Shortly after this Rose finds the thirty years' difference between herself and her husband too much for her and she allows herself to love his foreman. Reuben locked her out of his house late one night when she had been out with her lover, so she has no alternative but to go off with him and leave Reuben in the lurch once more. He turns again to Alice: "'Wot sort o' chap am I to have pride? My farm's ruined, my wife's run away, my children have left me—wot right have I to be proud?... She deceived me. I married her expecting money, and there wur none—I married her fur her body, and she's given it to another.'" This love of Alice Jury's had nothing akin to Naomi's poor little fluttering passion, or to Rose's fascination, half appetite, half game. Someone loved him purely, truly, strongly, deeply, with a fire that could be extinguished only by death or ... her own will. He is sorely tempted to give up his ambitious struggle—all his great plans had crumbled into failure. "Far better give up the struggle while there was the chance of an honourable retreat. He realised that he was at the turning-point—a step further along his old course and he would lose Alice, a step along the road she pointed and he would lose Boarzell.... His mind painted him a picture it had never dared paint before ... comfort ... his dear frail wife ... himself contented, growing stout, wanting nothing he hadn't got, so having nothing he didn't want...." But he turned his back on this with a shudder. Boarzell was more to him than any woman in the world.... Through blood and tears ... he would wade to Boarzell, and conquer it at last. Alice should go the way of all enemies. "And the last enemy to be destroyed is Love." So he tore women out of his life, as he tore up the gorse on Boarzell. Caro, his sole remaining daughter, then gives herself to a sailor and goes off with him as his mistress. She felt very few qualms of conscience, even when the barrier was past which she had thought impassable ... her life was brimmed with beauty, unimaginable beauty that welled up into the commonest things and suffused them with light. Also, about it all was that surprising sense of naturalness which almost always comes to women when they love for the first time, the feeling of "For this I was born." Sheila Kaye-Smith has a wonderful gift for depicting the passion of true love in the most beautiful manner.
"She never asked Dansay to marry her. He had given her pretty clearly to understand that he was not a marrying man, and she was terrified of doing or saying anything that might turn him against her. One of the things about her that charmed him most was the absence of all demand upon him."
But she is remorseless as Nature herself in her processes. A hundred pages later we see her own young brothers attempting to "pick her up" on the Newhaven Parade. She has become a third-rate harlot, a bundle of rags and bones and paint.
"'I'm not happy, but I'm jolly. I'm not good, but I'm pleasant-like.... Mind you tell father as, no matter the life I lead and the knocks I get, I've never once, not once, regretted the day I ran off from his old farm.'"
The Boer War claims his youngest sons and Reuben is left alone at Odiam, except for his brother Harry, who grows more shrivelled, more ape-like every day. "Reuben was not ashamed at eighty years old to lie full length in some sun-hazed field, and stretch his body over the grass, the better to feel that fertile quietness and moist freshness which is the comfort of those who make the ground their bed."
In the end we leave him victorious: out of a small obscure farm of barely sixty acres he had raised up this splendid dominion, and he had tamed the roughest, toughest, fiercest, cruellest piece of ground in Sussex, the beast of Boarzell. His victory was complete. He had done all that he set out to do. He had done what everyone had told him he could never do. He had made the wilderness to blossom as the rose, he had set his foot on Leviathan's neck, and made him his servant for ever.... He knew that not only the land within these boundaries was his—his possessions stretched beyond it, and reached up to the stars. The wind, the rain, dawns, dusks and darkness were all given him as the crown of his faithfulness. He had bruised Nature's head—and she had bruised his heel, and given him the earth as his reward.
"'I've won,' he said softly to himself—'I've won—and it's bin worth while.... I've fought and I've suffered, and I've gone hard and gone rough and gone empty—but I haven't gone in vain. It's all bin worth it. Odiam's great and Boarzell's mine—and when I die ... well, I've lived so close to the earth all my days that I reckon I shan't be afraid to lie in it at last.'"
There is a sense of complete unity, of complete mastery in this long novel that is lacking in nearly all other modern novels. It is a very high achievement for any author; for a woman it is amazing. Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith has given us the inside workings of a rough man's life from his earliest youth to his full four-score years: the secrets of the soil lie bare before her scrutiny, and both in characterisation and in descriptive power she shows a power which is nothing short of genius.
All her books deal with a mighty conflict between a man's tugging desires. In Tamarisk Town the conflict is between a man's love of a woman and his ambition to build and develop a seaside town. In Green Apple Harvest the conflict lies between a man's love for a woman and his soul's salvation. It is in this last novel of hers that we get perhaps Sheila Kaye-Smith's most telling descriptions.
Passages of this sort abound: