Джон Голсуорси
The Freelands
CHAPTER XI
It is in the nature of men and angels to pursue with death such birds as are uncommon, such animals as are rare; and Society had no use for one like Tod, so uncut to its pattern as to be practically unconscious of its existence. Not that he had deliberately turned his back on anything; he had merely begun as a very young man to keep bees. The better to do that he had gone on to the cultivation of flowers and fruit, together with just enough farming as kept his household in vegetables, milk, butter, and eggs. Living thus amongst insects, birds, cows, and the peace of trees, he had become queer. His was not a very reflective mind, it distilled but slowly certain large conclusions, and followed intently the minute happenings of his little world. To him a bee, a bird, a flower, a tree was well-nigh as interesting as a man; yet men, women, and especially children took to him, as one takes to a Newfoundland dog, because, though capable of anger, he seemed incapable of contempt, and to be endowed with a sort of permanent wonder at things. Then, too, he was good to look at, which counts for more than a little in the scales of our affections; indeed, the slight air of absence in his blue eyes was not chilling, as is that which portends a wandering of its owner on his own business. People recognized that it meant some bee or other in that bonnet, or elsewhere, some sound or scent or sight of life, suddenly perceived – always of life! He had often been observed gazing with peculiar gravity at a dead flower, bee, bird, or beetle, and, if spoken to at such a moment, would say, “Gone!” touching a wing or petal with his finger. To conceive of what happened after death did not apparently come within the few large conclusions of his reflective powers. That quaint grief of his in the presence of the death of things that were not human had, more than anything, fostered a habit among the gentry and clergy of the neighborhood of drawing up the mouth when they spoke of him, and slightly raising the shoulders. For the cottagers, to be sure, his eccentricity consisted rather in his being a ‘gentleman,’ yet neither eating flesh, drinking wine, nor telling them how they ought to behave themselves, together with the way he would sit down on anything and listen to what they had to tell him, without giving them the impression that he was proud of himself for doing so. In fact, it was the extraordinary impression he made of listening and answering without wanting anything either for himself or for them, that they could not understand. How on earth it came about that he did not give them advice about their politics, religion, morals, or monetary states, was to them a never-ending mystery; and though they were too well bred to shrug their shoulders, there did lurk in their dim minds the suspicion that ‘the good gentleman,’ as they called him, was ‘a tiddy-bit off.’ He had, of course, done many practical little things toward helping them and their beasts, but always, as it seemed, by accident, so that they could never make up their minds afterward whether he remembered having done them, which, in fact, he probably did not; and this seemed to them perhaps the most damning fact of all about his being – well, about his being – not quite all there. Another worrying habit he had, too, that of apparently not distinguishing between them and any tramps or strangers who might happen along and come across him. This was, in their eyes, undoubtedly a fault; for the village was, after all, their village, and he, as it were, their property. To crown all, there was a story, full ten years old now, which had lost nothing in the telling, of his treatment of a cattle-drover. To the village it had an eerie look, that windmill-like rage let loose upon a man who, after all, had only been twisting a bullock’s tail and running a spiked stick into its softer parts, as any drover might. People said – the postman and a wagoner had seen the business, raconteurs born, so that the tale had perhaps lost nothing – that he had positively roared as he came leaping down into the lane upon the man, a stout and thick-set fellow, taken him up like a baby, popped him into a furzebush, and held him there. People said that his own bare arms had been pricked to the very shoulder from pressing the drover down into that uncompromising shrub, and the man’s howls had pierced the very heavens. The postman, to this day, would tell how the mere recollection of seeing it still made him sore all over. Of the words assigned to Tod on this occasion, the mildest and probably most true were: “By the Lord God, if you treat a beast like that again, I’ll cut your liver out, you hell-hearted sweep!”
The incident, which had produced a somewhat marked effect in regard to the treatment of animals all round that neighborhood, had never been forgotten, nor in a sense forgiven. In conjunction with the extraordinary peace and mildness of his general behavior, it had endowed Tod with mystery; and people, especially simple folk, cannot bring themselves to feel quite at home with mystery. Children only – to whom everything is so mysterious that nothing can be – treated him as he treated them, giving him their hands with confidence. But children, even his own, as they grew up, began to have a little of the village feeling toward Tod; his world was not theirs, and what exactly his world was they could not grasp. Possibly it was the sense that they partook of his interest and affection too much on a level with any other kind of living thing that might happen to be about, which discomfited their understanding. They held him, however, in a certain reverence.
