IV
“Either Westmacott did not notice these new inhabitants of the kitchen window-sill, for there they lived, among the pots of red geranium, or he considered he had humiliated me sufficiently; at any rate he made no allusions to the cage. As for Ruth and I, we went for several uncomfortable days without reference to the scene, but there it was between us, an awkward bond, until she broke the silence.
“We were in the dairy; I had brought in the newly-filled milk pails, and she stood churning butter upon a marble slab. I liked the dairy, with its great earthenware pans of milk, its tiled floor, and its cleanliness like the cleanliness of a ship. To-day it was full of the smell of the buttermilk.
“‘Mr. Malory,’ said Ruth, suddenly turning to me, ‘I’ve never thanked you for understanding me the other night. I didn’t think any the worse of you, I’d like to say, for keeping back your words.’
“‘So long as you didn’t think I was afraid of your savage young friend....’ I said.
“‘No, no, I didn’t think that,’ she answered with her quick blush. ‘He says more than he means, Rawdon does, if he’s roused, and it’s best to give in.’
“‘You give in a good deal to people,’ I said with that same irritation at her meekness.
“‘It’s easier...’ she murmured.
“Ah? so that was it? not tameness of spirit, but mere indolence? I felt strangely comforted. At the same time I thought I would take advantage of our enforced confidences to make some remark about the young man of whom her parents had disapproved.
“‘Westmacott....’ I said. ‘He must be a difficult man to deal with? Even for you, whose word should be law to him?’
“But my attempt wasn’t a success, for she shut up like a box with a spring in the lid. I saw that I should never get her to discuss Rawdon Westmacott with me, and I came to the conclusion that she must be fond of the fellow, and I could understand it, regrettable as I thought it, for he was an attractive man in his dare-devil way.
“I soon had cause to regret my conclusion more, for I surprised the secret of a young handy-man who worked sometimes on the farm and for whom I had always had a great liking. He came to fell timber when old Pennistan wanted him, and he also did the thatching of the smaller, out-lying stacks. I went to help him at this work one day when his mate was laid up with a sprained ankle. He told me he had learnt his craft from his father, who had been a thatcher for fifty years; it gave me great satisfaction to think that a man could spend half a century on so monotonous a craft, constantly crawling on the sloping tops of ricks, with a bit of carpet tied round his knees, and his elementary tools—a mallet, a long wooden comb, a bundle of sticks, and a pocketful of pegs—always ready to his hand, while his mate on the ground pulled out the straw from the golden truss, made the ends even, and lifted the prepared bundle on a pitchfork up to the thatcher. My young friend told me the art of thatching was dying out. I tried my hand at it, but the straw blew about, and I found I could not lay two consecutive strands in place.
“He was a fine young man, whose knowledge of the country seemed as instinctive as it was extensive. I said I surprised his secret. I should not have used the word surprise. It shouted itself out from his candid eyes as he rested them on Ruth; she had brought out his dinner, and leaned against his ladder for a moment’s talk; he looked down at her from where he knelt on the rick, and if ever I saw adoration in a man’s face I saw it on his just then. I felt angry with Ruth in her serene unconsciousness. She had no right to disturb men with her more than beauty. I wondered whether she was or was not pledged to Rawdon Westmacott, and the more of a riddle she appeared to me the angrier I felt against her.
“I was dissatisfied with the whole situation; I could not manipulate my puppets as I would; I felt that I held a handful of scattered pearls, and could find no string on which to hang them. In my discontent I went into the kitchen to look at the mice, they were still and huddled in separate corners. Amos and his wife were sitting at the table drinking large cups of tea, Amos, full-bearded, and in his shirt sleeves and red braces as I had first seen him. As I turned to go they stopped me.
“‘Mr. Malory,’ Amos said, ‘we’d like to ask your advice. We’re right moidered about our girl. You’ve seen how it is between her and young Westmacott. Now we’ll not have young Westmacott in our family if we can help it, and we’re wondering whether it would be best to forbid him the place, and forbid Ruth to hold any further truck with him, or to trust her good sense to send him about his business in the end.’
“I reflected. Then I considered that Westmacott was probably more attractive present than absent, and spoke.
