Heritage

by V. Sackville-West

III

“Now,” said Malory, “I scarcely know how to continue my story. I have told you how I went to live with the Pennistans, and I have told you Oliver Pennistan’s Spanish adventure, and the rest lies largely in hours so full of work that no day could drag, but which in words would take five minutes’ reproducing. I have told you already how I loved that simple monotone of life. I had arrived in autumn, an unwise choice for a novice less enthusiastic than myself, for soon the trees were bare of the fruit which had so rejoiced me, bare, too, of the summer leaf, and the working day, which at first had drawn itself out in long, warm, melting evening, now rushed into darkness before work was done, and not into darkness alone, but into chill and wet, so that you might often have seen me going about my work in the cow-sheds with a sack over my shoulders and a hurricane lantern in my hand. I do not pretend that I enjoyed these squally winter nights. They had the effect of dulling my perception, and presently I found myself like the country people whose life I shared, considering the weather merely in its relation to myself; was it wet? then I should be wet; was it a bright, fine day? then I should be dry. My standpoint veered slowly round, like the needle of a compass, from the subjective to the objective. I wish I could say as much for many of my contemporaries. Then in our age as in all great ages, we might find more men living, not merely thinking, their lives.”

In after years I remembered Malory’s words, and wondered whether he had found on the battlefield sufficient signs of the activity he desired.

“I remember how entranced I was,” he went on, altering his tone, “by the sense of ritual in the labouring year. I thought of the country as a vast cathedral, teeming with worshippers, all passing in unison from ceremony to ceremony as the months revolved. When I had come to join the congregation, apse and column and nave were rich with fruit, the common fruit of the English countryside, plum and apple, damson and pear, curved and coloured and glowing with the quality of jewels; then busy hands came, and packed and stored the harvest into bins, and colour went from the place, and it grew dark. A long pause full of meditation fell. The trees slept, men worked quickly and silently, no more than was imperative, and from darkened corners spread the gleam of fires which they had lighted for their warmth and comfort. But then, oh! then the place was suddenly full of young living things, and of a light like pearls; children laughed, and over the ground swept a tide which left it starred with flowers, and a song arose, full of laughter and the ripple of brooks. The spring had come.”

He was strangely exalted. I knew that my presence was forgotten.

“The shepherd and his nymph were not long lacking in this Arcadian world. I met them crossing the fields, I spied them beneath the hedges, I learned to step loudly before entering the dairy with my pails of milk. I loved them, more perhaps as a part of the picture than for their own sakes. To me they were Daphnis and Chloe, not the game-keeper’s son and the farmer’s daughter.

“The match was favourably viewed by Amos Pennistan, though Nancy was but eighteen and her lover two years older. I was honoured by an invitation to the wedding. I had already woven a little tale for myself around those country nuptials, a celebration which, although slightly irregular, would have become my lovers better than the parochial gentility which did actually attend their union. I had pictured them by a brook, Daphnis in, to our minds, becomingly inadequate clothing, Chloe’s muslin supplemented by chains of meadow flowers such as the children weave, accompanied by their flocks and the many young creatures, lambs, kids, and calves, as are characteristic of that least virginal of seasons. No wooing; no; or if there must be wooing, let it be sudden and primitive, and of the nature of a revelation, and let the oak trees be their roof that night, and the stars the witnesses of their natural and candid passion. But passion, poor soul! was put into stays and stockings, had his mad gallop checked into a walk, while fingers poked, eyes peeped, and tongues clacked round the prisoner. Alas for the secret of Daphnis and Chloe; shorn of the dignity of secrecy, it glared in the printed column, was brayed out from the pulpit, was totted up in pounds and shillings. Food entered to play his hospitable and clumsy part. For days Mrs. Pennistan baked, roasted, and kneaded cakes and pastries, and daily as she did it her temper disimproved. Such beauty as was Chloe’s, the beauty of health and artlessness, was devastated by the atrocious trappings of respectability....

“What a commonplace tale! you will say, and a vulgar one into the bargain! and indeed you will be right, if a miracle can become a commonplace through frequent working, and if you look upon the marriage of two young creatures as a social convenience, ordained, as we are told, for the procreation of lawful children. I have told you nothing but the love of rustic clowns. But as the great words of language, life and death, love and hate, sin, birth, war, bread and wine, are short and simple, and as the great classical emotions are direct and without complexity, so my rustic clowns are classical and enduring, because Adam and Eve, Daphnis and Chloe, Dick and Nancy, are no more than interchangeable names throughout the ages.

“My Arcady missed its lovers. I realised after they had gone that they had been real lovers, imperative to one another, and that they had not simply drifted into marriage as a result of upbringing and propinquity. Had their parents’ consent been for some reason refused, they would, I am convinced, have gone away together. Amos Pennistan, in one of his rare moments of expansion, told me as much himself. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘it never did to cross Nancy. She was strong-willed from three months upward. Ruth, now, she’s a steady, tractable girl for all her dark looks. Of the two, give me Ruth as a daughter.’

