Chapter VII
THE SALVATION OF SOCIETY
After Ursula's departure Mary doubled her parochial activities. She visited the wives of all John's married labourers; she ministered continually to the invalids and old age pensioners; she organized a dance in the School Room in aid of the Village Institute, and a whist drive in aid of the local hospital. She was going to make Anderby the most prosperous, popular, well-cared-for village in the East Riding.
The village regarded her efforts with mingled awe and irritation. Mrs. Robson was wonderful. Her generosity, her persistence, her catholicity of interest, all were wonderful. At the same time they were a little embarrassing.
"You've no sooner got your shirt in t' wash but she's after you to see if you want a new one," sighed Ted Wilson.
But even he agreed that she was wonderful.
One day she stood in a bookshop in Hardrascliffe, tired out by a week of perpetual activity. She was looking for a birthday present for John. Lately his silence had become so wearisome that she welcomed any opportunity of rousing his admiration or dislike, if only to evoke a remark. Now he might talk about a book. He seemed to enjoy reading about agriculture and even sometimes read her passages from the Farmer's Weekly.
Mary herself hadn't much use for books. Once they had been well enough, but now she was too busy to be bothered with them. There were quite a lot in the house that had once belonged to her mother, but none of these would be likely to move John to the companionship of criticism.
She stood indifferently turning over the volumes offered her by Mr. Forsitt the bookseller. They all looked a little dull, she thought.
"Haven't you anything more modern than these?" she asked. "I want something with a sort of kick in it. No, not a story. He doesn't like novels. Something about farming."
"Ah." Mr. Forsitt pressed the tips of his fingers together and meditated. Then he suddenly ducked his head and scurried off to the corner table. "I have it," he cried. "The very book for you, Mrs. Robson." He returned flourishing a volume in a bright orange cover. "Here we are! The Salvation of Society by David Rossitur. Essays. Just out."
Mary took the book from him, and gazed at the vermilion letters across the wrapper. The Salvation of Society. Somehow the title was familiar, though she could not remember where she had last seen it. A queer title. Rather high-flown perhaps.
She opened the book and looked at the chapter headings: "The Generation at the Cross-Roads," "Revolution and Beyond," "The Reincarnation of Bestiality," "The Agricultural Calvary," "The Tyranny of Possession"....
No. It was not a Methodist production. What then?
"Yes, Mrs. Robson. I think I may safely say I recommend that to you if you want something exciting. I have not read it myself. Not quite in my line perhaps. A little rash, I gather. A volume of essays by a young gentleman recently expelled from Cambridge—or was it Oxford?"
"Yes?"
"Quite young, I gather. Oh, quite young. A mere boy, Mr. Locking tells me. The Reverend Mr. Locking. He has advanced views. Very. The parishioners at St. Paul's and St. Giles's hardly seem to like him. But there, he buys a good many books from us. Then there was Mr. Coast. He bought a copy—the schoolmaster from your part of the world I believe, Mrs. Robson."
Coast! That was it. Mary knew now that she had seen the book during that preposterous interview, when Coast had dared to condemn her for lack of generosity. It would be rather entertaining to discover what sort of literature appealed to him.
"Will it do for a birthday present for my husband?" she asked, smiling. Mr. Forsitt was an old friend and Mary retained a childish habit of taking tradesmen into her confidence, which many of her relations thought most unbecoming.
"Oh, quite suitable, I think. Very interesting to a farmer, I dare say. Let me wrap it up for you. Seven and sixpence. And the next thing?"
She went home with the flamboyant cover discreetly veiled in brown paper. She quite intended to amuse herself with it that night before she handed it over to John. But when she reached Anderby Violet had toothache and the groceries weren't unpacked, and books were all very well, but one had other things to see about.
On Sunday she forgot all about it. On Monday and Tuesday she was busy washing and ironing. On Wednesday she drove with John to Market Burton. On Thursday she always churned.
That was a busy day. She turned and turned before the butter came, and, even when the churning was done, there were golden slabs to be wrapped in grease-proof paper ready for the carrier to convey them into Hardrascliffe. Mary felt tired as she washed her hands. Nothing exciting ever happened. There had not even been a satisfactory lot of butter.
Outside the starlings were chattering in the naked trees. The mild evening air—it was warm for February—might blow away that jaded feeling. She mentally reviewed her list of pensioners and invalids.
Mrs. Watts! The name flashed across her mind. She had not visited her for several weeks.
Mrs. Watts, being completely crippled by rheumatism, lived in a high-backed chair in the kitchen of her small cottage, attended by Louie, her half-witted niece. But from her chair the old lady could acquire in one day more intimate and extensive knowledge of village gossip than Mary could collect in a week.