“‘I hardly like to interfere in what isn’t really my affair at all, but as you’ve asked me I’ll say that if Ruth were my daughter I should forbid him the farm.’
“‘That clinches it,’ said Amos, bringing his hand down on the table. ‘We’ll have the girl in and tell it her straight away. You’ve voiced my own feelings, sir, and I’m grateful to you.’
“Here Mrs. Pennistan began to cry.
“‘My poor Ruth! and what if she’s fond of the boy?’
“‘Better for her to shed a dozen tears for him now than a hundred thousand in years to come. I’ll call her in.’
“She came, wiping her hands on her blue apron.
“‘Father, the butter’ll spoil.’
“‘Never mind the butter. Now listen here, my girl, we’ve been talking about you, your mother and I, and we’ve decided that you and Rawdon have seen more of each other than is good for you. So I’m going to tell him that he’s to keep over at his own place in the future, and I expect you to keep over here; that is, I won’t have you slipping out and meeting that young good-for-nothing when the fancy takes you.’
“What a gentleman he is, I thought to myself, to have kept my name out of it.
“I looked at Ruth, wondering what she would do, and hoping, yes, hoping that she would rebel.
“‘Very well, dad,’ was all she said, and she looked perfectly composed, and was not even twisting her apron as she stood there before the court of justice.
“I think Amos was a little surprised, a little disappointed, at her compliance.
“‘You understand?’ he said, trying to emphasise the point which he had already
“‘I understand, dad,’ she said, still in that quiet and perfectly respectful voice.
“‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs. Pennistan, and she got up and kissed her daughter, who submitted passively.
“‘Now perhaps Mr. Malory’ll lend me a hand with the butter, or it’ll spoil,’ said Ruth, looking at me, and I followed her out to the dairy, expecting, I must confess, that she would turn upon me and rend me. But she remained severely practical as she set me to my task.
“I could bear it no longer.
“‘Ruth,’ I said, ‘I must be honest with you, even though it makes you angry. Your father asked my advice in this business, and I gave it him.’
“‘You shouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘the butter’ll never set properly.’
“I returned to my churn.
“‘But, Ruth, do you understand what I say? I am partly responsible for Westmacott’s dismissal.’
“Her hand and arm continued their rotary movement, but she turned her large eyes upon me.
“‘Why?’ she inquired, with disconcerting simplicity.
“‘I don’t like him,’ I muttered. ‘How could I live here, knowing you married to a man I dislike and mistrust?’
“To my surprise she said no more, but bent to her work, and I saw a great blush like a wave creep slowly over her half hidden face and down where her unfastened dress revealed her throat.
“‘Ruth,’ I said humbly, ‘are you angry with me?’
“I heard a ‘No,’ that glided out with her breath.
“‘I hope you don’t care for him too much? He isn’t worthy of you.’
“‘Can you lift that pail for me?’ she said, pointing, and I lifted the heavy pail, and poured it as she directed into the separator, a smooth Niagara of milk.
“About three days later my thatcher unbosomed himself to me. Westmacott had disappeared from the farm, and of course every one for five miles round knew that Pennistan had turned him out. I don’t know how they knew it, but country people seem to know things like a swallow knows its way to Egypt.
“I recommended my thatcher to speak privately to Amos first, which he did, and received that good man’s sanction and approval.
“Then Ruth came to me, or, rather, I met her with the pig pail in her hand, and she stopped me. A distant reaper was singing on its way somewhere in the summer evening.
“‘I’ve seen Leslie Dymock,’ she said abruptly. ‘Is it true that you....’
“‘I didn’t discourage him,’ I said as she paused.
“Again she put to me that disconcerting question, ‘Why?’
“‘He’s a good fellow,’ I answered warmly. ‘He cares for you. He didn’t tell me. I guessed.’
“‘How?’ she asked.
“‘Heavens!’ I cried, taking the pig pail angrily from her, ‘you positively rout me with your direct questions. Why? How? As if one’s actions could hold in a single why or how. Don’t you know that the stars of the Milky Way are as nothing compared with the complexity of men’s motives?’
“She gazed at me, and as I looked into her eyes I felt that I had been a fool, and that with certain human beings a single motive could sail serenely like a rising planet in the evening sky. Then I remembered I was still holding the pail. I set it down.