“You may imagine my profound interest in the study of this strain sprung from the stock of Concha and Oliver Pennistan. Here I had Nancy, with her slight English prettiness, and the fiery will which might never be crossed; and Ruth, who looked like a gipsy and was in fact steady and tractable. I could not help feeling that fate had her hand on these people, and mocked and pushed them hither and thither in the thin disguise of heredity. You remember Francis Galton and the waltzing mice, how he took the common mouse and the waltzing mouse, and mated them, and how among their progeny there were a common mouse, a black and white mouse, and a mouse that waltzed; and how in the subsequent generations the common brown house mouse predominated, but every now and then there came a mouse that waltzed and waltzed, restless and tormented, until in the endless pursuit of its tail it died, dazed, blinded, perplexed, by the relentless fate that had it in grip. Well, I had my mice in a cage, and Concha, the dancer, the waltzing mouse, sat mumbling by the fire.”

I shuddered. I did not understand Malory. He had spoken of the violence of his feeling when he first caught sight of Ruth; I could not reconcile that mood with his present chill analysis.

“You held a microscope over their emotions,” I said.

“I was afraid there would not be many emotions left now that Nancy was gone,” he replied regretfully. “I missed her as a study, and I missed her as an intrinsic part of my Arcady. I turned naturally for compensation to Ruth and to Rawdon Westmacott, but here I realised at once that I must dissociate the figures from the landscape. They would not fit. No; contrive and compress them as I might, they would not fit. I am very sensitive to the relation of the picture to the frame, and I was troubled by their southern exuberance in the midst of English hay and cornfields. Now could I but have had them here ...” and again the cropping goats, the mountains, and the torrent rushed across the magic lantern screen in my mind.

“I told you that I knew young Westmacott was there crazy for her; he had no reserve about his desire, but hung round the farm with a straw between his teeth, his whip smacking viciously at his riding-boots, and his eyes perpetually following the girl at her work. He would look at her with a hunger that was indecent. Me he considered with a dislike that amused while it annoyed me. I often left my work when I saw him looming up morosely in the distance, but old Amos dropped me a hint, very gently, in his magnificently grand manner, after which I no longer felt at liberty to leave the two alone. If they wanted private interviews they must arrange them when they knew my work would take me elsewhere.

“I was not sorry, for I had no affection for Westmacott, and it amused me to watch Ruth’s manner towards him. I had heard of a woman treating a man like a dog, but I had never seen an expression put into practice as I now saw Ruth put this expression into practice towards her cousin. She seemed to have absolute confidence in her power over him. When it did not suit her to notice his presence, she utterly ignored him, busied her tongue with singing and her hands with the affair of the moment, never casting so much as a glance in his direction, never asking so much as his help with her work; and he would wait, lounging against the doorway or against a tree, silent, devouring her with that hungry look in his eyes. Often I have seen him wait in vain, returning at last to his home without a word from her to carry with him. His farm suffered from his continual absence, but he did not seem to care. And she? did she get much satisfaction out of her ill-treatment of his devotion? I never knew, for she never alluded to him, but I can only suppose that, in the devilish, inexplicable way of women, she did. In his presence she was certainly an altered being; all her gentleness and her undoubted sweetness left her, and she became hard, contemptuous, almost impudent. I disliked her at such moments; self-confidence was unbecoming to her.

“Then, when she wanted him, she would whistle him up like a little puppy, and this also I disliked, because Westmacott, whatever his faults, wasn’t that sort of man, and it offended me to witness the slight put upon his dignity. He didn’t seem to resent it himself, but came always, obedient to her call. And he would do the most extraordinary things at her bidding. Mrs. Pennistan told me one day that when the pair were children, or, rather, when Ruth was a child of ten and he was a young man of twenty-two, she would order him to perform the wildest feats of danger and difficulty.

“‘And he’d do what she told him, what’s more,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, to whom these reminiscences were obviously a source of delight and pride, as though she, poor honest woman, shone a little with the reflected glory of her daughter’s ten-year-old ascendancy over the daring young man. ‘Lord, you would have laughed to see her standing there, stamping her little foot, and defying him to go down Bailey’s Hill on his bicycle without any brakes, and him doing it, with that twist in the road and all.... One day she wanted him to jump into the pond with all his clothes on, and when he wouldn’t do that she got into such a rage, and stalked away, and wouldn’t speak to him, enough to make a cat laugh,’ and Mrs. Pennistan with a great chuckle doubled herself up, rubbing her fat hands in enjoyment up and down her thighs, straightening herself again to say, ‘Oh, comical!’ and to wipe her eye with the corner of her apron!

“‘Well, now, I declare!’ she said suddenly, craning her neck to see over the hedge. ‘If she isn’t at her old tricks again!’

“I followed her with a thrill to a gap in the hedge whither she had darted—if any one so portly may be said to dart. There, across the field, by the gate, stood the pair we had been discussing, and I was actually surprised to find that the little ten-year-old girl whom I had half expected to see was a well-grown and extremely good-looking young woman. She was sitting on the gate, and Westmacott was lounging in his usual attitude beside her; even at that distance his singular grace was apparent.

