Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

“I do,” he replied. He rushed on, not looking at her, “I must not make friends. I want to be alone. You stole my friendship, and I have resented it. Call me ill-mannered, even brutal; call me ungrateful, boorish. I was angry when I saw you riding to-day. It is better that you should know the truth, and it cannot hurt you, coming from me. What am I to you? a peasant, a gipsy, a Jack-of-all-trades. I have nothing to do with your life or you with mine, so leave me alone,—leave me alone,” he said.

All her pride was lashed alive now; she was utterly astonished, and, in her simplicity, convinced. “I have forced my friendship upon you,” she stammered. “Yes, yes,” said Lovel, driving it home. She stared at him, lovely in her distress. But even in her humiliation she was generous. “Forgive me,” she stammered again. She turned and fled out from amongst the trees, aware,—but not knowing how truly,—that she had left there something which she would never regain. She came out by the osiers, the hurdles, and Lovel’s knife lying upon the ground. The sight of it, in its familiarity, stung tears to her eyes. If he had not wanted her, why had he carved faces from the warts of the beech-trees for her amusement. Why had he tired so suddenly? rebelled so wildly against the slight tie of her friendship? She swung herself on to her pony and galloped away, not seeing where she was going, but only mad to put the greatest possible distance between herself and that wood whence she had escaped indeed, but only with her life.

Calladine meanwhile, who knew nothing of Clare’s friendship with Lovel, and who would have stared had he heard it mentioned, had lived in a torment ever since her visit. She had come and gone again, and he felt as though during her brief sojourn she had stirred round the sluggish atmosphere of his house with a wand. His eye became more critical as he surveyed his surroundings from her point of view. He tried to imagine what she would say were she to take his house thoroughly in hand, and began to introduce such alterations as he thought she would approve; he rearranged his books, he re-hung his pictures, he ordered patterns from London and had his leather chairs covered with a flowered chintz. His servant Mrs. Quince was at first at a loss to know what had come over her master, but after she and Martha Sparrow had put their heads together they arrived at the obvious conclusion. “’Tis a woman’s house now, Martha,—dimity in the windows, and what do you think? dried rose leaves and spices among the linen!—though as yet there’s no woman to live in it.” Calladine shut his mind obstinately to the curiosity he knew he must be awaking in Mrs. Quince; he daily informed her of his wishes while inviting no comment, and she, on her part, took advantage of his new mood, and of the good-humour in which, she argued, he must be anxious to keep her, to ask for an extra pair of hands for all the new work she pretended he was creating. “There’s that girl of Farmer Morland’s, sir, casting round for a place.” Calladine agreed at once, without argument or enquiry. Let Farmer Morland’s girl be engaged by all means; and Daisy, with her red head, her freckles, her pale blue eyes, and her frilled Sunday muslins, was installed in the attic. Calladine, in so far as he noticed her at all, disliked her at sight; she dropped a curtsey to him the first time she met him, and tried to ingratiate him with a smile. But he was too deeply bent upon his own concerns to pay her more than the tribute of a passing distaste. Clare had been to his house, his room had contained Clare, her voice had vibrated through the air he breathed, her hand had rested on his door handle, her foot had trodden his stair. She might come again—but such was his fantasy that he all but dreaded lest the return of her presence should disturb the perfection of his memory. He was almost content, for the moment, that he might remain at Starvecrow, doing her service. A garden, she had said; and he toiled at the obstinate soil till his hands lost their refinement and hardened in the palms, and he smiled to see his broken nails. Mrs. Quince observed him sarcastically from the windows of the house, hands on hips. He had thrown aside his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeves. “But he’ll need to do away with those silk shirts if he’s to go in for pick and mattock,” she grumbled, between tenderness and scorn. Calladine was indeed an incongruous figure, spare and delicate of build, with his greying hair that gave him a slightly eighteenth century appearance, and his long back bent over the stones and flints of that untilled hillside. He thought, sometimes ruefully, when he stood up to stretch his back and to survey the little progress he had made, that Clare had set him a harder task than she knew. He began to invest it with characteristically romantic properties. It was like scaling the Hill of Glass, or separating the wheat from the millet, or travelling to the ends of the earth to bring back a jet bottled from the Singing Fountain. If he could transform this strong wilderness to a blowing curtseying garden, might he, having accomplished his task, present himself to claim his prize? And what would she say, she the distant, she the all-unconscious, when she came to inspect the results of his labours? Would she praise? would she deride? he swung his pick again with an unconvinced jeer at himself for the fabric of symbolism he was creating.

“The new mistress’ll have nothing to say to my old-fashioned ways,” Mrs. Quince observed to Martha, suggesting that it was she herself whom she thus slightly derided. Martha, simple soul, was taken in. “Likely enough, Mrs. Quince, she has a rare eye to the ordering of a house.” Mrs. Quince smiled on one side of her face. “She took over from me when she was fifteen,” continued Martha in perfect good faith, “and I wasn’t able to call my dusters my own. Look what she has made Mr. Calladine do already; the house isn’t the gloomy place it was.”

“What he has done was Mr. Calladine’s own choice,” said Mrs. Quince tartly.

“But you may be sure she put him up to it,” Martha replied.

So for hours they talked round and round the central subject, avoiding always the crux of the discussion, which was that Martha, with the match-making instinct, longed for the day when she should let Clare pass from her hands as a bride, and that Mrs. Quince, who had governed and mothered Calladine (in so far as so uncomfortable and so unreal a man would allow himself to be mothered) equally dreaded the day when another woman should take over from her the reins of Starvecrow. Calladine himself remarked her altered manner. “Will you be taking your lemon and hot water the same as usual at night, sir?” she asked him, and when in surprise he said, “Why shouldn’t I, Mrs. Quince?” she replied in a voice full of vague and sinister suggestion, “Well, I thought as things was so changed, and likely to be more changed in future, that that might be going overboard with the rest.”