“‘I am sorry,’ I said more gently, ‘I ought not to answer you like that. I like, I respect, and I trust Leslie Dymock, and for that reason I should at least be glad to see you consider his claim. As for my guessing, I had only to look at his face when you came.’
“‘I see,’ she said slowly. She bent to recover her pail. ‘I must be getting on to the pigs,’ and indeed those impatient animals were shrieking discordantly from the stye.
“Next day,” said Malory as though in parenthesis, and with a reminiscent smile on his face, “I remember that a butcher came to buy the pigs. He fastened a big hook on to the beams of the ceiling in a little, dark, disused cottage, and we drove the pigs, three of them, into the cottage for the purpose of weighing them alive, and Ruth looked on from outside, through the much cobwebbed window. It was a scene both farcical and Flemish. All the farm dogs gathered round barking; the pigs, who were terrified into panic, made an uproar such as you cannot imagine if you have never heard a pig screaming. The butcher and his mate drove them into sacks, head first, and as he got the snout neatly into one corner of the sack, and the feet into as many corners as were left to accommodate them, the sack took on the exact semblance of a pig dragging itself with restraint and difficulty along the ground. One after the other they were hoisted into the air and suspended yelling from the hook. I went out to see whether Ruth was scared by the noise. She was not. She was laughing as I had never seen her laugh before, her hands pressed to her hips, tears in her eyes, her white teeth gleaming in the shadows. I was interested, because I thought I understood the inevitable introduction of farcical interludes into mediæval drama. Now I think I understand better, that Ruth, who entirely lacked a sense of the humorous in life, was rich in the truly Latin sense of farce. I practised on her on several occasions after that, and never failed to draw the laugh I expected. The physical imposition of the automatic was unvarying in its results. And she had no feminine sentimentality about the sufferings of the pigs—not she. She rather liked to see animals baited.”
Yes, my friend, thought I as he paused, and I understand you even better than you profess to have understood the girl. You have no spark of real humour in you.
Just as Malory reached this point in his story, I was obliged to go away to Turin for a couple of days, but my mind ran more on the Weald of Kent than on my own affairs: I felt that the summer days were slipping by, that the corn would be cut and set up in stooks, if not already carted, by the time I got back, and that Leslie Dymock might have made such good use of his time as to be actually betrothed. As soon as I reached Sampiero and had changed from my travelling decency into my habitual flannels, I rushed out to find Malory, who was sitting with his pipe in his mouth beside the stream fishing.
He greeted me, “I’ve caught two trout.”
“No? We’ll have them for breakfast,” and I threw myself on the ground beside him, and watched his lazy line rocking on the water.
“What it is to be a fisherman!” Malory said. “To wade out into a great, broad river, and stand there isolated from men, with the water swirling round your knees, and crying ‘Come! come away from the staid and stupid land out to the sea, and exchange the shackles of life for the liberty of death.’ When the voice of the water has become too insistent, I have all but bent my knees and given myself up to the rhythm of the stream. Fishing, like nothing else, begets serenity of spirit. Serenity of spirit,” he repeated, “and turbulence of action—that should make up the sum of man’s life.”
He cast his fly and began to murmur some lines over to himself,—
“Give me a spirit that on life’s rough sea
Loves t’ have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is....”
“The Elizabethans counted life well lost in an adventurous cause. I believe in their sense of duty, but I believe still more in their sense of adventure. And they share with the French the love of panache. Prudence is a hateful virtue. I believe the hatefulness of prudence is the chief cause of the unpopularity of Jews.”
He looked apologetically at me to see what I made of his dogmatic excursion.
“I wonder whether you want me to go on with my story? You do! Well. Amos Pennistan said to me after a month had passed, ‘I’ve enough of Ruth’s nivvering-novvering.’
“I thought that,” said Malory, “an excellent expression—a moral onomatopœia. Amos continued, ‘I’m going to say to her, “One thing or the other; either you take Leslie Dymock, or you leave him.“’ ‘Grand!’ I said, ‘I like your directness, straight to the point, like a pin to a magnet. After all, over-much subtlety has weakened modern life and modern art alike. And what if she replies that she will leave him?’
“I thought his answer a fine simple one, patriarchal in its pride: ‘There’s many young men besides Leslie Dymock that would be glad to marry my daughter; ’tis not every girl has such a dower of looks as my girl, and a dower of this world’s goods thrown along.’ Flocks and herds, she-goats and he-goats, I suppose he would have said, had he lived in Israel two thousand years ago.
“So this ultimatum was presented to Ruth, who asked for a month in which to make up her mind. I saw her going about her work as usual, but I supposed that thoughts more sacred, more speculative, than her ordinary thoughts of daily labour, were coming and going in her brain, hopping, and occasionally twittering, like little birds in a coppice. I did not speak to her much at this time. I pictured her as a nun during her novitiate, or as a young man in vigil beside his unused armour, or as the condemned criminal in his cell, because all three figures share alike a quantity of aloofness from the world. I only wished that Heaven might grant me a second Daphnis and Chloe for my depopulated Arcady, and I asked no greater happiness than to see Ruth and Leslie tangled together in the meshes of love.
“September was merging into October, and again the orchards on the slope of the hill were loaded with fruit, the bushel baskets stood on the ground, and the tall ladders reared themselves into the branches. We were all fruit-pickers for the time being. Of the apples, only the very early kinds were ripe for market, and of this I was glad, for I enjoyed the jewelled orchard, red, green, and russet, and yellow, too, where the quince-trees stood with their roots under the little brook, but the plums were ready, and the village boys swarmed into the trees to pick such fruit as their hands could reach, and to shake the remainder to the ground. We, below, stood clear while a shower of plums bounced and tumbled into the grass, then we filled our baskets with gold and purple, returning homewards in the evening laden like the spies from the Promised Land. Amos stood, nobly apostolic, his great beard spread like a breastplate over his chest, among the glowing plunder. I was reminded of my Greek trader, and of the Tuscan vineyards; and the English country and the southern plenty were again strangely mingled.
“Towards the end of the month, considering that if her mind had not yet sailed into the sea of placidity I so desired it to attain, it would never do so, I decided to sound Ruth upon her decision. You see, she interested me, disappointed as I was in her, and I had nothing else to think about at the time save these, to you no doubt tame, love affairs of my country friends. I had a good deal of difficulty in coaxing her into a sufficiently emotional frame of mind; as fast as I threw the ballast out of our conversational balloon, she threw in the sand-bags from the other side. My speech was all of the lover’s Heaven, hers of the farm-labourer’s earth. She was curiously on the defensive; I could not understand her. I was certain that her matter-of-factness was, that evening, deliberate. She was full of restraint, and yet, a feverishness, an expectancy clung about her, which I could not then explain, but which I think was fully explained by later events.
“We got off at last, we went soaring up into the sky; it was my doing, for I had uttered the wildest words to get her to follow me. I had talked of marriage; Heaven knows what I said. I told her that love was passion and friendship—passion in the secret night, but comradeship in the open places under the sun, and that whereas passion was the drunkenness of love, friendship was its food and clear water and warmth, and bodily health and vigour. I told her that children were to their begetters what flowers are to the gardener: little expanding things with dancing butterflies, sensitive, responsive, satisfying; the crown of life, the assurance of the future, the rhyme of the poem. I told her that in love alone can the poignancy of joy equal the poignancy of sorrow. I told her of that minority that finds its interest in continual change, and of that majority which rests on a deep content, and a great many other things which I do not believe, but which I should wish to believe, and which I should wish all women to believe. I told her all that I had never told a human being before, all that I had, perhaps, checked my tongue from uttering once or twice in my life, because I knew myself to be an inconstant man. I made love by quadruple proxy, not as myself to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself in Leslie Dymock’s name to Ruth Pennistan, or as myself to any named or unnamed woman, but as any man to any woman, and I enjoyed it, because sincerity always carries with it a certain degree of pain, but pure rhetoric carries the pure enjoyment of the creative artist.”
I disliked Malory’s cynicism, and I should have disliked it still more had I not suspected that he was not entirely speaking the truth. I was also conscious of boiling rage against the man for being such a fool.
“When I had finished,” he went on, “she was trembling like a pool stirred by the wind.