“They seemed to be looking at the two cart-horses which were grazing, loose in the field.

“‘She’s up to something, you mark my words,’ said Mrs. Pennistan to me.

“I agreed with her. Ruth was pointing, and the imperious tones of her voice floated across to us in the still evening; Rawdon was following the direction of her finger, and now and then he turned in his languid, easy way that covered—with how thin a veneer!—the fierceness beneath, to say something to his companion. I saw his hand drop the switch he carried, and fall upon her knee. Her manner became more wilful, more imperative; had she been standing on the ground, she would have stamped. I heard Rawdon laugh at her, but that seemed to make her angry, and with a resigned shrug he pushed himself away from the gate and began to walk across the field.

“‘Lord sakes,’ said Mrs. Pennistan anxiously, ‘whatever is he going to do?’

“I begged her to keep quiet, because I wanted to see any fun that might be going.

“Mrs. Pennistan was not happy; she grunted.

“Ruth was perched on the gate, watching her cousin. I was delighted to have an opportunity of observing them when they thought themselves alone. Besides, I intensely wanted to see what Rawdon was going to do. He walked up to one of the horses, hand outstretched and fingers moving invitingly, but the horse snorted, threw up its head, and cantered lumberingly away to another part of the field. Rawdon followed it, pulling a wisp of grass by means of which he enticed the great clumsy beast until he was able, after some stroking and patting, to lay his hand upon its mane. Ruth, on the gate, clapped her hands and called out gaily,—

“‘Now up with you!’

“‘Lord sakes!’ said Mrs. Pennistan again.

“I saw Westmacott getting ready to spring; he was agile as a cat, and with a leap and a good hold on the mane he hoisted himself on to the horse’s back. The horse galloped madly round the field, but Westmacott sat him easily—not a very wonderful feat for a farm-trained boy to accomplish. As he passed Ruth he waved his hand to her.

“She wasn’t satisfied yet; she called out something, and, the horse having come to a standstill, I saw Rawdon cautiously turning himself round till he sat with his face to the tail. Then he drummed with his heels to put the horse once more into its lumbering gallop.

“I saw the scene as something barbaric, or, rather, as something that ought to have been barbaric and only succeeded in being grotesque. Ruth ought to have been, of course, an Arab girl daring her lover in the desert to feats of horsemanship upon a slim unbroken thoroughbred colt. Instead of that, Westmacott was just making himself look rather ridiculous upon a cart-horse. But the intention was there; yes, by Jove! it was; the intention, the instinct; he was wooing her in a way an English suitor wouldn’t have chosen, nor an English girl have approved. Mrs. Pennistan, however, saw the matter in a different light, as a foolish and unbecoming escapade on the part of her daughter; so, thrusting herself between the loose staves of the fence and waving her hands angrily, she called out to Westmacott to have done with his dangerous nonsense.

“He slipped off the horse’s back, and Ruth slipped down off the gate, the man looking annoyed, and, in a slight degree, sheepish, the girl perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Pennistan rated them both. Westmacott kicked sulkily at the toe of one boot with the heel of the other. I glanced at Ruth. She had her hands in the big pockets of her apron and was looking away into the sky, with her lips pursed for an inaudible whistle. Her mother stormed at her.

“‘You’re getting too old for such nonsense. It was all very well when you were a chit with pig-tails down your back. And you, Rawdon, I should ha’ thought you’d ha’ known better. What’d Pennistan say if he knew of your larking with his horses? I’ve a good mind to tell him.’

“‘I’ve done the brute no harm,’ he muttered.

“‘Well, I’ll tell him next time, see if I don’t. What did you do it for, anyway?’

“‘A bit of fun ... ’ he muttered again, and, his smouldering eyes resting resentfully upon her, he added something about Ruth.

“Ruth brought her gaze slowly down from the clouds to bend it upon her cousin. Their eyes met in that furnace of passion and hatred with which I was to become so familiar.

“‘Ay, Ruth told you,’ stormed Ruth’s mother. ‘An old tale. You let Ruth alone and she’ll let you alone, and we’ll all be better pleased. Now be off with you, Rawdon, and you, Ruth, come in to your tea.’

“Her excitement had grown as it beat in vain against the rock of Ruth’s indifference.

“Ruth,” said Malory after a long pause, and paused again. “She is a problem by which I am still baffled. I do not know how to speak of her, lest you should misunderstand me. That first impression of which I have already told you never wore off. Do not think that I was in love with her. I was not. I am not that sort of man. But I was always conscious of her, and I cannot imagine the man who, seeing her, would not be conscious of her.