Because Mrs. Quince could not keep off her idea, which buzzed in her head as tirelessly as a mosquito, in between Martha’s visits she began to throw out dark hints to Daisy Morland. Daisy absorbed them with the intelligence she brought to bear only on questions connected with the sexual relationship of any two persons. She was careful not to betray too much of her interest to Mrs. Quince; only a modicum sufficient to keep the housekeeper going; and thus judiciously she was able to give the impression that she took in only about half of what was said, so that Mrs. Quince loosened her tongue to her more than she ventured to loosen it to Martha Sparrow, and presently, encouraged by Daisy’s ejaculations of sympathy and admiration, she fell into the habit of speaking her mind freely as to the vexatious prospect of having a young mistress in the house, “With her notions and her fandangles, upsetting folk that knew their work inside out long before she was born.” Daisy echoed the complaint; but inwardly she devoutly favoured the scheme of a marriage between Mr. Calladine and Miss Warrener. A parallel plan was maturing slowly in her brain, that she would turn Mr. Calladine’s name to her own advantage. She recalled all too vividly the faces of Miss Warrener and young Lovel as she had seen them upon the Downs, when, as she had expressed it in a bout of jealous despair to Olver, “a week wouldn’t have been enough for all they had to say to one another.” It was true that she had not seen them touch so much as each other’s hands, which seemed remarkable to her ideas, accustomed to the loose, inarticulate, indiscriminate rustic fondling, but this, with a sneer, her instinct working less subtly than it might have worked, she attributed to Miss Clare being “gentry,” and to Lovel fancying himself “gentry” too, though every one knew in what poverty he lived, for all his ancestors and his book-reading. But, she reflected, with the satisfaction of reducing even “gentry” to a least common denominator with simple folk like herself, in the end it came to the same thing for everybody; and there was only one way of begetting children: no amount of gentility was able to refine that away! She put it crudely to herself, and grinned. But a thought struck her: what if young Lovel in that high-handed way he had with him, should actually succeed in getting Miss Warrener before Mr. Calladine had spoken? Mr. Calladine was a gentleman,—she couldn’t call him a man, no, but a gentleman he certainly was, and she was even a little overawed by his gentility,—who would take a long time in coming to the point; he would dawdle the thing out, just for the sake of tickling his own feelings; she could tell that merely by looking at him. Oh, he might have made up his mind long ago, but that wouldn’t prevent him from dallying with a girl, seeing her often, teasing himself and her with doubts, wondering whether he would want her quite so much once he had got her, and preferring to live on the whole, in the uncertainty of courtship.... She could see through Mr. Calladine; that was one effect being “gentry” had on people. She had nothing but scorn for men like that. Look at him now, digging up a patch for a garden, and all to please Miss Clare,—Mrs. Quince had said so,—and not as though he had been a poor man digging over his potato-patch against the day when he would have to keep a wife. Lovel wasn’t like that; and therein lay both her fear and her respect. She tried to console herself by thinking how preposterous was the idea that Lovel should ever hope to get Miss Warrener, he, a village boy when all was said and done, with an old bed-ridden witch for a mother and a daft hobgoblin for a brother; but her own feelings for Lovel stepped in to destroy this consolation: wasn’t he a proper strong young man, as difficult to catch as a colt turned loose on the Downs, with his wild dark air, enough to touch the fancy of a girl? She couldn’t tell herself why she had so set her heart on Lovel, if it wasn’t for that air of his,—so set her heart on him that she was ready to take on the zany and the old witch and all, if only she could get him. He had never looked twice at her, for all she had tried hard enough to attract his attention; yet she preferred him to any young man in the village, even to Peter Gorwyn, the smith’s son, with his muscular six foot two, with whom she had made so merry on the day of the Scouring, or Job Lackland, who played the fiddle and whose appearance of fair girlishness was so misleading. They were all very well, either of those two, for a one day’s fooling; she reckoned them at their proper worth, just as they reckoned her; Lovel alone was the serious business. She supposed that she could get Peter Gorwyn to marry her; he was a decent boy, and his sense of decency would certainly get him as far as the church,—and suddenly, in her mind, she saw quite complete the scheme by which she would decoy Lovel.

She brooded over this for some time, perfecting its details, with little gusts of excitement. There was as yet no very great urgency; she could afford to wait a week or two. Olver, moreover, whom she met one day that Mrs. Quince had sent her on an errand to King’s Avon, informed her that his brother seemed very moody of late and short in the temper, from which she deduced that he was either not seeing Clare or that something had happened to cloud their friendship. The information reassured her, and she cheerfully completed her purchases, passing the time of day with her acquaintances and even accepting a glass of stout at the Waggon of Hay from young Gorwyn, of which she knew that Mrs. Quince would not approve; she looked at young Gorwyn over the rim of her glass as she drank, and wondered whether the day would ever come when she could tell him what she owed him: perhaps on the occasion of some future Scouring, when he and she were left behind among the old folks of the village, to dodder and dither in the sun of the street, perhaps she would tell him then, and a fine astonishment and a good though quavering laugh, he would get out of it. It was funny to look at him now, handsome enough as he lounged beside the bar, and to think of him bent double over a stick; funny, too, to think of what had been between them and of what it was perhaps to lead to. One never knew how things were going to turn out.... She set down her glass on the counter, thanked him, and gathered up her parcels to go. He offered to accompany her, but she declined the offer; she had plenty to think about in her walk home over the Downs. “You’re mighty pernickety to-day,” he twitted her, rather relieved to be let off the consequences of the offer gallantry had prompted, and went with her as far as the door, and the old men sitting with their pipes in the chimney corner commented, “A hefty pair.”