Turf or Stone (10 page)

On the left side of the yard were the stables and the cow-house, on the right a high blank brick wall with the tips of young apple trees waving above it. A narrow wooden gate led into the orchard beyond, which Matt himself had planted. Tulips, white and striped, grew at random in the long grass, mingled with silvery dandelion
balls. She was looking over the gate when Matt and another man entered the yard. They were both wearing bright blue coats with red facings and gold buttons, and red stockings, having come straight from hunting. The strange man looked ruddy and energetic as if the sport had done him good, but the clear gay colour of his uniform showed up Matt’s pallor and he moved languidly.

He lifted his cap to Mary.

‘Good evening. The calf is dead they tell me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He looked at the ground absently and exclaimed
without
much feeling: ‘What a pity. Where’s Easter?’ he added.

She did not quite know how to define her home, so she pointed and answered in a low voice, ‘Up there.’

At this point Matt’s friend started forward.

‘How do you do,’ he said, holding out his hand. She bowed, hesitated, looked into his face and finally took it.

She looked so haughty and so very ill that he was frightened and did not know what to do. She had met him on several occasions. His name was Harold Maidment and his parents were Miss Tressan’s neighbours. He was shy and silent.

Matt thought: ‘Good God, how awful!’

‘It’s a lovely evening. Why don’t you go in the orchard? There’s a path… it’s too wet, perhaps?’ he stammered.

‘No, not too wet at all. I didn’t know I could.’

‘Of course. Any time. There’s a lovely view.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Easter!’ Matt shouted.

‘Where’s this cow?’ Harold demanded, ‘I’ll just have a look at her.’ 

He bustled across the yard, an ungainly person, horribly embarrassed. Matt followed him, and Easter, yawning, came down the steps, putting on his coat. It was not until the next day that Matt spoke to him privately.

‘Easter, is your wife well?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like interfering, but has she seen a doctor?’

‘No, sir, I don’t think so. She was asking if there was a nurse hereabouts.’

‘There is. Get her.’

He had never before spoken autocratically. He could not get Mary out of his mind.

An episode brought Easter before Matt in a new light.

The groom was walking back from Brelshope, a small village about a mile and a half from The Gallustree, on the opposite bank of the river. He had been sent with a message to the owner of a timber yard, one Samuel Collins, a pompous old pocket snob who hated Easter on the strength of his appearance.

It was afternoon and the middle of June; as he strode along the raised footpath he could see over the hedge. Meadows and fields of growing corn vibrated in the heat, the ruts in the lane were crumbling, and every now and then a sudden hot wind raised a powdery dust from the ground which made its way into his eyes. In spite of the heat his strides were as long as ever and he chewed a grass and looked about him with a bold, confident glance.

He was terribly untidy; his collar was crooked, his tie
flapping over his shoulder, his hair shaggy. Truly an odd person to be a gentleman’s groom.

The lane took a turn and ran downhill, beneath thick tall trees which completely shut out the sun. In the cool shadow Easter stood still a moment, listening. He heard the blows of an axe, uneven, yet very powerful, and vague voices at the bottom of the hill. The property was Matt’s; he knew no reason why axe should be laid to it nor person to wield it. He walked faster.

At the bottom of the hill a labourer, a woman, a youth, and a young girl stood watching a man who was hacking with a heavy bright axe at the thick holly hedge. He had made a sizable hole. Each time the axe fell, the onlookers blenched away, but the man himself did not appear to notice them. He was breathing in laboured sighs and sweat rolled down his high white forehead. The girl, in an extremity of morbid curiosity, kept on laughing and letting out hysterical screams, while the others wore the frown of impotent responsibility.

Easter joined them.

‘What’s up?’ he demanded. The woman warned him: ‘Don’t go a step nearer. This chap’s queer in the head.’

‘Just look at him!’

‘I’m frightened…’

He was an emaciated, frail man, craning his long neck forward between every two or three blows with the axe as he stared anxiously into the lower growth of the hedge. His hair was quite white, his large green eyes myopic, and his face was set in intense excitement. His clothes seemed to have been somebody else’s, for the sleeves of his coat nearly hid his hands, and his trousers were rolled up at the bottom.

‘We’ve sent for the police,’ the youth told Easter.

He grinned contemptuously, spat out the grass, and, walking right up to the lunatic, closed his hand over his shoulder. The man paused, still holding the axe, and looked at Easter. His face was full of shining hope.

‘Come away, you fool – he’ll strike you stiff,’ shouted the woman, hiding her eyes.

‘What are you doing?’ Easter asked in a peculiarly tender voice.

‘My wife’s in there, and my little girl. I must get them out.’

‘Ah.’

‘Look in here. You can see them… see my wife’s bent arm… glimmering. Can’t you?’

‘I’ll have a look.’

‘Bend down.’

‘Easter Probert, for God’s sake come away!’

‘Shut your racket,’ answered Easter, as he stooped his head to the hole.