“She on her part, was, I am certain, unaware of the effect she produced. Before I had been very long on the farm I had come to the conclusion that she was a slow, gentle, rather stupid girl, obedient to her parents in all things, less from the virtue of obedience than from her natural apathy. She and I were thrown a good deal together by reason of my work. I tried to draw her into conversation, but no sooner had I enticed her, however laboriously, into the regions of speculation than she dragged me back into the regions of fact. ‘Ruth,’ I would say, ‘does a woman cling more to her children or to her husband?’ and she would stare at me and reply, ‘What things you do say, Mr. Malory! and if you’ll excuse me I have the dairy to wash down yet.’

“I am a lover of experiments by nature, and having no aptitude for science it is necessarily with human elements that I conjure in my crucible. You said I held a microscope over emotions. I say, rather, that I hold my subject, my human being, like a piece of cut glass in the sunlight, and let the colours play varyingly through the facets.

“Sunday afternoon was our holiday on the farm, and to the worker alone a holiday is passionately precious. It is all a matter of contrast. On Sunday afternoon I would take Ruth for a walk; the sheep-dog came with us, and we would go through shaw and spinney and young coppice, and along high-hedged lanes. One spot I loved, called Baker’s Rough, where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, and wild flowers had consequently gathered in their millions: anemones, wood-violets, bluebells, cuckooflowers, primroses, and later the wild strawberry, and later still the scarlet hips of the briar. I never saw a piece of ground so starred. Here we often passed, and we would climb the hill-ridge behind, and look down over the Weald, and fancy that we could see as far as Romney Marsh, where Rye and Winchelsea keep guard over the melancholy waste like little foreign towns. We stood over the Weald, seeing both fair weather and foul in the wide sweep of sky; there a storm, and there a patch of sun on the squares of meadow. On fine days great pillows of white cloud drifted across the blue, painted by a bold artist in generous sweeps on a broad canvas, and those great clouds were repeated below in the great rounded cushions of trees. We looked over perhaps fifty miles of country, yet scarcely one house could we distinguish, but when we looked for a long time we made out, here and there, a roof or an oast-house, and I used to think that, like certain animals, these dwellings had taken on the colour of the land. For the most part, a clump of trees would be our nearest landmark.

“I could evoke for you many of those hours when, with the girl beside me, I explored the recesses of that tender country. Without sharing my enthusiasm, she was yet singularly companionable, happy and contented wherever our footsteps led us, with the reposeful quality of content essential to a true comrade.”

He was silent, and I considered him covertly as he sat hugging his knees and staring into the distance with a far-away look on his face. He was, I thought, a queer chap; queer, lonely, alien; intensely, damnably analytical. As I watched him, his head moved slightly, in a distressed, unconscious manner, and his brow contracted into a frown that emphasized the slight negative movement of the head. Yet he did not share his difficulties with me. He dismissed them with a sigh, and a gesture of the hand, and resumed,—

“I mentioned just now the place called Baker’s Rough. Ruth came to me one morning with glowing eyes.

“‘There’s flowers such as you never saw on Baker’s Rough to-day,’ she said mysteriously.

“I tried to guess: mulleins? ragged robins? periwinkles? but it was none of those. She would not tell me. I must come and see for myself.

“We set out after tea for Baker’s Rough, walking quickly, for we had only an hour to spare. As we drew near, the sheep-dog, who had run on ahead, set up a tremendous barking at the gate. I cried,—

“‘Gipsies!’

“There was a real gipsy encampment, caravans hung with shining pots and pans, gaudy washing strung out on a line, a camp fire, lean dogs, curly-headed children. Ruth had guessed aright when she guessed that I would be pleased. Amos hated gipsies, but I loved them. I’ve never outgrown the love of gipsies that lurks in every boy. Have you?”

His eyes were actually sparkling as he asked the question, and I was overcome by a feeling of guilt. Often I had thought this man a prig. He was not one, but simply an odd compound of philosopher and vagrant, poet and child. I resolved not to be hard on him again. I was uncomfortably suspicious that it was I who had been the prig.

“As we stood looking,” he went on, “a woman came down the steps of a caravan, and, seeing us, invited us with a flashing smile to come into the camp. Ruth was delighted; she followed the woman, looking like a gipsy herself, I thought, and the children came round her, little impudent beggars, staring up into her face and even touching her clothes. She only laughed, curiously at home; I felt, despite my love of the roaming people, over-educated and sophisticated. I was loving the camp self-consciously, almost voluntarily, aware that I was loving it and rather pleased with myself for doing so.”

“Your mind twists,” I interrupted, “like the point of a corkscrew.”

He laughed, but he looked a little hurt, taken aback, checked on his course.

“I am sorry,” he said, “you are right to snub me for it. Well, Ruth at any rate was thoroughly at home, and I could see that the gipsy was sizing her up with her shrewd eyes, and wondering whether I should be good for half-a-crown or only a shilling.

“She let Ruth sit on a stool and stir the pot over the fire; it smelt very good, though it probably contained rabbits, which of all foods in the world is the one I most dislike. Then she offered, inevitably, to tell our fortunes, and Ruth, as inevitably, accepted with alacrity. She stretched out her little brown hand, strong and hard with work.

“Of course the gipsy told her a lot of nonsense, and I stood by, acutely apprehensive that I should be drawn in an embarrassing rôle into the prognostications. I had come there with Ruth; therefore, in the gipsy’s eyes, I must be Ruth’s young man. I took off my cap to let the gipsy see that my hair was going gray on the temples. But it wasn’t any use; I found myself appearing as the middle-aged man whose heart was younger than his years, and who would finally carry off the young lady as his bride.

“I tried, of course, to laugh it off, but to my surprise I saw Ruth growing very red and her mouth quivering, so I told the gipsy we had heard enough and that we had no more time to spare. Ruth rose, the pleasure all died away from her face. Then, to add to the misfortunes of the evening, I heard a scream and an outburst of laughter from a neighbouring caravan, and, looking round, I saw Rawdon Westmacott jump to the ground in pursuit of a young gipsy woman, whom he caught in his arms and kissed.

“I looked hastily at Ruth; she had seen the thing happen. The distress which had troubled her face gave way to anger; the name ‘Rawdon!’ slipped in involuntary indignation from her lips. Then an instinct asserted itself to pretend that she had seen nothing, and to get out of the place before her cousin had discovered her. But she conquered the instinct, staring at Westmacott till he turned as though compelled in her direction.

“Not a word did they speak to one another then, but in the silence her anger and contempt flashed across at him like a heliograph, and his vexation flashed back at her. She stood there staring at him deliberately, staring him out of countenance. God! how vexed and furious he was! It makes me laugh now to remember it. I never knew what a fool a man could look when he was caught red-handed. The gipsy only giggled vulgarly, and tried to rearrange her tumbled dress. Ruth never even glanced at her, and presently she removed her gaze from Westmacott—it seemed quite a long time, though I suppose it was not really more than a few seconds—and turned to me.

“‘Shall we go?’ she said.

“‘We went, Ruth haughty, and I at a loss for words. Decidedly the expedition had not been a success. The sheep-dog ran on in front and tactfully barked, and in throwing little stones at him relations were re-established between us. I was prepared not to allude to the incident, but Ruth was bolder; she grappled directly with the difficulty.

“‘You saw Rawdon?’ she said with suppressed violence.

“‘I.... Well, yes, I saw him.’

“‘What was he doing there? He was up to no good with those gipsy women.’

“I had nothing to say; I knew she was right.

“‘He’s always after women,’ she added violently.

“‘I knew that she would not have said this to me had she not been completely startled out of her self-control.

“‘He cares for you though, in his heart,’ I said, rather inanely.

“‘Does he!’ she exclaimed. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘he rides the cart-horses bareback with his face to their tails to please you.’

“‘Oh, you may joke,’ she said; ‘he wants to please me now, but where’d I be if I belonged to him? He’d sing a very different song.’

“‘It rests with you, after all,’ I ventured.

“She was silent, swishing at the hedges with her stick as she passed.

“‘Doesn’t it?’ I urged.

“‘Oh—I suppose so.’

“‘How do you mean, you suppose so? Nobody wants you to marry him; your parents don’t; your brothers don’t. You need never see him again. Send him away!’

“‘I can’t do that,’ she said in a very low voice.

“‘Why not?’

“‘I can’t.... I sometimes feel I can’t escape Rawdon,’ she cried out. ‘He’s always been there since I can remember, I think he always will be there. There’s something between us; it may be fancy; but there’s something between us.’

“‘Hush!’ I said, startled as I was; ‘here he is.’

“He caught us up, walking rapidly, and I could see at a glance that he was determined to have it out with Ruth in spite of my presence. He came up with us, and he took her by the arm.

“‘Ruth!’ he said, in a vibrant voice. I want a word with you. You’ve misjudged me.’

“We had all come to a standstill.

“‘I can’t misjudge what I see,’ she answered very coldly.

“‘You saw, you saw! well, and what of it? That was only a bit of fun. Damn you, if you treated me a bit better yourself ...’

“‘Let me alone, Rawdon,’ she said, shaking him off. ‘You can do as you like, that’s your affair, only let me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.’

“‘Your way!’ he said, scowling at me. ‘Your way’s my way, as you’ll learn.’

“‘Now don’t you come bullying me, Rawdon,’ she said, but I think she was frightened.

“‘Well, you speak me fair and I won’t bully you. I was up to no harm, only larking around.... Come, Ruthie, haven’t you a smile for me? You treat me cruel bad most days, you know, and I don’t take offence. Ruthie!’

“‘We’re not alone, Rawdon,’ she said sharply.

“I thought he muttered, ‘No, damn it!’ between his teeth, and just then I felt a hand close over my wrist on the side farthest from Westmacott, a little imploring hand that checked in the nick of time my impulse to move away. She spoke bravely, as though the contact gave her courage.

“‘That’ll do, now, Rawdon, don’t come making a scene. There’s nothing to make a scene about.’

“‘But you’ll not sulk me?’ he said.

“‘I’ll not sulk you, why should I?’

“‘Then give me a kiss, for peace.’