That early morning he had already done a good two hours’ work in connection with broad beans, of which he grew, perhaps, the best in the whole county, and had knocked off for a moment, to examine a spider’s web. This marvellous creation, which the dew had visited and clustered over, as stars over the firmament, was hung on the gate of the vegetable garden, and the spider, a large and active one, was regarding Tod with the misgiving natural to its species. Intensely still Tod stood, absorbed in contemplation of that bright and dusty miracle. Then, taking up his hoe again, he went back to the weeds that threatened his broad beans. Now and again he stopped to listen, or to look at the sky, as is the way of husbandmen, thinking of nothing, enjoying the peace of his muscles.
“Please, sir, father’s got into a fit again.”
Two little girls were standing in the lane below. The elder, who had spoken in that small, anxious voice, had a pale little face with pointed chin; her hair, the color of over-ripe corn, hung fluffy on her thin shoulders, her flower-like eyes, with something motherly in them already, were the same hue as her pale-blue, almost clean, overall. She had her smaller, chubbier sister by the hand, and, having delivered her message, stood still, gazing up at Tod, as one might at God. Tod dropped his hoe.
“Biddy come with me; Susie go and tell Mrs. Freeland, or Miss Sheila.”
He took the frail little hand of the elder Tryst and ran. They ran at the child’s pace, the one so very massive, the other such a whiff of flesh and blood.
“Did you come at once, Biddy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where was he taken?”
“In the kitchen – just as I was cookin’ breakfast.”
“Ah! Is it a bad one?”
“Yes, sir, awful bad – he’s all foamy.”
“What did you do for it?”
“Susie and me turned him over, and Billy’s seein’ he don’t get his tongue down his throat – like what you told us, and we ran to you. Susie was frightened, he hollered so.”
Past the three cottages, whence a woman at a window stared in amaze to see that queer couple running, past the pond where the ducks, whiter than ever in the brightening sunlight, dived and circled carelessly, into the Tryst kitchen. There on the brick floor lay the distressful man, already struggling back out of epilepsy, while his little frightened son sat manfully beside him.
“Towels, and hot water, Biddy!”
With extraordinary calm rapidity the small creature brought what might have been two towels, a basin, and the kettle; and in silence she and Tod steeped his forehead.
“Eyes look better, Biddy?”
“He don’t look so funny now, sir.”
Picking up that form, almost as big as his own, Tod carried it up impossibly narrow stairs and laid it on a dishevelled bed.
“Phew! Open the window, Biddy.”
The small creature opened what there was of window.
“Now, go down and heat two bricks and wrap them in something, and bring them up.”
Tryst’s boots and socks removed, Tod rubbed the large, warped feet. While doing this he whistled, and the little boy crept up-stairs and squatted in the doorway, to watch and listen. The morning air overcame with its sweetness the natural odor of that small room, and a bird or two went flirting past. The small creature came back with the bricks, wrapped in petticoats of her own, and, placing them against the soles of her father’s feet, she stood gazing at Tod, for all the world like a little mother dog with puppies.
“You can’t go to school to-day, Biddy.”
“Is Susie and Billy to go?”
“Yes; there’s nothing to be frightened of now. He’ll be nearly all right by evening. But some one shall stay with you.”
At this moment Tryst lifted his hand, and the small creature went and stood beside him, listening to the whispering that emerged from his thick lips.
“Father says I’m to thank you, please.”
“Yes. Have you had your breakfasts?”
The small creature and her smaller brother shook their heads.
“Go down and get them.”
Whispering and twisting back, they went, and by the side of the bed Tod sat down. In Tryst’s eyes was that same look of dog-like devotion he had bent on Derek earlier that morning. Tod stared out of the window and gave the man’s big hand a squeeze. Of what did he think, watching a lime-tree outside, and the sunlight through its foliage painting bright the room’s newly whitewashed wall, already gray-spotted with damp again; watching the shadows of the leaves playing in that sunlight? Almost cruel, that lovely shadow game of outside life so full and joyful, so careless of man and suffering; too gay almost, too alive! Of what did he think, watching the chase and dart of shadow on shadow, as of gray butterflies fluttering swift to the sack of flowers, while beside him on the bed the big laborer lay?..
When Kirsteen and Sheila came to relieve him of that vigil he went down-stairs. There in the kitchen Biddy was washing up, and Susie and Billy putting on their boots for school. They stopped to gaze at Tod feeling in his pockets, for they knew that things sometimes happened after that. To-day there came out two carrots, some lumps of sugar, some cord, a bill, a pruning knife, a bit of wax, a bit of chalk, three flints, a pouch of tobacco, two pipes, a match-box with a single match in it, a six-pence, a necktie, a stick of chocolate, a tomato, a handkerchief, a dead bee, an old razor, a bit of gauze, some tow, a stick of caustic, a reel of cotton, a needle, no thimble, two dock leaves, and some sheets of yellowish paper. He separated from the rest the sixpence, the dead bee, and what was edible. And in delighted silence the three little Trysts gazed, till Biddy with the tip of one wet finger touched the bee.
