South Riding (25 page)

Three days after the Cold Harbour meeting, when he entered Castle’s room, stooping under the lintel of the low door, he found his shepherd Naylor seated beside the fire. Lambing was in full swing; the hot room reeked of tar and sheep-folds.

“Well, Naylor, how are you getting on?” he asked, lowering his bulk cautiously into an inadequate chair. “Are they giving you much trouble?”

“Not more than they can help, poor things,” the shepherd replied with his usual grave courtesy for the ewes that he attended.

“How many to-day?”

“Twelve couples of twins, seven singletons, four lots of triplets down here, and seventeen couples of twins and nine singletons out at Minton Riggs.”

“Any casualties?”

“Not so far. But yon little blackie I’ve got in my hut—he’s not doing too well. Foursome’s don’t. Stands to reason. It’s unnatural, I say. If the Lord meant ewes to have foursomes He’d have given ’em another pair of dugs to feed ’em. Not that this ’un isn’t a brisk little jockey. If we can rear him, we’ll give him to Miss Midge for a pet.”

“That’s an idea,” smiled Carne.

“How’s she framing at school?” asked Castle from the bed.

“It’s early days to say yet.”

“She’s not been to see my nursery this year,” grumbled Naylor.

“It’s all this home-work.”

Carne defended Midge, but he sympathised with the shepherd. He too felt neglected. The child was far too much absorbed in her new environment. It was “Miss Burton” this—“Miss Burton” that—all day. Carne wished Miss Burton was in Jericho. He would not admit that he was jealous of her. He had to acknowledge that Midge seemed well and happy, but he would have been better pleased by an excuse to withdraw her from the’High School. He compromised with all these feelings by saying, “School isn’t what it was in our day, Shep.”

“Nay,” chuckled the old man. “For I didn’t have none.”

“It was ABC and the birch rod for me,” said Castle, “and I doubt if we was any worse off. We learned a bit beyond school books those days. I mind when I was a little lad in Norfolk, working for a rat-catcher by I was eight year old. He’d give us so much a dozen for rat-tails—tied up in twenty-fours, they were; but if ever we came across an extra long ’un, we’d cut it in half and make two. That’s how I learned arithmetic.”

“Did you ever tell Maister how you saw rattens changing their spot?” the shepherd prompted. It was a well-worn tale, but Castle loved to tell it. Since his illness the memory of his youth had grown increasingly clear and radiant. The human figures of those days assumed heroic proportions. The sun shone; the land was bright with flowers. The men and women towered above the puny present as superb creatures of formidable eccentricity, uncurbed in energy and passion.

“I remember,” said Castle, “how I used in those days to be out at horse-rake in harvest time till eleven o’clock or later, working with an old fellow, nigh on eighty years. It was a dry summer. Not a drop in t’ponds for miles round, and water twopence a bucket. I was walking home by moonlight, bright as day it was, and dry as a bone. Old fellow walked dot and carry one, leaning on a stick. Aye, cloppety-clop, he went. I can hear him now. We weren’t saying owt, too tired to talk, when I heard a sound behind us like rain pattering on a window. Old man stops in’t middle of road, leaning with both hands on stick. ‘D’ye hear owt, lad?’ he asks. ‘Aye,’ I says, ‘a sound like watter running.’ Old man shakes his head. ‘There ain’t no watter,’ and turns hisself about in road and listens. Then he says, ‘D’you see yon gate, lad?’ ’Course I sees it. I’ve got eyes,’ says I, pert as sixpence. ‘Then, if you’ve legs too,’ says the old man, ‘get on it—them’s rattens,’ and he makes for the gate, cloppety-clop, dot-an-carry one, quicker than a two-year-old. ‘Rattens?’ says I, ready to argue the point, but I sees him clambering on to the gate, so I clambers too, and there we were each sitting on a post, like them monuments outside Lissell Grange. And then I sees ’em, coming along the road. Rattens. Like a black stream they were, pouring along the white road in the moonlight, pattering like rain, eyes glistening like water. It was the queerest thing I ever saw in all my born days, and if we hadn’t got out a’t way on to them gate posts, they’d have got us. For when rattens is on the move like yon, from one drinking place to another, there’s small chance for any flesh and blood they find in their way. I’ve heard on ’em going straight through a horse yoked to a cart and leaving the skellington picked clean, upright still in t’shafts. But you don’t see ’em like that now. We’ve killed off ower many.”