“‘Let me be, Rawdon.’

“She was troubled, now that her anger had passed. I would have walked on, but for the dry, fevered fingers gripping my wrist.

“A new idea had taken possession of Rawdon’s mind; his eyes glowed in the noble, architectural carving of his face, that so belied the coarseness of his nature.

“‘I’m your cousin, Ruth!’ he cried satirically.

“He caught her by the shoulder and turned her towards him. I thought she would have struggled, and indeed I saw the preparatory tautening of her frame; then to my astonishment she yielded suddenly, flexible and abandoned, and he kissed her regardless of my presence; kissed her ferociously, and pushed her from him.

“‘I’ll see you to-morrow?’ he asked.

“‘To-morrow, likely,’ she answered indifferently, with a quick return to her old contemptuous manner.

“He nodded, put his hand on the top bar of the adjoining gate, and vaulted it, walking off rapidly across the fields in the direction of his own farm.

“‘And let me tell you,’ said Ruth, as though she were continuing an uninterrupted conversation, “he’ll be back around that gipsy place to-night as sure as geese at Michaelmas. He’s as false as can be, is Rawdon.”

“‘Then I think you were weak with him,’ I said. ‘Are you afraid of him?’

“‘It’s like this,’ said Ruth, with that great uneasy heave of the uneducated when confronted with the explanation of a problem beyond the scope of their vocabulary, ‘we never get straight. Rawdon and I. He cringes to me, and then I bully him; or else he bullies me, and then I cringe to him. But quarrel as we may, we always come together again. It’s no good,’ she said with a note of despair in her expressive voice like the melancholy of a violin, ‘we can’t get away from one another. We always come together again.’

“I was sad; I foresaw that those two would drift into marriage from pure physical need, though there might well be more hatred than love between them.

“In the meantime I tried, not always very successfully, to keep Ruth away from him; she liked being with me, I know, and I think she even welcomed a barrier between herself and her all-too compelling cousin, and so it came about that our Sunday afternoons were, as I have told you, usually spent together. There were times when she broke away from me, when the physical craving became, I suppose, too strong for her, and she would go back to Rawdon. But for the most part she would come after dinner on Sundays, silent and reserved, to see if I was disposed for a walk. She would come in her daily untidiness, with the colour blowing in her cheeks, as beautiful and as wild as a flower. I used to feel sorry for Westmacott and his hot blood.

“On these afternoons I tried my experiments on Ruth, and I sometimes wonder whether she ever caught me at the game, for she would give me a scared, distrustful glance, and turn her head away. She was curiously lazy for so hard a worker, and in sudden indolence she would refuse to move, but would lie on the ground idle and half asleep, and would do nothing but eat the sweets I gave her. I never saw a book in her hand. Once,” said Malory, throwing a bit of wood at the goats, “I thought I would convert her to Art. I brought out some treasured books, and showed her the pictures; she was neither bewildered, nor bored, nor impressed, nor puzzled; she simply thought the masterpieces unspeakably funny. She laughed.... I was absurdly offended at first, then I began to come round to her point of view, and now I am not at all sure that I don’t agree. She opened out for me a new attitude.

“After the failure of my pictures, I tried her with a more tangible object. I took her to Penshurst. In telling you of this I am making a very real sacrifice of my pride and self-respect, for, as sometimes happens, I have realised since, from my disinclination to dwell in my own mind upon the incident, that the little rapier of humiliation went deeper than I thought, down to that point in the heart where indifference ceases and essentials begin.”

As Malory said this, he looked at me with his quizzical, interrogative expression, as if to see how I was taking it. I noticed then that he had a crooked smile which gave to his face a quaint attraction. He was a clean-shaven man, with lean features and a dark skin; graying hair; I supposed him to be in the neighbourhood of forty.

“When I asked Ruth if she would come to Penshurst with me,” he continued, “she said she must change her dress. She was absent for about half an hour, while I waited in the garden and threw stones for the sheep-dog. When she joined me I saw that she had done her best to smarten herself up; she had frizzed her hair and put on a hat, and her blouse was decorated with some sort of lace—I can’t give you a closer description than that. I scarcely recognised her, and though I felt that I was expected to make some comment I knew at the same time that I was physically unable to do so. ‘How nice you look!’ were the words that my will hammered out in my brain, but the words that left my lips were, ‘Come along.’

“We started thus unpropitiously, and the strain between us was tautened at every step by the mood of excitement which possessed her. I had never known her like this before. Usually she was quiet, lazy about her speech, and not particularly apposite when she did make a remark, yet I had always found her a satisfactory companion. To-day she chattered volubly, and the painful conviction grew upon me that she was trying to be coy; she hinted that she had broken an appointment with Westmacott; I became more and more silent and miserable. I had anticipated with so much pleasure our going to Penshurst, and I knew now that the afternoon was to be a failure. When we reached the house, bad became worse; Ruth giggled in the rooms, and the housekeeper looked severely at her. She made terrible jokes about the pictures; giggled again; crammed her handkerchief against her mouth; pinched my arm. At last my endurance gave out, and I said, ‘We had better go home,’ and I thanked the housekeeper, and said we would find our own way out.

