clean. I brought his cap-badge home for his missus. It was all the birds had left, about. That wasn’t burying ground. Too hard even for picks. And t’would a’ been sweat wasted for such as Jim.’
‘You’ve sweated more for him since,’ the landlord chuckled.
‘l have that. When the first tree died, nobody thought anything of it. Plant another, they says, and it’ll come right. I planted another. What happened? Dies. Vicar says to me, when he sees it turning brown, “Dig deeper, Godsell, or try another place. Maybe there’s stones or roots down there to hinder it.” So I dug another place for this one. You saw the pit.’
‘I did,’ said the landlord.
‘Clean, sweet earth,’ said the thin man, ‘like he could never hold to. The others, they clung on as if the roots was hands. But Jim was always different.’
‘I’m not defending Jim,’ said the landlord, ‘He was no good. I know that.’
‘He was a stranger,’ the old man murmured.
‘When they said War was declared,’ the landlord went on, leaning impressively above the bar, ‘that very night Jim Hewish come in here. “Heard the news?” I ask him. “I have,” he says, “and thank God for it. Now’s a chance to get out of this bloody hole for good, and I don’t care if I never come back.” He’d had nothing to drink. It was just his way of talking. Used to remind me sometimes of Vicar when he was feeling strong about hell; that same desperate way of talking that don’t mean much. Well, then, that very night after he went out of here, he walked into Borthwick to enlist, but the office was shut. They took him next day though, and glad to get him. Fusiliers, wasn’t ’e, Godsell?’
‘That was Jim all over,’ said the thin man sourly, ‘too high and mighty to go to the regiment where he belonged.’
‘You was a Fusilier yourself,’ the landlord reminded him.
‘I was,’ retorted the thin man. ‘And why? Because some old madam of a colonel couldn’t read.’
‘Well, it’s a good regiment, too,’ said the landlord.
‘I know that,’ said the thin man, ‘though the officers was half of ’em ladies’ pets, and the men was half of ’em scum like Jim Hewish. The regiment was all right. I reckon there wasn’t much fighting we wasn’t in, some of us. It was as good as a medal, that grenade I sent her off his cap.’
‘She’s well rid of him,’ the landlord said.
‘And on with another, they say,’ said the old man, brightening at the prospect of gossip. ‘Inglesham’s looking her way. Well, it’s no surprise to me. She’s a neat-looking woman, and Jim treated her wrong.’
‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ said the landlord, ‘you and me don’t get our names on a monument and trees planted, only the men that died. Seems a waste, when they can’t see it.’
‘Jim’ll see it, I bet,’ the thin man said, ‘he was like a cat in the dark. Funny to think of them great birds getting at his eyes. It’s the first thing they go for.’
He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, without apparent disgust. The old man rose, and carried his pint pot to the bar. The landlord took it with a non-committal expression, and cast it into some limbo of pots beneath the counter. The thin man stretched himself, and the flames threw a grotesque gigantic shadow of him towering up the wall and halfway across the ceiling. I heard movements, clinkings and rustlings, in the parlour, and I could not wait to hear the end of the discussion: indeed, I had the impression that it was already ended. Too hungry to remember dignity, I almost ran across to the forbidding parlour which now held promise of repletion. There was the meal as I had pictured it, save that the beer-jug was empty. The woman took it, and went across into the bar, where already the voices had ceased; perhaps they only talked for an audience. When she came back I said to her, ‘They were talking about a man called Jim Hewish.’
But she was not to be drawn. She set down the jug, wiping it carefully first on her apron, and answered, ‘Oh, indeed, m’m? Yes.’
She moved towards the door. With a final spirt of curiosity I insisted, ‘And how his tree won’t grow.’
She answered, indifferently, it seemed.
‘The tree? Yes.’
I gave it up, and begun to help myself from the slices of meat set out on a plate with tomatoes. I no longer expected anything, or desired anything, other than what lay before me. But to my surprise, as I took the first mouthful she paused in the doorway, and said in a sombre, almost angry voice, ‘Why do they go talking of him? He was a low sort of man.’
I said nothing, having found occupation. She added, as though to herself, ‘An ugly sort of a man; more like a foreigner.’
She closed the door, and I heard her steps going across to the tap-room. The sign creaked and cried, like an animal in prison, and the same wind that swung it bent the stem of the tree that would die, that stood for his body, a little heap of bones on a bare hill; the vultures would have left it long ago. I thought that a tree would take root if they planted it there, in the close yellow earth where he lay, to which he belonged, the earth that was too hard even for picks. Then the wind, that had been no more than one sudden gust, dropped, and the sign was quiet. I went on eating.
4 As Much More Land
‘It must be marvellous for you, having this,’ said the young man, looking about him.
Certainly the room was delightful, long, and not too high, with shallow bow windows looking west; the walls were panelled, and painted an odd lush green, the colour of grass after a wet summer. Against the panels stood two or three bookcases filled with brown volumes. There was a mantelpiece with cherubs drawing some deity in a chariot, and the door had above it a broken pediment whose angles rose like horns. It was the kind of room the young man could appreciate, and since his hostess had not long been its owner she did not disparage it in the usual way, but answered, beaming, ‘Marvellous!’
And stared as he had done, with almost equal rapture.
‘He must have been a charming uncle,’ the young man went on, ‘and a person of discernment besides. Otherwise he would have left it to your cousin James just because he is a man; and James would have had quantities of children as soon as possible, who could be trusted to ruin every inch of the house. The uncle suspected this, and left it to you instead, because he knew you’d adore it, as of course you do.’
‘Oh,’ said the hostess happily, ‘It’s such fun to have somebody to gloat with. You do like things; not as much as I do—no, no, not as much really. I’ve had twenty-three years longer than you, all of them spent with other people’s things, in other people’s houses. Now I think I’m absolutely happy.’