The woman and the girl screamed again as the lunatic shifted his hands on the axe that was so keen, so sharp, so dazzlingly bright like an unbroken sunbeam. But he made no attempt to strike Easter.

‘Move. I must get them out soon,’ he said.

Easter raised himself and looked seriously at the man who was preparing for another blow.

‘I don’t see them. They’re not there. They must be at home.’

The man relaxed again as though pondering, but he shook his head.

‘Oh, no, we don’t live at home.’

In the circumstances there was such a suggestion of
tragedy in the reply that the labourer visibly shuddered.

‘Well, then, why not come along with me?’ said Easter.

‘Can’t you see her arm?’

‘No; at first I thought I saw something, but ’twas only the sun on a root. Give me the axe and have another look yourself.’

The lunatic’s face was hidden in glossy leaves. He stared and sighed himself back into a long accumulated grief. The joy left his face which now expressed such poignant hopeless affliction that he excited pity rather than terror. Without another word he gave up the axe to Easter, and with his eyes vaguely lifted to the arching boughs above them, walked away slowly by his side.

‘Well…!’ ejaculated the woman, folding her arms.

‘Shouldn’t ’ave thought it on ’im.’

‘Some spunk,’ said the young girl in the Salus Grammar School blazer. She was a keeper’s daughter, at home with swollen glands.

‘Maybe yer’ll meet the police,’ screamed the youth, who had rather more sense than the rest.

The labourer, with the reflection that if he put on a spurt he might reach The Dog before two o’clock, was the only silent one. He spat. The fun was over. Now he’d get a drink.

Easter and his companion met a couple of constables evidently walking up from the station. As they passed the church, the lunatic stopped and stood looking at his feet, panting like a sheep.

‘Where’s he from?’

‘Gloucester Asylum. Got loose yesterday.’

‘Dangerous?’

‘So they say. Must have slept on the road. Where did you find him?’

Easter told them dryly. Then he looked once more at the lunatic with a singular expression. One might almost have thought he was in awe and dread, yet near to weeping. Indeed, emotion all but overcame him. The man had lifted his gaze once more; his head on its long, thin neck turned hopelessly from side to side in a kind of eternal blind quest.

Easter broke away from them all abruptly. The constables looked after him.

‘A queer fish himself.’

Matt heard of the matter before he came home in the evening. He sought Easter, who had been hogging the mane of Phoebe’s pony which was tied by a halter to the paddock gate.

After thanking him, he began to question him.

‘Were you afraid?’

‘No,’ said Easter.

He knew few people, and the idea entered his mind that if ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were the limit and extent of his vocabulary he would get along very well, since questions and orders represented the greater part of his intercourse.

His face was perfectly grave and reposeful as at times it could be, but Matt felt him thinking, ‘You won’t get anything out of me.’ Matt stroked the pony’s smooth coat with a hand which closed, tapered like a bird’s wing. It was far too small to be capable, yet intelligent and very masculine. His lustreless eyes took in the groom’s vigorous movements, his straight neck and balanced head, his enigmatical expression.

‘The life seems to have drained out of me,’ he thought, ‘I can remember feeling very different. And the less I have, the more I watch for it in others. This chap’s full of life. His wife, too, in her way.’

After dinner he left Dorothy to her coffee and sat in a little square room which quite recently he had taken to using. Long after it had grown dark he sat there, an unlighted lamp on the table before him, holding a box of matches in his hand.

At first his head was vacant and he was just thankful to be away from voices and high lights. Then nerves began to nag at him, stirred by the pregnant silence of the night.

He felt that his life at present resembled that dusky room… he knew that if he chose he could light a lamp that would throw its wild beams on the darkness. In his mind he fitted together an odd, stilted sentence which he found himself repeating out loud, while the thought behind them had grown cold.

‘The contemplation of continued existence is almost too much.’

Yet his tired, enfeebled mind lacked the furious energy that prompts suicide. It did not occur to him to die.

Suddenly he struck a match and put it to the lamp. By the yellow glowing light he stupidly examined the
oatmeal-coloured
paper on the walls, the almost empty, carved bookcase and the crude frieze of unnatural fruits.

‘It is so very ugly.’

His eyes were attracted to three cards fastened by drawing pins to the walls, simply because they were objects on an expanse. They made his thoughts meander towards Philip, who had taken an unreasonably excited
dislike to the servant Gladys, although she was gentle and friendly, owing to her glass eye, under which the tears used to trickle. When he discovered she could paint roses in beautiful golden vases with long, flute-like necks, he was gradually attracted to her, and then loved her. The three cards were Philip’s own work under her tuition; they were of red roses growing on trellis-work, and stiff, expanded butterflies; a birthday present to Matt.

‘In the name of – affection, how many horrors must I put up with?’

The lamp was flaring. He gently turned the wick lower and deliberately began to think of Mary sensually.

It seemed as though strength rose up in him, and during the night he retreated before it, seeking to gain his old empty indifference. But the lamp was burning indeed… pulses beat in his neck and his arms.

‘Dorothy!’ he whispered, and touched her back, ‘I can’t sleep.’