“Ruth was very crestfallen as we went silently across the park; she walked with hanging head beside me, and as I looked down on the top of her absurd hat I was almost sorry for her, but I was really annoyed, and childishly disappointed, so I said nothing, and stared gloomily in front of me. I thought that if I thus marked my disapproval of her sudden mood she would never repeat the experiment, and that next day she would return to her blue linen dress and her habitual reserve. I did not think she would make a scene, but rather that she would be glad to pass over the disaster in silence.

“I was surprised when she stopped abruptly.

“‘I suppose you’ll never take me out again?’ she said, as though the idea had been boiling wildly in her brain till it found a safety valve in her lips.

“‘My dear Ruth....’ I began.

“‘How cold you are!’ she cried violently, and she stamped her foot upon the ground. ‘Why don’t you get angry with me? shake me? abuse me? at any rate, say something. Only “my dear Ruth.” I suppose I’m not good enough for you to speak to. If that’s it, say so. I’ll go home a different way. What have I done? What’s wrong? What have I done?’

“I realised that she was in the grip of an emotion she could not control. Such emotions came over one but seldom in ordinary life, but when they come they are uncontrollable, for they spring from that point in the heart, which I was speaking of, where indifference ceases and essentials begin. Still, while realising this, I hardened myself against her.

“‘Nothing,’ I said, adding, ‘except failed to be yourself.’

“‘What do you want me to be?’ she asked, staring at me.

“‘My dear Ruth,’ I said, ‘I like you in blue linen.’

“I swear I only meant it symbolically; it was perhaps foolish of me to think she would understand. She went on staring at me for a moment, then a change came over her face, a wounded look, horrible to see, and I felt I had hurt a child, most grievously, but before I could rush into the breach I had made and build it up again with fair words, she had dropped her face into her hands and I saw that her shoulders were shaking. She uttered no word of reproach or self-justification, no plea; thereby increasing her pathos a hundredfold.

“I was distressed and embarrassed beyond measure; I hated myself, but I no longer hated her. I had begun to like her again in the brief period of her rage, and now in the period of her despair I liked her again completely. I implored her to stop crying, and I tried confusedly to explain my meaning.

“She would have none of my explanations, but turned on me cheeks flaming with a shame which forbade any allusion to her clothes. I could see that she was trembling from head to foot, and by the force of her authority over me I gauged the force of her emotion over herself. Genius and passion are alike compelling. Here was a Ruth I did not know, but it was a Ruth I had desired to see, and I triumphed secretly for having divined her under the Ruth of every day.

“Well,” said Malory, “I have made my confession now, for it partakes of the nature of confession. I never saw that piteous finery again, and I never saw the mood that matched it. She calmed down at length, and we made a compact of friendship, but if ever the name of Penshurst arose in conversation I saw the scarlet flags fluttering in her cheeks.

“Meanwhile the familiarity of the place grew on me, as I had foreseen, and there were many inmates of the farm, now old-established, whom I had known since their birth; plants and animals alike. We were haymaking, a common enough pursuit, but to me full of delight; I loved the ready fields, the unceasing whirr and rattle of the cutter, the browning grass as it lay where it had fallen, and the rough wooden rake in my hand. I loved the curve of the fields over the hill, and the ridges of hay stretching away like furrows. Above all I loved the great stack, which swallowed up the cart-loads one by one, and the green tarpaulins furled above it, which made it look like a galleon with sails and rigging.

“I told you I had dipped into many things; I worked once on a Greek trader which plied with figs and oranges from Smyrna to Corinth through the islands of the Ægean. It was a bulky, mediæval-looking vessel, with vast red sails, very little changed, I should imagine, from the one in which Ulysses sailed on his immortal journey. I learnt a certain amount about the orange trade, but I learnt another thing from that Greek ship which I value more: I learnt about colour, hot, tawny colour, that ran the gamut from the bronze limbs of the crew, through the Venetian sails, to the fire of the fruit, and echoed again in the sunset behind Hymettus, and dropped in the cool aquamarine of the waves near the shore, and deepened into sapphire as I hung over the sides of the ship above the moving water. From this rich canvas I had come to the grays and greens and browns of England, the dove after the bird of Paradise, and do you know, I felt the relationship of the two, the relationship of labour between the Greek, the almost pirate, crew, and the English farmer with his classic and primitive tools, the brotherhood between the sweeping scythe and the dipping oar, between the unwieldy stack and the clumsy vessel.

“The scent of the hay is in my nostrils, and the stirring is in my arms to throw up my fork-load upon the cart. We worked sometimes till ten at night, a race with the weather; we worked by sunlight and moonlight, and I preferred the latter. You may think that I preferred it because it pleased me to see the round yellow moon come up from behind the trees, and light that wholesome scene with its unwholesome radiance, like a portrait of Hercules, naked, by Aubrey Beardsley? Well, you are wrong. I preferred it because I got less hot.