“Not good to eat, Biddy.”
At those words, one after the other, cautiously, the three little Trysts smiled. Finding that Tod smiled too, they broadened, and Billy burst into chuckles. Then, clustering in the doorway, grasping the edibles and the sixpence, and consulting with each other, they looked long after his big figure passing down the road.
CHAPTER XII
Still later, that same morning, Derek and Sheila moved slowly up the Mallorings’ well-swept drive. Their lips were set, as though they had spoken the last word before battle, and an old cock pheasant, running into the bushes close by, rose with a whir and skimmed out toward his covert, scared, perhaps, by something uncompromising in the footsteps of those two.
Only when actually under the shelter of the porch, which some folk thought enhanced the old Greek-temple effect of the Mallorings’ house, Derek broke through that taciturnity:
“What if they won’t?”
“Wait and see; and don’t lose your head, Derek.” The man who stood there when the door opened was tall, grave, wore his hair in powder, and waited without speech.
“Will you ask Sir Gerald and Lady Malloring if Miss Freeland and Mr. Derek Freeland could see them, please; and will you say the matter is urgent?”
The man bowed, left them, and soon came back.
“My lady will see you, miss; Sir Gerald is not in. This way.”
Past the statuary, flowers, and antlers of the hall, they traversed a long, cool corridor, and through a white door entered a white room, not very large, and very pretty. Two children got up as they came in and flapped out past them like young partridges, and Lady Malloring rose from her writing-table and came forward, holding out her hand. The two young Freelands took it gravely. For all their hostility they could not withstand the feeling that she would think them terrible young prigs if they simply bowed. And they looked steadily at one with whom they had never before been at quite such close quarters. Lady Malloring, who had originally been the Honorable Mildred Killory, a daughter of Viscount Silport, was tall, slender, and not very striking, with very fair hair going rather gray; her expression in repose was pleasant, a little anxious; only by her eyes was the suspicion awakened that she was a woman of some character. They had that peculiar look of belonging to two worlds, so often to be met with in English eyes, a look of self-denying aspiration, tinctured with the suggestion that denial might not be confined to self.
In a quite friendly voice she said:
“Can I do anything for you?” And while she waited for an answer her glance travelled from face to face of the two young people, with a certain curiosity. After a silence of several seconds, Sheila answered:
“Not for us, thank you; for others, you can.”
Lady Malloring’s eyebrows rose a little, as if there seemed to her something rather unjust in those words – ‘for others.’
“Yes?” she said.
Sheila, whose hands were clenched, and whose face had been fiery red, grew suddenly almost white.
“Lady Malloring, will you please let the Gaunts stay in their cottage and Tryst’s wife’s sister come to live with the children and him?”
Lady Malloring raised one hand; the motion, quite involuntary, ended at the tiny cross on her breast. She said quietly:
“I’m afraid you don’t understand.”
“Yes,” said Sheila, still very pale, “we understand quite well. We understand that you are acting in what you believe to be the interests of morality. All the same, won’t you? Do!”
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t.”
“May we ask why?”
Lady Malloring started, and transferred her glance to Derek.
“I don’t know,” she said with a smile, “that I am obliged to account for my actions to you two young people. Besides, you must know why, quite well.”
Sheila put out her hand.
“Wilmet Gaunt will go to the bad if you turn them out.”
“I am afraid I think she has gone to the bad already, and I do not mean her to take others there with her. I am sorry for poor Tryst, and I wish he could find some nice woman to marry; but what he proposes is impossible.”
The blood had flared up again in Sheila’s cheeks; she was as red as the comb of a turkey-cock.
“Why shouldn’t he marry his wife’s sister? It’s legal, now, and you’ve no right to stop it.”
Lady Malloring bit her lips; she looked straight and hard at Sheila.
“I do not stop it; I have no means of stopping it. Only, he cannot do it and live in one of our cottages. I don’t think we need discuss this further.”
“I beg your pardon – ”
The words had come from Derek. Lady Malloring paused in her walk toward the bell. With his peculiar thin-lipped smile the boy went on:
“We imagined you would say no; we really came because we thought it fair to warn you that there may be trouble.”
Lady Malloring smiled.
