Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

Clare was glad to go out, for the room was making upon her a sad and cold impression, but she found little comfort in the exterior of the house, ungarnished as it well could be. She began to talk to Calladine again about the garden he must make, for not only was she really distressed for his own sake by the bleakness of his dwelling, but annoyed, almost, in a feminine way, by the man’s incompetence to deal with his own existence, and not unflattered, either, by his submission to her directions and the attentiveness with which he received every word that came from her lips. She saw that he clung to her as his salvation; she became more autocratic, with a pretty tyranny. She would transform his patch of desert into an oasis; she, over at King’s Avon would think of this Starvecrow as blooming into gaiety and colour by her orders. Calladine watched her, and she knew that he watched. But she never allowed him to speak of herself, keeping him rigorously to the business of his new garden; her laughter rang out, and she rallied him, awaking almost against his will the rare smile on his melancholy lips. At moments he thought, as he followed her about, that he must stretch out his hands and cry to her “Clare! Clare!” No one ever treated him as Clare treated him; other people always took him at the valuation he set upon himself, composed their faces to a becoming sobriety as soon as they perceived his own, and quitted his grave company with relief. He chose to construe their acquiescence into a grim sort of flattery. But Clare was privileged; Clare might assume whatever mood she would; he would endeavour to follow her, perhaps clumsily, for he had lost,—or liked to think that he had lost,—the habit of lightheartedness; still, she should teach it to him again and he would renew his youth.

He had come to the age when the sense of passing days induced a panic. Clare had youth, Clare had a reserve of youth on which he could draw without impoverishing her; he felt that she gave him life as surely as if he drank it at her breast.

She seemed, as she stood in the centre of the square she had designated as his future garden, to be all the flowers which should blow there presently at her command. He said this to her, in that courtly artificial manner he had of saying such things, with so much froth of emotion underneath. It was the first personal remark he had made to her since they had come out of the house, and it gave him relief. But she only laughed again, and this time he could have shaken her with rough hands for her laughter, and for her holding off the words which would stifle him if they remained unspoken. “Clare,” he said violently.

She glanced at him with that new self-possession; she was maddening him, though not with the purpose he would have attributed to any other woman. How she eluded him! how she would perpetually elude him! and so hold him forever. He knew himself to be fastidious enough to esteem only that which he had lost, or could never hope to seize. “Clare,” he repeated, this time with a genuine despair.

They went back into the house, where tea had been made ready; she noted his preparations, the honey, the girdle-cakes, the fruit and cream. He deprecated them, “A bachelor’s house....” “What could be better?” she replied; and had slipped from him once more. She ate heartily, borrowing a handkerchief to wipe the cream from her lips, unaccountably a child again, and a new bewilderment to him. He now felt that what he might have said to the woman of whom he had had a glimpse, he could not say to the child who trusted herself in his house, and he thought with baffled anger, how ably she managed her alternative of weapons. A spoonful of honey in one hand, and a cake in the other, she leaned forward, talking to him, he more helpless than ever, and she more completely in control. He dared not think of his house when her presence should have gone out of it; he wondered whether he would suffer least pain by returning to his sitting-room directly the gig had driven away, by going for a walk on the Downs and returning only after dusk, or by driving her himself back to the Manor House. The idea of her going at all was intolerable; perhaps he had been unwise to ask her to come; perhaps he had only been at his favourite trick of turning the knife in the wound. But she was speaking, she was saying, “I shall come again to see whether you have prepared our garden against the autumn.”

By her movement he saw that she was about to take her leave; he leapt out of his own chair and stood over her, saying wildly, “Don’t go, Clare, don’t; how can I bear your going? don’t leave me again, stay with me a little longer, I can’t face the loneliness without you,” and a stream of incoherent ejaculations flooded from his lips, while his hands fumbled towards her, yet with a remnant of soberness he strove to restrain them. Clare looked at him calmly, with wondering eyes. “But I must go home if my father is not to be kept waiting for his dinner,” she said.

Calladine stepped back instantly and released her. “I am sorry,” he said. “The loneliness, perhaps, gets a little on my nerves.” He passed his hand across his eyes. “You are the first visitor I have welcomed here for many years, and your presence threw me off my balance.” He tried to speak lightly. “Come, I will take you to the gig,” but still he lingered, looking to see whether she had left anything behind, in a last attempt to delay her. “Shall I drive you home?” he asked desperately.