“Rawdon Westmacott used to come over to help us. A pair of extra hands was welcome, but I think old Pennistan would rather the hands had been tied on to any other body. It was quite clear that he neglected his own farm only to be near Ruth, and I had long since gathered that the Pennistans would never willingly consider him as a son-in-law. I sympathised with them. He was an unruly man, as wild as he was handsome, a byword among the young men of the countryside; prompt with his fist—that was perhaps the best thing that could be said of him—foul with his tongue, intolerable when in his cups. So quarrelsome was he that even when sober he would seek out cause for insult. I myself, who in my capacity of guest took every precaution to avoid any unpleasantness, had an ominous encounter with him. I had spent a day in London, and returned with various little gifts which I had thought would please the Pennistans; to Ruth I brought a pair of big, round, brass ear-rings and a coloured scarf, for I had a fancy to see her tricked out as a gipsy. It entertained me to see her, who as I have told you was habitually slow of mind, enthusiasm, and speech, respond with some latent instinct to the gaudy things. She ran to the glass in the kitchen and began to screw the rings on to her unpierced ears.

“‘You must learn to dance now, Ruth,’ I said.

“She looked round at me, and in the turn of her head and the flash of the rings I seemed to see Concha of the gipsy booth.

“‘Father doesn’t hold with dancing,’ she replied.

“‘He isn’t here to see,’ I said. ‘Won’t you try a step?’

“She blushed. It was a pretty sight to see her blush.

“‘I don’t know how,’ she said awkwardly, looking away from me into the glass as she wound the scarf round her neck.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘will you learn if I have you taught?’

“She burst into the shrill laugh of the common girl, and cried, ‘Get along with you, Mr. Malory! making fun of a poor girl like me.’

“Concha was gone, but I struggled to revive her, without conviction, and with a queer blankness in my heart. At least,” said Malory, correcting himself, “it wasn’t my heart, but my mind, my sense of rightness, that was disappointed.

“‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I’ll have you taught the dances of Spain.’

“‘Spain?’ she echoed, with a frown genuinely puzzled, so remote from her was all thought of the land of her wandering forefathers.

“I risked a bold remark.

“‘Your great-grandmother, I’ve no doubt, could give you a hint of the Spanish dances.’

“Then she remembered, but the recollection came to her, I could see, from afar off, with the unreality of a date in history, poignant enough at the time.

“At that moment a knock fell upon the door, and Rawdon Westmacott came in without waiting to be bidden. He saw Ruth standing there, and stopped. Then he caught sight of me by the wide fireplace. His eyes travelled swiftly between us, and I saw the rage and the prompt conclusion spring into them. In fact, I never saw a man so suddenly full of barely contained anger. He would have given a great deal, I am sure, to have insulted me openly.

“We stood for a moment in silence, the three of us, then Westmacott’s voice came out of space to break the moment’s eternity.

“‘That’s fine toggery, Ruth, you’ve got on,’ he said.

“She looked at him without answering, her breath beginning to come a little quicker. I watched them both; I was angry, but not too angry to be interested. I felt the man’s power; his brutality; and I remember thinking that something in her—was it primitive woman?—responded to something—was it primitive man?—in him. At the same time I knew that waves of hatred vibrated between them; that, if she was attracted, she was no less repelled. Did I touch then, in an unexpected moment of insight, the vital spot of that enigma? I believe that I was very near the truth. I knew that the situation was not by any means an important one, but it was nevertheless a battle, a clash of wills, and as such I thought it significant.

“I saw her hand travel upward, and slowly begin to unwind the scarf.

“‘It’s ill becoming you, my girl,’ he went on, with the threatening note rising in his voice. ‘I’d sooner see you simple, Ruth,’ and I thought of the lashing sea when the wind begins to swirl like a dragon’s tail along the beach.

“I tried to intervene.

“‘I brought....’ I began to say, but catching the glance which Ruth turned upon me I was silent.

“‘You’d best take them off,’ Westmacott said.

“Slowly she took the scarf, and laid it on the table, slowly she unfastened the rings and laid them beside the scarf. I could have wrung his neck, but for the sake of the girl I remained quiet; I knew that she would have to pay for my championship, and, besides, I was ignorant of what understanding existed between them. Underneath my anger, I was conscious of a vague irritation creeping over me, that she had taken his bullying so meekly and had not flown out at him, with her brass ear-rings clanking in her ears, as she had flown out at me on the day of Penshurst.

“Westmacott was clever enough to ignore the obvious fact that I had been the giver of the ornaments. He swept them off the table into his pocket, and, I presume, threw them into the horse-pond, and would have liked to throw me after; but that Ruth should not go without a present I ordered for her a pair of mice in a cage, a brown mouse and a Japanese waltzing mouse. She thought it extremely diverting to see the black and white mouse turning unceasingly after its tail, white the brown mouse watched it in perplexity mingled with disapproval from a corner of the cage.”