“Rattens aren’t what they were, eh?” teased Carne.

“Nothin’ isn’t what it was. Why, look at lads now. When I was eight, I tell you, I was scrattin’ my own pickings. Now it’s school till fourteen and pension at sixty-five, and in between an eight hour day and Saturdays off and overtime. After a week of rain, with half all out, first fine day a lad will come an’ say, ‘It’s fine now, Mr. Castle—Can I have a day off to take my young lady out to Hardascliffe?’ Aye, an’ then all this dole. It ain’t reached the farms yet, thank God, but it will. It will. Road work too. That’s what they fancy now. Twenty-six weeks’ work to qualify, and then sit back on benefit—like gentlemen.”

Queer, thought Carne. Socialist chaps like Astell think it’s us employers who grudge the unemployed their dole; but it’s the old workers like Castle who are far harder on them.

Castle was running on—the price of labour, the price of wheat, the vogue of mechanisation. He was enjoying himself, while Naylor dozed, head on chest, beside the guttering fire. He had been up and down intermittently with the sheep for seven nights now, and had sacrificed one of his precious hours of rest to visit Castle.

The old foreman had reached the vexed question of Cold Harbour colony.

“They say you’re all for ’em, Maister—in council and such.”

“They’re having a rough time. We’re all in the same boat.”

“Boat—aye. Boat’s a good word for some o’ them spots. Luxury liners. Ever seen the stable Government put up for Brimsley’s horses? Stalls all along side, door at one end, corn bin at t’other, and lad had to squeeze his way past tail ends to get to bin. He didn’t like it—an’ nor would you, and Brimsley complained to Government agent. He came down—all Oxford an’ Cambridge an’ haw-haw—’ You’ve made stable too narrow, sir,’ says Brimsley. ‘Narrow be damned,’ says he. ‘Stable’s all right. It’s your blessed horses are too long.’”

Carne laughed as he was trusted to do. Indeed, in the company of this brave cheerful grumbling stricken old man, he found laughter easier than elsewhere. He respected Castle and Naylor. He recognised their prejudices and he shared them. He saw their limitations, but he loved them. Here he felt at home with men whose integrity and affection he never doubted. They were men of peace and men of character. They met fortune and misfortune with equal courage. He had tested their quality and felt himself honoured by their confidence.

Had he remained comfortably in the South Riding, he might have taken that confidence for granted. But the circumstances of his marriage had driven him forth into a wider and less easily comprehensible world. His war service had increased his fund of exotic memory: He returned with intensified awareness to the comradeship of these men who served not him so much as Maythorpe. He was Robert, elder son of Thomas Carne, steward for one generation of two thousand acres. He felt humble because he knew himself to be an unworthy steward.

He had endangered the farm for his wife’s sake. The shadow of her thin imperious beauty crossed that hot firelit room where rested the two old men who had served Maythorpe better than its owner. Naylor nodded in his chair; Castle drowsed in the bed. Carne sat upright and communed in his shocked and sorrowful soul with the woman he loved.

He thought of the last visit that he had paid her, when she had leapt at him, wild and screaming, then, subdued and weary, turned to him with recognition, repeating over and over, “Poor Robbie. I do treat you badly. Poor Robbie. I do treat you badly.”

He thought of Naylor’s answer to his question: “‘Are they giving yon much trouble?’”

“Not more than they can help, poor things.” Not more than she could help.

Oh, he never should have married her. It had been irreparable folly. From the beginning, after their accidental encounter in the hunting field, followed by his unique determination to go to the Hunt Ball—(that night—oh, that night, with snow powdering the ramparts of Lissell Grange, and the stars so brilliant and Muriel in her scarlet cloak)— from the beginning William had sneered and his father had opposed “It’s no good, Rob. A Carne of Maythorpe can hold up his head in any company, but she’s of the nobility, and there’s queer blood there. Let her go, boy. Let her go. You’ll bring worse on her if you take her now.” But he had not listened to reason. She wrote and he followed her: he faced it out with her parents; he waited for her at a Shropshire inn until she came to him. He would not listen to reason. He carried her off to Paris on the proceeds of his two young hunters, and returned to his father’s funeral after a ten days’ honeymoon, lacerated, enchanted, bewildered, deeply afraid.