She was asleep.

He longed to look at Mary, to appraise her, to marvel at her, to find in her thin severe face some potent charm or beauty. He asked himself: ‘Why this one? What has aroused my feelings and when did they dawn? In what moment did I first behold something I loved?’

He found no answer to any of these aged questions, but he had a dream in which he saw her stepping over a candlestick on the floor.

He saw her twice during the next day. Her nostrils were pinched, and there was a shadow on her full lips, which were dry and cracked as if she had fallen into the habit of biting them. Since her marriage her face had become
squarer, bonier; her expression was hard and her way of speaking lifeless. On the first occasion she said ‘Good morning’ from her doorway, on the second ‘Good evening’ in the yard. The last time, as she walked towards the steps, her head sank forward between her shoulders and her steps tottered. She touched the edge of the stone, leant on her arm and pressed one hand to her forehead. When Matt reached her side and looked into her face he saw that her eyes were shut. He asked her what was the matter.

‘Oh, nothing… my head was buzzing. There, it’s all right now.’

Her hand fell to her side.

‘Are you really better?’

‘Yes. It must be going to thunder,’ she remarked, absently.

They lifted their eyes to the low bronze clouds. To his astonishment and pleasure she began to explain how she felt, very naturally, without attempting to call him ‘sir’. He listened attentively to her voice which was already singular to him.

‘Something like a telephone rings in my head, and then my neck seems to go numb, and though I always go on with what I’m doing, I haven’t an idea what it is…. I have walked quite a long way and come to myself and wondered how I did it, for I couldn’t remember a thing.’

She rubbed the back of her neck gently: ‘When I was a child I thought the ringing was meant for a warning, and I used to say out loud, “Thank you, thank you… message received.”’

She smiled, but Matt thought she was nervous.

‘I believe you are frightened,’ he said, ‘why?’

‘Look at me,’ she exclaimed, ‘you can’t deny that I look ghastly?’

She did.

‘Do you feel ill?’

‘Desperately. All the time. You’ve children. Did
your
wife look like this before they were born?’

She turned her white, harassed face towards him: ‘
No
!’ she continued before he could answer. ‘She had a different sort of husband, different treatment…’

‘Have you seen anybody?’

‘Yes – the parish nurse!’

‘Well?’

‘She said I was to see a doctor.’

‘And you haven’t?’

‘No.’

‘Good lord! Listen, you must… tomorrow. I’ll telephone.’

‘You are kind,’ she said in a formal voice.

‘Oh, Mary… Mary,’ he cried, his new love and his living sorrow like cruel stabs in his side. ‘Mary, don’t turn away from pity! People hate it and they’re bitterly wrong. Of all emotions it’s the greatest, the purest… don’t be hard on me because I pity you!’

‘It’s myself I hate and loathe and scorn!’ she said furiously, and he was silent, impotently watching her, searching her anger till she looked at him.

‘But I’m not hard on you,’ she added, far more gently.

‘Let us go in here for a moment,’ he almost whispered.

‘Why?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

She nodded, and her pouting lips parted. They regarded each other with dawning certainty, and emotion replaced
their painful fatigue. It was too much for Matt; they had barely entered the brewing house and taken a few steps forward into the cobwebby dusk when he was aware of a fearful heat in his breast. He stuttered incoherently, threw one arm around her which instantly dropped, and the next moment was gone.

A little while before dinner he was returning from an aimless stroll which had taken him no farther than the church, where he had sat down on the mounting block. The threatening storm seemed to hang immobile in the branches of the yew above him; the lightning flashed in his brain, tearing the darkness with spasms of excitement. But he felt also a tenderness which restrained him. Having looked at his watch, he returned to The Gallustree, and paused with his hand on the gate.

‘Matt!’ screamed Dorothy.

‘Yes,’ said he.

‘Come and help me.’

When he saw her he could not help laughing. She had climbed up the Danes’ Mount to avoid a fat roan cow who, with drooping, pensive head, was breathing over her fallen umbrella.

‘Why, it’s only Emma!’

‘It’s a cow – that’s enough. Doesn’t matter what name you choose to give her. Drive her off, Matt, and help me down. It’s disgraceful the way she’s allowed to wander about.’

‘It’s only old Emma,’ he repeated, giving her a whack.
She raised her heavy head with its wrinkled, pendulous dewlap, switched her tail and moved off, lumbering and stately.

Healthy and flourishing as Emma appeared, there had been a time when this good cow had wasted away to a magnificent skeleton. She would not eat anything. Finally her owner, a single, middle-aged woman with a passion for animals, screwed herself up to the point of having her destroyed. But on the morning appointed, Emma got out. She was discovered in a lane, eating. Later she lay down by the wayside and chewed the cud. The upshot was she recovered, regained her comely outlines, and (nobody quite knew why) received the freedom of the parish. She went where she listed, walked, and ate decorously, never molested man or beast. Nobody but Dorothy dreamed of fearing Emma, the mild and gracious.