“This is a private matter between us and our tenants, and we should be so glad if you could manage not to interfere.”
Derek bowed, and put his hand within his sister’s arm. But Sheila did not move; she was trembling with anger.
“Who are you,” she suddenly burst out, “to dispose of the poor, body and soul? Who are you, to dictate their private lives? If they pay their rent, that should be enough for you.”
Lady Malloring moved swiftly again toward the bell. She paused with her hand on it, and said:
“I am sorry for you two; you have been miserably brought up!”
There was a silence; then Derek said quietly:
“Thank you; we shall remember that insult to our people. Don’t ring, please; we’re going.”
In a silence if anything more profound than that of their approach, the two young people retired down the drive. They had not yet learned – most difficult of lessons – how to believe that people could in their bones differ from them. It had always seemed to them that if only they had a chance of putting directly what they thought, the other side must at heart agree, and only go on saying they didn’t out of mere self-interest. They came away, therefore, from this encounter with the enemy a little dazed by the discovery that Lady Malloring in her bones believed that she was right. It confused them, and heated the fires of their anger.
They had shaken off all private dust before Sheila spoke.
“They’re all like that – can’t see or feel – simply certain they’re superior! It makes – it makes me hate them! It’s terrible, ghastly.” And while she stammered out those little stabs of speech, tears of rage rolled down her cheeks.
Derek put his arm round her waist.
“All right! No good groaning; let’s think seriously what to do.”
There was comfort to the girl in that curiously sudden reversal of their usual attitudes.
“Whatever’s done,” he went on, “has got to be startling. It’s no good pottering and protesting, any more.” And between his teeth he muttered: “‘Men of England, wherefore plough?’…”
In the room where the encounter had taken place Mildred Malloring was taking her time to recover. From very childhood she had felt that the essence of her own goodness, the essence of her duty in life, was the doing of ‘good’ to others; from very childhood she had never doubted that she was in a position to do this, and that those to whom she did good, although they might kick against it as inconvenient, must admit that it WAS their ‘good.’ The thought: ‘They don’t admit that I am superior!’ had never even occurred to her, so completely was she unselfconscious, in her convinced superiority. It was hard, indeed, to be flung against such outspoken rudeness. It shook her more than she gave sign of, for she was not by any means an insensitive woman – shook her almost to the point of feeling that there was something in the remonstrance of those dreadful young people. Yet, how could there be, when no one knew better than she that the laborers on the Malloring estate were better off than those on nine out of ten estates; better paid and better housed, and – better looked after in their morals. Was she to give up that? – when she knew that she WAS better able to tell what was good for them than they were themselves. After all, without stripping herself naked of every thought, experience, and action since her birth, how could she admit that she was not better able? And slowly, in the white room with the moss-green carpet, she recovered, till there was only just a touch of soreness left, at the injustice implicit in their words. Those two had been ‘miserably brought up,’ had never had a chance of finding their proper place, of understanding that they were just two callow young things, for whom Life had some fearful knocks in store. She could even feel now that she had meant that saying: ‘I am sorry for you two!’ She WAS sorry for them, sorry for their want of manners and their point of view, neither of which they could help, of course, with a mother like that. For all her gentleness and sensibility, there was much practical directness about Mildred Malloring; for her, a page turned was a page turned, an idea absorbed was never disgorged; she was of religious temperament, ever trimming her course down the exact channel marked out with buoys by the Port Authorities, and really incapable of imagining spiritual wants in others that could not be satisfied by what satisfied herself. And this pathetic strength she had in common with many of her fellow creatures in every class. Sitting down at the writing-table from which she had been disturbed, she leaned her thin, rather long, gentle, but stubborn face on her hand, thinking. These Gaunts were a source of irritation in the parish, a kind of open sore. It would be better if they could be got rid of before quarter day, up to which she had weakly said they might remain. Far better for them to go at once, if it could be arranged. As for the poor fellow Tryst, thinking that by plunging into sin he could improve his lot and his poor children’s, it was really criminal of those Freelands to encourage him. She had refrained hitherto from seriously worrying Gerald on such points of village policy – his hands were so full; but he must now take his part. And she rang the bell.
“Tell Sir Gerald I’d like to see him, please, as soon as he gets back.”
“Sir Gerald has just come in, my lady.”
“Now, then!”