So to Mrs. Watts she went.
Mrs. Watts received her boisterously. For a cripple she possessed remarkable vocal and mental energy.
"Come in, Mrs. Robson," she shouted. "Come in! Now wherever have you been all t' time? I haven't set eyes on you since back end o' Christmas. Has Mrs. Foster gone yet? When's baby coming, eh?"
"Oh, of course," laughed Mary. "I quite see it's no use my ever telling you anything. I don't know why I come here. You always know all my news before it's happened. The baby's coming in April if all goes well."
She drew off her gloves, laid a small packet of tea on the mantelpiece and sat down to enjoy herself. She had a whole hour before tea. One could learn a lot from Mrs. Watts in an hour.
"Well, and how are you?"
"I'se about middlin'. I haven't caught sight o' t' edge o' Peter's robe yet, and they say you've got to see that before you come t' gowlden gates."
"Well, I'm glad of that."
"Ay. I think you are. There's nowt goes well in t' village but I think we are glad on't. I don't know what some on us would do without you."
"Oh, you'd do well enough."
Lately a sneaking fear had found its way to Mary's mind that the village could do without her. It was comforting to be reassured.
"Nay now, would we? Just look at Mrs. Foster. What good d'ye think comes of her in her parts o' t' Wold? My nephew works for Burrages out Middlethorpe way, and I hear all goings on there. Why she didn't send so much as a jelly to Middlethorpe cricket club dance!"
"Well, she has other interests."
Mary was guiltily conscious that she found criticism of Ursula pleasant.
"Yes, she had a lot of interest in your chair covers, hadn't she?"
"Now what on earth did you hear about them?"
The old woman chuckled and, bending forward, patted Mary's hand with stiff fingers.
"Now don't you take on about that. Your Violet told her cousin, Mrs. Jellaby, what lives down in Spring Cottages. And she came in here a bit back for a talk and told me how young Mrs. Foster had been staying up at Anderby, and how she'd been wanting you to get oyster satin cushions with black borders. 'Ah've no notion what oyster satin covers is like,' ah says, 'but t' my mind, it sounds a bit messy.'"
"Violet has no business to repeat things she hears in the house."
"Why, bless you, don't you know a lass will tell owt tiv' her friends whether she's in service or not? Ye can't stop it, Mrs. Robson. Ye might as well get butter out of a dog's throat as a bit of gossip back from a lass who's once heard tell on't."
"I suppose so. But it's rather hard on me, isn't it, if I can't even keep my chair covers to myself?"
Mary smiled half whimsically, unable to be as annoyed as her dignity demanded.
"Now then don't you go fashin' yourself about your chair covers. If Violet says owt, it's never but what it's to your credit. I'm sure lass or lady, there's none better respected on whole o' t' woldside, seek where you like."
"Don't be silly. There are lots better. What I do, I do for pleasure."
"Ay, but it's a kind o' pleasure that takes it out of you more than you let on. What's happened to roses that used to be in your cheeks, eh? You've been fretting yourself because Mr. Coast wouldn't let you have Jack Greenwood for shepherd lad, ay. Mrs. Greenwood told me all about yon business. And how ye'd got him away now and all. 'Of all fond fools,' ah said, 'yon schoolmaster chap takes a lot o' beating.' As I said to Mrs. Greenwood, 'Eddication's all very well,' ah says, 'but it doesn't teach you to drive a waggon let alone a plough!'"
Mary sighed. So every one knew about Jack Greenwood too. Every one knew about everything. The fierce light that beats upon a throne is only a candle's flicker beside the searching glare of village criticism. It consoled her, though, to think that publicity could only further reveal her love for Anderby. And it was pleasant to sit in the dancing firelight, while the dusk crept up the orchard outside, and listen to Mrs. Watts telling her how wonderful she was.
Mrs. Watts knew that Mary found it pleasant. Mrs. Robson, she considered, was a very fine young woman, but as she talked a thousand past acts of kindness, of gratuitous attention, of charitable patronage rose before her. Somehow by her crude flattery she seemed paying a little of her debt back to the mistress of the Wold Farm, and holding over her, if only for a moment, that suzerainty which belongs to people who can give us what we need.
An hour later, when Mary opened the front door and entered her lamplit hall, she recalled with a faint sensation of disgust her calm acceptance of the old woman's praise. But after all if people liked her why shouldn't they say so? And if they spoke why shouldn't she listen? "It isn't as if it was likely to turn my head," she thought as she drew the curtains across the dining-room windows. "I'm not a little fool to be taken in by that sort of thing."
She really thought she wasn't.
