XXIV
The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself, to Upthorne.
Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself. She had no very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something about the road to Upthorne that repelled her. A hundred yards or so above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green bottom and winding up toward the naked moor. To the north, on her right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls, the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines. At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne lay unseen.
And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face, its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living; it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.
But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become callous in every other.
* * * * *
Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot thickness of the house wall.
Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head over her shoulder to call to him.
"There's a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!"
There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set, blue, pathetic eyes. Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had hardened with her thirty-five years.
"Well yo' coom?"
Maggie called again and waited. Courageous in her bright blue Sunday gown, she waited while her master rose, then, shame-faced as if driven by some sharp sign from him, she slunk into the scullery.
Jim Greatorex appeared on his threshold.
On his threshold, utterly sober, carrying himself with the assurance of the master in his own house, he would not have suffered by comparison with any man. Instead of the black broadcloth that Alice had expected, he wore a loose brown shooting jacket, drab corduroy breeches, a drab cloth waistcoat and brown leather leggings, and he wore them with a distinction that Rowcliffe might have envied. His face, his whole body, alert and upright, had the charm of some shy, half-savage animal. When he stood at ease his whole face, with all its features, sensed you and took you in; the quivering eyebrows were aware of you; the nose, with its short, high bridge, its fine, wide nostrils, repeated the sensitive stare of the wide eyes; his mouth, under its golden brown moustache, was somber with a sort of sullen apprehension, till in a sudden, childlike confidence it smiled. His whole face and all its features smiled.
He was smiling at Alice now, as if struck all of a sudden by her smallness.
"I've come to ask a favor, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
"Ay," said Greatorex. He said it as if ladies called every day to ask him favors. "Will you coom in, Miss Cartaret?" It was the mournful and musical voice that she had heard sometimes last summer on the road outside the back door of the Vicarage.
She came in, pausing on the threshold and looking about her, as if she stood poised on the edge of an adventure. Her smallness, and the delicious, exploring air of her melted Jim's heart and made him smile at her.
"It's a roough plaace fer a laady," he said.
"It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice.
And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle; not because of these things but because it was on the border of her Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there. Jim Greatorex had glamour for her, less on his own account than as a man in whom Rowcliffe was interested.
"You'd think it a bit loansoom, wouldn' yo', ef yo' staayed in it yeear in and yeear out?"
"I don't know," said Alice doubtfully. "Perhaps—a little," she ventured, encouraged by Greatorex's indulgent smile.
"An' loansoom it is," said Greatorex dismally.
Alice explored, penetrating into the interior.
"Oh—but aren't you glad you've got such a lovely fireplace?"
"I doan' knaw as I've thought mooch about it. We get used to our own."
"What are those hooks for in the chimney?"
"They? They're fer 'angin' the haams on—to smoak 'em."
"I see."
She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was holding open the door of an inner room.
"Yo'd better coom into t' parlor, Miss Cartaret. It'll be more coomfortable for you."
She rose and followed him. She had been long enough in Garth to know that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go. Otherwise you risk offending the kind gods of the hearth and threshold.
The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house to its southern end. One wide mullioned window looked east over the marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of dwarfed and twisted trees.
To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its boundary.
Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair with the white antimacassar.
"Sit yo' down and I'll putt a light to the fire."
"Not for me," she protested.
But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire.
"You'll 'ave wet feet coomin' over t' moor. Cauld, too, yo'll be."
She sat and watched him. He was deft with his great hands, like a woman, over his fire-lighting.
"There—she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.
"Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret."
There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said.
"Please don't trouble."
"It's naw trooble—naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."
He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."
Alice looked about her while she waited.
Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue.
There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures, the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink; and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties—faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.
All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and importance.
* * * * *
She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of
Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie.
"Theer—that's t' road. Gently, laass—moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now t' tray—an' a clane cloth—t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road."
Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations:
"Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?"
"T' best coops, Maaggie."
Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white and gold). At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth before the visitor. Humbly, under her master's eye, yet with a sort of happy pride about her, she set out the tea-things and the glass dishes of jam and honey and tea-cakes.
Greatorex waited, silent and awkward, till his servant had left the room. Then he came forward.
"Theer's caake," he said. "Maaggie baaked un yesterda'. An' theer's hooney."
He made no servile apologies for what he set before her. He was giving her nothing that was not good, and he knew it.
And he sat down facing her and watched her pour out her tea and help herself with her little delicate hands. If he had been a common man, a peasant, his idea of courtesy would have been to leave her to herself, to turn away his eyes from her in that intimate and sacred act of eating and drinking. But Greatorex was a farmer, the descendant of yeomen, and by courtesy a yeoman still, and courtesy bade him watch and see that his guest wanted for nothing.
That he did not sit down at the little table and drink tea with her himself showed that his courtesy knew where to draw the dividing line.
"But why aren't you having anything yourself?" said Alice. She really wondered.
He smiled. "It's a bit too early for me, thank yo'. Maaggie'll mak' me a coop by and bye."
And she said to herself, "How beautifully he did it."
He was indeed doing it beautifully all through. He watched her little fingers, and the very instant they had disposed of a morsel he offered her another. It was a deep and exquisite pleasure to him to observe her in that act of eating and drinking. He had never seen anything like the prettiness, the dainty precision that she brought to it. He had never seen anything so pretty as Ally herself, in the rough gray tweed that exaggerated her fineness and fragility; never anything so distracting and at the same time so heartrending as the gray muff and collar of squirrel fur, and the little gray fur hat with the bit of blue peacock's breast laid on one side of it like a folded wing.