Oh, it had been wrong from the beginning. But these men had stood by him—when he went abroad with Muriel, seeking cures for her nerves in strange places which he hated and remembered only as backgrounds to their quarrels and reconciliations. They had stood by him and run the farm for him. while he had drained its resources to meet his wife’s desires

He had never known, for one hour, peace of mind with her. She had been able to torment and to enrapture him. She had led him into a thousand unforgivable follies—he had spent nearly a thousand pounds renovating Maythorpe only to let it fall again to shabby ruin; he had drawn on capital to supply her wardrobe; he had travelled with her all over the Continent, if it hadn’t been for the War, when a farmer could not help making money—and he had been specially favoured—they would have been bankrupt long ago.

And it had been all useless—all quite useless, because in one hour of jealous and exasperated passion he had forced her to conceive his child, and that had destroyed her. All his tenderness, his disastrous acquiescence, had gone to nothing, because he was a passionate man, and he had forced her to do that which was beyond her fragile power.

He was aware of Castle interrogating him from the bed. About Cold Harbour. The old man seemed weary.

“Don’t go wasting pity on them as doesn’t need it. Wait till mortgage is paid off Maythorpe, Maister.”

“But the new road would not help us either,” Carne said, and explained just why.

Castle was unappeased.

“It’s all right. But you’ll have a powerful lot to fight and your hands are full already. You’re a bit given to biting off more than you can chew. Give Shep a thump for me, will you? He said he must set out at half-past seven, and he’s gone off, sweet as a baby.”

“I must go with him. I promised to look round with him tonight.”

He woke Naylor, and followed his clumping boots down the steep stairs.

In the brick entry a stable lad, stripped to the waist, after working late with horses, was washing himself in a tub of lathered water. He looked up as the farmer and shepherd passed, squeezing the soap out of his hair, and grinning without embarrassment. Naylor stopped to light his lantern, and Carne spoke to the lad as he wriggled into his shirt—a fine boy, healthy, muscular.

Dolly Castle appeared at the kitchen door, pretty as paint and sour as a crab apple.

“Well, Dolly, I hope you’re looking after these young men,” smiled Carne shyly.

“They need a regiment of soldiers to look after them, Mr. Carne.” She tossed her pretty head. “Buck up, now,” she ordered the young man. “Do you want to keep me waiting here all night while your tea gets dried to cinders in the oven —making the water as thick with muck as a dog’s dinner?”

The boy flushed deeply crimson. Dolly had neither manners nor mercy. Carne sighed. He did not know how to reprove a pretty girl. But he felt unhappy about the whole affair—Castle’s illness, Dolly’s presence, his own shortcomings.

“That girl gives them the rough edge of her tongue,” he remarked to Naylor as they crossed the slackyard to the buildings, the swinging lantern tossing rings of light on to trampled straw and muddy puddles.

“They don’t like it, Mr. Carne. She’s been spoiled by town life. I’ve never minded a bit of sauce from lasses, but that one’s over keen. I wish we were all back in our proper places.”

“I wish that too,” sighed Carne.

He thrust up the heavy wooden bolt of the door to the fold yard. The soft ba-aing of sheep and high tremulous bleating of young lambs came from within. Under the sheds round the yard, pens had been built with hurdles and netting for the newly-born. In the deep straw of the yard itself, ewes near their time stirred restlessly. Naylor passed with his lantern from one to the other, speaking to them, feeling them. One family of twins had just arrived. He picked up the two little creatures by their forelegs; their fleeces glowed golden yellow, moist, tightly curled, in the light of the lantern Carne had taken from him; the ewe followed, stumbling and bleating into the shed. Naylor settled her down with her lambs, and went through the building from pen to pen, the lantern casting fantastic shadows on straw, wool, hurdles, the velvet darkness, and the warm rustling scent and movement of breathing sheep.

“It’s a cold night. Come up and have a nip in my place?” invited Naylor.

“Thanks,” said Carne.