At the same time she was glad that John had to attend a vestry meeting that evening, for she had suddenly remembered the orange-covered book. Mr. David Rossitur's acid comments on capitalist farmers were likely to prove an effective antidote to the cloying sweetness of Mrs. Watts's adulation.
She produced the book from a drawer and sat down in John's arm-chair before the fire.
At first, she read with knit brows; then her eyes opened wide; then she sat up straight in the arm-chair, her lips parted in a half-amused, half-incredulous smile. It really was an outrageous book! Mary was unacquainted with any political or social theories more violent than those expounded in the columns of the Yorkshire Chronicle. The only excuse for this tirade against capitalism, patronage and "the dependence of the proletariat upon the self-interested solicitude of a bourgeois minority," lay in the youth of its author. Of course he must be a mere boy—a student at Oxford, according to the preface. And they were always very young, Mary was sure. A footnote explained that the writer had spent one summer vacation on a walking tour, investigating the conditions in which agricultural labourers of the South Country lived and worked. It added that he hoped to continue his researches in the North at an early date, for the conclusions he had reached after his Southern pilgrimage had convinced him that the only hope for England lay in social revolution. Anything less drastic—the extension of trades unionism, or the political ascendancy of the Labour Party—was merely a sop thrown to the proletarian Cerberus.
"He's very fond of that word 'proletarian'" thought Mary. She was not absolutely certain what it meant.
There followed a scornful rejection of the passive optimism of the Constitutionalists. Darwin was denounced as a traitor to the cause of progress. "Society," declared Mr. Rossitur, "is perishing from senile decay, awaiting the fabled miracle of evolution." Reform could only follow destruction: destruction of empty loyalties, destruction of cowardly compromise, of a tyranny based on material advantage and sentimentalism that masked rapacity.
Quotations abounded. In his zeal to carry conviction the author rarely expressed an opinion without the support of some famous authority, as if his own cheques would not hold good unless backed by a great financier.
It was all bewildering, and ridiculous and intriguing. Certainly Mary had never encountered anything of the kind before. She became entangled in a labyrinth of obscure reasoning. She was belaboured by pages of savage rhetoric. She stumbled over unfamiliar phrases that recurred here with unremitting urgency—"Living Wage," "Standard of comfort," "Private capitalists." Quite half of it was wholly beyond her comprehension.
"Perhaps I'm tired," she thought. "I shall be able to take it in better to-morrow."
When John returned from the meeting, she rose regretfully and hid the book in the sideboard drawer.
Of course, it was all nonsense; but what amusing nonsense! And somehow, for all its extravagance, it was really rather refreshing. Some grace of youth and burning sincerity relieved its ugliest violence and crudest rhetoric. She wished she could talk to the author. It really was amazing that anyone clever enough to go to Oxford should know so little about farms. Mary would like to explain exactly why one had to look after people who weren't capable of looking after themselves and why one paid labourers' wages instead of every one sharing the profits. It was all so self-evident when one knew anything at all about agriculture. Of course Mr. Rossitur didn't. He was only a boy, whose tempestuousness was too childish to be dangerous, and whose idealism was too unselfconscious to be sentimental. Quite a dear, Mary thought, but terribly ignorant of what things were really like.
"I wonder whatever John will think," she mused as she undressed that night. The prospect of John's inevitable comment was highly entertaining.
Mary had only two days to wait before his birthday, when she handed him her present after the usual ceremonial kiss. My word, at least here was something to make him talk! All day she looked forward eagerly to his reception of the social theories of David Rossitur.
After tea she produced her sewing and, handing John his pipe and the book, sat down to await his verdict.
For three hours she sat silently sewing. The black hands of the clock crawled forward. The room was silent except when, every few minutes, John's hand flicked over another page. It was a quarter past ten.
A coal, crashing suddenly from the grate to the hearth, aroused John. He looked at the clock and put down his book.
"Bedtime I think, missus," he said.
Mary began to fold her work. Now was the time when he must speak. He must really. Even if he had very little to say about most things, at least he must have some sort of an opinion about this.
John was poking the largest lumps of coal out of the fire. It was his favourite habit of economy.
Mary could bear it in silence no longer.
"Well, John," she remarked as casually as she could, "what do you think of it? How far have you got?"
"Page 121," said John and, knocking the ashes out of his pipe against the fender, he went upstairs to bed.
Next morning Mary walked up to Littledale to see the foreman's latest baby. Coming home through the fields she recovered for the first time from her husband's rebuff of the previous night.
Really John's stupidity mattered very little on a morning like this. She wanted to race with the wind, to jump, to shout, to sing.
The freshly turned ploughland gleamed purple in the sunlight. A faintly pink haze caressed the stubble.
What did anything matter?
It was good land. What nonsense that writer person talked all about handing over property to the State to be run by syndicates of working men. As though just anyone could farm who thought it would be rather nice to walk about and watch the crops grow! Why, a hundred years ago this height of the wold had been covered by gorse and short-cropped turf. The sixty-acre and its neighbouring fields were still known as the "Sheep Walk." To produce this fertile soil her grandfather and her father and John had marled and manured and watched and waited as though nothing else in the world was of any importance. Even in her own day hundreds of tons of burnt chalk must have been scattered on the hill-side to make those turnips swell so gallantly.
Mr. Rossitur, if you please, thought the land was easy to own. Mary wanted to tell him that to care for it as she cared one had to give up everything—even the chance of ever hearing anyone say something more intelligent than "Page 121!"
From the other side of the hedge rose a sharp cry, half pain, half terror.
Mary looked at the thick interlacing of hawthorn, but could see nothing. Then came voices—a man's hoarse and angry, a boy's shrill with fear.
She began to run along the uneven road.
The hedge was broken by a strip of fence across the stump of a tree. Beyond, near a "pie" of turnips, stood a half-filled cart. Near it, crouching in the road, knelt the boy, Jack Greenwood, whom Mary had prematurely wrested from the Council School. Bending over him, with a short whip in his hand, stood Waite, the beast man.
"Stop that! What are you doing, Waite?" called Mary. She climbed the fence with greater speed than elegance, slipping a little on the damp wood.
The man looked up, with surly defiance.
"I warn't doing nowt, Mrs. Robson. This lad's an idler. He needs a bit o' stick now and then to keep him up ti'd mark."
"Come here, Jack," commanded Mary.
The boy rose and limped towards her sobbing, not at all unwilling to make capital out of his misfortunes. A furrow of pink, washed clean by tears, ran down his muddy face. He held one hand across his bleeding ear.
"What has he been doing, Waite?"
"He's an idle, good-for-nowt. Back end o' ten o'clock I sent him up to get the cart forked up wi' swedes, and as he never comed and never comed, I had t' come up mysen and see what's wrong, and here he was, with nowt to say, and nowt done."
"Did you ask him why?"
"Ay. That I did and all." Waite plucked a turnip from the pie with his long handled fork and flung it into the cart.
Mary was quietly examining the boy's injuries. His shoulder was bruised and his ear inflamed, but her opportune arrival had prevented further damage.
For a little while she did not speak. Her mind was again with Mr. David Rossitur, and his plea for the independence of the labouring class, and for a wider recognition of the innate dignity of human nature. Then she spoke slowly, almost as though addressing herself alone.
"Oh. So you sent a boy up to do work you are supposed to do yourself, and expect him to manage a horse, and to fork turnips into a cart he is too small to reach and, because he couldn't do it, you came and beat him, did you? And thought that no one would see? You know we don't beat boys at Anderby. Jack has only just started to work. I wonder what sort of opinion he has of farm life."
Waite continued to throw turnips into the cart. They fell from his fork with dull little thuds, punctuating Mary's speech.
"I didn't know Jack was going to work for you," she continued. "It isn't the first time you've done this sort of thing, you know. I can't let you go on working together because you obviously don't know how to treat a boy. And even if I take Jack away, you'll be up to the same tricks with some one else, sooner or later. So I'm afraid you'll have to go. I'm sorry—but I don't know what else to do. You shall have a week's wages, but I can't allow this sort of thing here, don't you see? Jack, come along with me and I'll give you something for your ear. No, don't cry, because you're not much hurt really, you know. I'm ashamed of you, Waite, and I hope you're ashamed of yourself. I shall tell Foreman and my husband of the step I have taken. You can consider yourself dismissed."
The man continued phlegmatically to throw turnips into the cart, his body swaying loosely from the hips as he stooped and lifted. He might never have heard Mary's voice, but as she went down the road she sighed, conscious that she had made another enemy. First Coast, now Waite....
The government of a kingdom was not always easy. Mary hated to be disliked. She loved to imagine herself the idolized champion of the poor and suffering, the serene mistress of bountiful acres, where the season was always harvest and the labourers worthy of their hire. Coast and Waite were somehow out of the picture.
Then she heard the squelch of Jack's boots on the road behind her. At least, in dismissing Waite, she had fulfilled her rôle as champion of the oppressed. She saw herself for a moment as she hoped Jack saw her, calm mistress of his destiny snatching him from peril, and she smiled again at the vision.
Then she wondered how John would take it when she told him she had dismissed the beast man. But even this, she decided, did not matter, and so went down to Anderby.