“No,” she said, not wanting his company at all, “stay here and begin to dig the garden.” She smiled. She was anxious to get away. Not until she was out in the lanes would she again breathe freely. She went without any appearance of hurry, thanking Calladine, who tore from his solitary rose-bush all the branches he could crowd into her arms, and climbed back into the gig as she had come. He saw her go, despair and joy and anguish rending him.

The strain and anxiety of being with Calladine drove her, as always, towards the wish to be with Lovel. “Brother,” she could have called him, from the ease of his companionship. She could have put her hand into his, simply for the trust she had in him. But she knew too well that the indifference of his greeting would repulse instantly any such movement of confidence on her part; he would glance at her, when they met, and his glance would take her back into the assurance of their old intimacy, but there would be no softening of sentiment in it. Never that; a challenge and a bracing, but never compassion or a caress. Could she ever go with a trouble to Lovel? Her instinct leapt up into an affirmative; he would listen gravely, would understand without commiserating, would counsel quietly, and would fortify her with a sense of his reliance in her trustworthiness. He would trust her to behave always as he would expect that she should behave. She would endure anything rather than disappoint Lovel. More: even in his absence, even though he should know nothing of it, she kept herself constantly up to the level of his standards. She winced at any thought of his possible disapproval. She had not for him, nor could she imagine herself having, the indulgent and,—school herself to reverence as she would,—contemptuous pity she had for Calladine; what had she told Calladine to do? to grow lupin and iris, tulips and honesty, sweet sultan and snapdragons, in a walled patch of what had once been Down-land! to wall the Down? was it possible that she had told him to wall in the Down? what gulf she must divine between him and herself, between him and the Down-country in which he had elected to live, if she could tell him to wall in the Down. Yes, even a square, a stray square of Down, forgotten between a lane and Starvecrow’s farm-house. What would Lovel say, if she told him that? True, Lovel himself was sometimes set on to plough the Down, and willingly proceeded with the task; but that was different: that was the old struggle between man and the soil from which he wrested his daily bread; Lovel would tame the Down to grow barley for man or roots for his cattle,—a poor crop at best, extorted from the recalcitrant soil, like charity from an irreconcilable spirit, a poor crop, flaunting red poppies for its last flag of insubordination,—Lovel would plough the Down for that purpose, and relish the tussle, meeting in mutual understanding an adversary as stubborn as he himself; but for his mere pleasure he would not wall in a square to grow the effeminate flowers of decoration. They would blow and curtsey, Calladine’s flowers, until a wind swept over them from the angry Downs and laid them low,—but stay, what had she said?—“The wall will protect them against the wind.” Yes, and protect Calladine too: he could not stand up against the winds from the Downs. So, in her heart, she pitied Calladine and was disposed to see him protected? What had he done to deserve from her the insult of that charity? She had seen Lovel go out into a snowstorm on the heights and had not feared for his discomfort or his danger, any more than he feared for hers. Calladine she would have prevented with kind, firm words on the threshold of the door.

And it so happened, at her first meeting with Lovel after her visit to Starvecrow, that she, riding, sighted him in the distance following a plough-team over a curve of hill. He was not at work in one of the folds of the lower reaches, the favourite position for the rare stains of cultivation. He and his team were in outline against the sky, following the slow and classical progression of the furrow over the curve; the hempen reins looped slackly from the horses’ heads to his hand; the man, the horses, and the plough pursued their way, disengaged from all but the essentials of their labour, with the old inevitable simplicity. Clare rode towards the brown patch and, reaching Lovel, rode at a walk beside him up and down the freshly-turned furrows. The bright share cut cleanly into the sod, turning it over. They both watched it, as it slid through the sod, with a professional and satisfied criticism. “Poor soil,” Lovel said once; otherwise they had not spoken. She liked to watch him plough, appreciating his dexterity, and the jump of the plough-shaft under his hand; she liked his voice ringing out to the horses at the turn. The slow rhythm soothed her. “Who are you ploughing for?” she asked. “Morland,” he said briefly. “Shall you be finished by six?” she asked, looking across at the westering sun; and he nodded. “I’ll wait,” she said, and getting off her pony, she slipped the reins over her arm and stood watching Lovel without impatience.