Reuben drove back slowly through the October afternoon. A transparent brede of mist lay over the fields, occasionally torn by sunlight. Everything was very quiet—sounds of labour stole across the valley from distant farms, and the barking of a dog at Stonelink seemed close at hand. Now and then the old man muttered to himself: "We döan't understand each other—we döan't forgive each other—we've lost each other. We've lost each other."
He knew now that Alice was lost. The whole of Boarzell lay between them. He had thought that she would be always there, but now he saw that between him and her lay the dividing wilderness of his success. She was the offering and the reward of failure—and he had triumphed over failure as over everything else.
He drove through Peasmarsh and turned into the Totease lane. The fields on both sides of it were his now. He sniffed delightedly the savour of their sun-baked earth, of the crumpling leaves in their hedges, of the roots, round and portly, that they nourished in their soil—and the west wind brought him the scent of the gorse on Boarzell, very faintly, for now only the thickets of the top were left.
Almost the whole south was filled by the great lumpish mass of the Moor, no longer tawny and hummocky, but lined with hedges and scored with furrows, here and there a spread of pasture, with the dotted sheep. A mellow corn-coloured light rippled over it from the west, and the sheep bleated to each other across the meadows that had once been wastes....
"My land," murmured old Reuben, drinking in the breeze of it. "My land—more to me than Alice." Then with a sudden fierceness:
"I'm shut of her!"
§ 5.
The next year came the great Unionist collapse. The Government which had bumped perilously through the South African war, went on the rocks of an indignant peace—wrecked by Tariff Reform with the complication of Chinese Labour and the Education Bill. Once more Reuben took prominent part in a general election. The circumstances were altered—no one threw dead cats at him at meetings, though the common labouring men had a way of asking questions which they had not had in '65.
Old Backfield spoke at five meetings, each time on Tariff Reform and the effect it would have on local agriculture. The candidate and the Unionist Club were very proud of him, and spoke of him as "a grand old man." On Election Day, one of the candidates' own cars was sent to fetch him to the Poll. It was the first time Reuben had ever been in a motor, but he did his best to dissemble his excitement.
"It's lik them trains," he said to the chauffeur, "unaccountable strange and furrin-looking at first, but naun to spik of when you're used to 'em. Well I remember when the first railway train wur run from Rye to Hastings—and most people too frightened to go in it, though it never mäade more'n ten mile an hour."