Gerald Malloring – an excellent fellow, as could be seen from his face of strictly Norman architecture, with blue stained-glass windows rather deep set in – had only one defect: he was not a poet. Not that this would have seemed to him anything but an advantage, had he been aware of it. His was one of those high-principled natures who hold that breadth is synonymous with weakness. It may be said without exaggeration that the few meetings of his life with those who had a touch of the poet in them had been exquisitely uncomfortable. Silent, almost taciturn by nature, he was a great reader of poetry, and seldom went to sleep without having digested a page or two of Wordsworth, Milton, Tennyson, or Scott. Byron, save such poems as ‘Don Juan’ or ‘The Waltz,’ he could but did not read, for fear of setting a bad example. Burns, Shelley, and Keats he did not care for. Browning pained him, except by such things as: ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ and the ‘Cavalier Tunes’; while of ‘Omar Khayyam’ and ‘The Hound of Heaven’ he definitely disapproved. For Shakespeare he had no real liking, though he concealed this, from humility in the face of accepted opinion. His was a firm mind, sure of itself, but not self-assertive. His points were so good, and he had so many of them, that it was only when he met any one touched with poetry that his limitations became apparent; it was rare, however, and getting more so every year, for him to have this unpleasant experience.
When summoned by his wife, he came in with a wrinkle between his straight brows; he had just finished a morning’s work on a drainage scheme, like the really good fellow that he was. She greeted him with a little special smile. Nothing could be friendlier than the relations between these two. Affection and trust, undeviating undemonstrativeness, identity of feeling as to religion, children, property; and, in regard to views on the question of sex, a really strange unanimity, considering that they were man and woman.
“It’s about these Gaunts, Gerald. I feel they must go at once. They’re only creating bad feeling by staying till quarter day. I have had the young Freelands here.”
“Those young pups!”
“Can’t it be managed?”
Malloring did not answer hastily. He had that best point of the good Englishman, a dislike to being moved out of a course of conduct by anything save the appeal of his own conscience.
“I don’t know,” he said, “why we should alter what we thought was just. Must give him time to look round and get a job elsewhere.”
“I think the general state of feeling demands it. It’s not fair to the villagers to let the Freelands have such a handle for agitating. Labor’s badly wanted everywhere; he can’t have any difficulty in getting a place, if he likes.”
“No. Only, I rather admire the fellow for sticking by his girl, though he is such a ‘land-lawyer.’ I think it’s a bit harsh to move him suddenly.”
“So did I, till I saw from those young furies what harm it’s doing. They really do infect the cottagers. You know how discontent spreads. And Tryst – they’re egging him on, too.”
Malloring very thoughtfully filled a pipe. He was not an alarmist; if anything, he erred on the side of not being alarmed until it was all over and there was no longer anything to be alarmed at! His imagination would then sometimes take fire, and he would say that such and such, or so and so, was dangerous.
“I’d rather go and have a talk with Freeland,” he said. “He’s queer, but he’s not at all a bad chap.”
Lady Malloring rose, and took one of his real-leather buttons in her hand.
“My dear Gerald, Mr. Freeland doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t know about that; a man can always come to life, if he likes, in his own family.”
Lady Malloring was silent. It was true. For all their unanimity of thought and feeling, for all the latitude she had in domestic and village affairs, Gerald had a habit of filling his pipe with her decisions. Quite honestly, she had no objection to their becoming smoke through HIS lips, though she might wriggle just a little. To her credit, she did entirely carry out in her life her professed belief that husbands should be the forefronts of their wives. For all that, there burst from her lips the words:
“That Freeland woman! When I think of the mischief she’s always done here, by her example and her irreligion – I can’t forgive her. I don’t believe you’ll make any impression on Mr. Freeland; he’s entirely under her thumb.”
Smoking slowly, and looking just over the top of his wife’s head, Malioring answered:
“I’ll have a try; and don’t you worry!”
Lady Malloring turned away. Her soreness still wanted salve.
“Those two young people,” she murmured, “said some very unpleasant things to me. The boy, I believe, might have some good in him, but the girl is simply terrible.”
“H’m! I think just the reverse, you know.”
“They’ll come to awful grief if they’re not brought up sharp. They ought to be sent to the colonies to learn reality.”
Malloring nodded.
“Come out, Mildred, and see how they’re getting on with the new vinery.” And they went out together through the French window.
The vinery was of their own designing, and of extraordinary interest. In contemplation of its lofty glass and aluminium-cased pipes the feeling of soreness left her. It was very pleasant, standing with Gerald, looking at what they had planned together; there was a soothing sense of reality about that visit, after the morning’s happening, with its disappointment, its reminder of immorality and discontent, and of folk ungrateful for what was done for their good. And, squeezing her husband’s arm, she murmured:
“It’s really exactly what we thought it would be, Gerald!”