“‘You think like that,’ she said, ‘I never heard any one talk like that before.’
“Then I told her a great deal more, about her Spanish heritage and that disturbing blood in her veins, and about Spain, of which she knew next to nothing: that southern Spain was soft and the air full of orange-blossom, but that the north was fierce and arid, and peopled by men who in their dignity and reserve had more in common with the English than with the Latin races to whom they belonged; that as their country had not the kindliness of the English country, so they themselves lacked the kindly English humour, which mocks and smiles and, above all, pities; and that their temper is not swift, but slow like the English temper, but, when roused, ruthless and as little to be checked as a fall of water. I think that for the first time she guessed at a world beyond England, a world inhabited by real men. Before that, Spain and all Europe had been as remote as the stars.”
Malory told her all this, and then, when they were fairly flying through the air—I imagined them as the North Wind and the little girl in the fairy-story: hair streaming, garments streaming, hand pulling hand—he judged the moment opportune to return to Leslie Dymock. I fancy that the crash to earth again must have knocked all consciousness from the girl for a considerable interval. During this interval Malory dilated on the admirableness of the young man, his estimable qualities, and his worldly prospects. I could understand his scheme. He had planned to fill her with electricity, then to switch her suddenly off, sparkling and thrilling, on to Leslie Dymock. He had, I suppose, assumed that a certain sympathy had already inclined her native tenderness towards Leslie Dymock. The scheme was an excellent one in all but one particular: that his initial premise was radically false.
After the interval of her unconsciousness, she returned with slowly opening eyes to what he was saying. God knows what she had expected the outcome of their wild journey to be. Malory only told me that with parted lips and eyes in which all the mysteries of awakened adolescence were stirring, she laid her hand, trembling, on his hand and said,—
“What do you mean? why do you speak to me like ... like this, and then talk to me again about Leslie Dymock?”
He asked her whether she could not find her happiness with Leslie Dymock and realise in her life with him all the pictures whose colours he, Malory, had painted for her. And she answered so bitterly and so scornfully that he charged her with having her heart still fixed on Rawdon Westmacott.
“Still fixed!” she cried, emphasising the first word, “and how could that be still fixed which never was fixed at all?”
He was baffled; he thought her an unnatural creature to be still heart-whole when her youth, her advantages, and that depth which, in spite of her tameness, her reserve, and his own protestations of her lack of passion—protestations which I suspect he continued to make for the strengthening of his own unsure belief—he instinctively divined, should have created a tumult in her soul. It was to him unthinkable that such hammer-strokes as Nature, Westmacott, and Dymock had conjointly delivered on the walls of her heart, should have failed to open a breach. Such breaches, once opened, are hard to close against a determined invader. He urged her to confide in him, he told her that his whole delight lay in the problems of humanity, that metaphysics and psychology were to his mind as sea-air to his nostrils. She only looked at him, and I think it was probably fortunate for his vanity that he could not read what a fool she thought him. I suppose that every man must appear to a woman half a genius and half a fool. Much as a grown person must appear to the infinitely simpler and infinitely more complex mind of a child.
He urged her confidence, therefore, seeing that she remained silent, although her lips were still parted, her hand still lying on his hand, and the expectation still living in her eyes, that had not as yet remembered to follow the lead of her mind. They were the mirrors of her instinct, and her instinct was at variance with her reason. He had come down to the practical business of his mission, while she lived still in the enchanted moments of their flight into a realm to her unknown. If her ears received his emphatic words, her brain remained insensible to them. He detached his hand from hers, to lay it on her shoulder and to shake her slightly.
“Ruth, do you hear what I am saying to you?”
Her widened eyes contracted for an instant, as with pain, and turning them on him she prepared an expression of intelligent comprehension to greet his next sentence.
“I am asking you to trust me as a friend. It’s lonely to be left alone with a decision. If you are angry with me for interfering, tell me to go away, and I will go. But so long as I may talk to you, I want to keep my finger on the pulse of your affairs, where it has been, let me remind you, ever since I set foot in your father’s house. I want to see you happy in your home, and to know that I accompanied you at any rate to the threshold.”
She broke from him, he told me, with a cry; ran from him, and never reappeared that evening. On the following day she accepted Leslie Dymock.