As he watched her he thought, "If I was to touch her I should break her."
* * * * *
Then the conversation began.
"I was sorry," he said, "to hear yo was so poorly, Miss Cartaret."
"I'm all right now. You can see I'm all right."
He shook his head. "I saw yo' a moonth ago, and I didn't think then I sud aver see yo' at Oopthorne again."
He paused.
"'E's a woonderful maan, Dr. Rawcliffe."
"He is," said Alice.
Her voice was very soft, inaudible as a breath. All the blood in her body seemed to rush into her face and flood it and spread up her forehead to the roots of the gold hair that the east wind had crisped round the edges of her hat. She thought, "It'll be awful if he guesses, and if he talks." But when she looked at Greatorex his face reassured her, it was so utterly innocent of divination. And the next moment he went straight to the matter in hand.
"An' what's this thing you've coom to aassk me, Miss Cartaret?"
"Well"—she looked at him and her gray eyes were soft and charmingly candid—"it was if you'd be kind enough to sing at our concert. You've heard about it?"
"Ay, I've heard about it, right enoof."
"Well—won't you? You have sung, you know."
"Yes. I've soong. But thot was in t' owd schoolmaaster's time. Yo' wouldn't care to hear my singin' now. I've got out of the way of it, like."
"You haven't, Mr. Greatorex. I've heard you. You've got a magnificent voice. There isn't one like it in the choir."
"Ay, there's not mooch wrong with my voice, I rackon. But it's like this, look yo. I joost soong fer t' schoolmaaster. He was a friend—a personal friend of mine. And he's gone. And I'm sure I doan' knaw—"
"I know, Mr. Greatorex. I know exactly how you feel about it. You sang to please your friend. He's gone and you don't like the idea of singing for anybody else—for a set of people you don't know."
She had said it. It was the naked truth and he wasn't going to deny it.
She went on. "We're strangers and perhaps you don't like us very much, and you feel that singing for us would be like singing the Lord's song in a strange country; you feel as if it would be profanation—a kind of disloyalty."
"Thot's it. Thot's it." Never had he been so well interpreted.
"It's that—and it's because you miss him so awfully."
"Wall—" He seemed inclined, in sheer honesty, to deprecate the extreme and passionate emotion she suggested. I would n' saay—O' course, I sort o' miss him. I caann't afford to lose a friend—I 'aven't so many of 'em."
"I know. It's the waters of Babylon, and you're hanging up your voice in the willow tree." She could be gay and fluent enough with Greatorex, who was nothing to her. "But it's an awful pity. A willow tree can't do anything with a big barytone voice hung up in it."
He laughed then. And afterward, whenever he thought of it, he laughed.
She saw that he had adopted his attitude first of all in resentment, that he had continued it as a passionate, melancholy pose, and that he was only keeping it up through sheer obstinacy. He would be glad of a decent excuse to abandon it, if he could find one.
"And your friend must have been proud of your voice, wasn't he?"
"He sat more store by it than what I do. It was he, look yo, who trained me so as I could sing proper."
"Well, then, he must have taken some trouble over it. Do you think he'd like you to go and hang it up in a willow tree?"
Greatorex looked up, showing a shamefaced smile. The little lass had beaten him.
"Coom to think of it, I doan' knaw as he would like it mooch."
"Of course he wouldn't like it. It would be wasting what he'd done."
"So 't would. I naver thought of it like thot."
She rose. She knew the moment of surrender, and she knew, woman-like, that it must not be overpassed. She stood before him, drawing on her gloves, fastening her squirrel collar and settling her chin in the warm fur with the movement of a small burrowing animal, a movement that captivated Greatorex. Then, deliberately and finally, she held out her hand.
"Good-bye, Mr. Greatorex. It's all right, isn't it? You're coming to sing for him, you know, not for us."
"I'm coomin'," said Greatorex.
She settled her chin again, tucked her hands away in the squirrel muff and went quickly toward the door. He followed.
"Let me putt Daasy in t' trap, Miss Cartaret, and drive yo' home."
"I wouldn't think of it. Thank you all the same."
She was in the kitchen now, on the outer threshold. He followed her there.
"Miss Cartaret—"
She turned. "Well?"
His face was flushed to the eyes. He struggled visibly for expression.
"Yo' moosn' saay I doan' like yo'. Fer it's nat the truth."
"I'm glad it isn't," she said.
He walked with her down the bridle path to the gate. He was dumb after his apocalypse.
They parted at the gate.
With long, slow, thoughtful strides Greatorex returned along the bridle path to his house.
* * * * *
Alice went gaily down the hill to Garth. It was the hill of Paradise. And if she thought of Greatorex and of how she had cajoled him into singing, and of how through singing she would reclaim him, it was because Greatorex and his song and his redemption were a small, hardly significant part of the immense thought of Rowcliffe.
"How pleased he'll be when he knows what I've done!"
And her pure joy had a strain in it that was not so pure. It pleased her to please Rowcliffe, but it pleased her also that he should realise her as a woman who could cajole men into doing for her what they didn't want to do.
* * * * *
"I've got him! I've got him!" she cried as she came, triumphant, into the dining-room where her father and her sisters still sat round the table. "No, thanks. I've had tea."
"Where did you get it?" the Vicar asked with his customary suspicion.
"At Upthorne. Jim Greatorex gave it me."
The Vicar was appeased. He thought nothing of it that Greatorex should have given his daughter tea. Greatorex was part of the parish.