Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

GREY WETHERS

Part One

More than half a century has now elapsed since the events which added a new legend to the hard ancient hills lying about Marlborough and King’s Avon. The last organised rustic Scouring of the White Horse of King’s Avon,—from which occasion these events may properly be said to date, although a believer in predestination might be found to contend that they dated, indeed, from the very births of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel,—that last organised Scouring took place more than half a century ago. The White Horse remains, the same gaunt, hoary relic; King’s Avon remains, secluded, tragic, rearing its great stones within the circle of its strange earthwork; the Downs remain, and every winter, now as then, shroud their secrets and the memory of their secrets beneath the same mantle of snow away from the speculation of the curious. But of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel no trace remains, unless indeed they have passed into the wind and become incorporate with the intractable spaces and uncompromising heights. A great many tales are locally told of them, all too fantastic to be set down in print; the chalky soil, so unpropitious to other crops, grew at least a rich crop of superstition, especially in an age and district when stories of witches and burnings were curiously mingled in the minds of the ignorant with the opening of barrows and the fable of British princes. So it is not surprising that the disappearance of these two persons should have given rise to a jabber of conjecture which rapidly came to be explained away by a variety of legends following the line of approved local tradition. It is not the business of print to enter into these conjectures or their interpretation. It is the business of print to set down, in as practical a manner as may be, the circumstances leading up to the final catastrophe,—or fulfilment, call it which you will, according to the point of view from which you approach it,—and to leave the reader to carry on the narrative for himself in the manner best suited to his own fancy and requirements.

A peculiar silence reigned over the village; no children shouted, and no young men or girls passed down the street with that exact air of energy and enterprise that youth alone can produce. Somnolence predominated; it seemed a village inhabited only by the aged, and by those sparsely; a small gaggle of geese quacked and pried with their flat beaks along the cobbles; but for them, the cats and the old men had the place to themselves. The cats slumbered, curled round in the corners of doorsteps, where the sun struck hot on the stone; and on a bench outside the Waggon of Hay the four old men sat in a row, leaning on their knobly sticks, and holding pewter mugs in their hands. Brown old men, brown of hide and brown of garment, so that it was difficult to tell where their clothes began or their hands and faces left off. Eight boots of similar pattern set squarely side by side on the stones; four heads of almost equal similarity nodded together over the pewter, sagely and immemorially, for it would be safe to say that those four old men of King’s Avon might have been at any moment replaced by another set of four old men out of another century, without a casual observer remarking on the difference. It was the day out of half a score of years when they were left in supreme sovereignty over the village. The Waggon of Hay became then what they considered it always ought to be, and what they chose to maintain it had been at that epoch of time called “when we were young,” a place of meeting sober and stagnant, undisturbed by the rude, hobnailed entrance of young men, calling for spirits in a tap-room where they should have been content with beer or cider. It was the day when they might sit at peace in their row on the bench, sure that no lout of a blunderer would stumble over their toes. It was the day when they might indulge themselves to their hearts’ content in gossip and politics, uninterrupted by the revolutionary opinions of their juniors. They could go back to the time when no railway disfigured the valley of the Frome, when the old horned breed of true Wiltshire sheep wandered upon the heights, and when no man dreamt of threshing his wheat save by flail, or of crushing his apples in any but a wooden press. They could recall without effort those days in the ’thirties, when, themselves but little older than the century, they had gone in bands with rude weapons to break up the new and hateful machinery in the farmers’ barns. They could tell again the tales of superstition, and the sights which their fathers’ generation had seen; and above all, most succulently, they could recall how old Mother Lovel had been burnt on the top of Silbury Hill for a witch, the bogey their mothers had used to frighten them with; and, nodding together, the four heads coming closer, whisper that Nicholas Lovel had all the black arts at his disposal, and had in a fit of rage put a curse upon his own brother, so that the lad no longer had his wits about him, but loitered around, the anxiety and disgrace of the village.

They had the whole day to themselves, in which to say over and over again the things they had said many times before, and, greedy, would have liked to have the evening too, but far from it, the evening of that day was worse than any other evening, for the young men returned, already uproarious and in their numbers, full of song and boastfulness, their boots white with the chalk of the Downs, and their broad hats stuck round with the grasses and sorrel that grew up there on those unfertile heights. The old men would collect together in a corner, remotely grumbling, watching the young men as they lounged against the bar, filling the tap-room with their ribald good-humour and their tobacco smoke. The old men disapproved of the young because they feared in them the jostle of the oncoming generation, but the young men merely laughed carelessly at the old, having from them no longer anything to fear. The young men, on the evening of that particular day, would be more than usually vainglorious, bragging of their exploits, growing with every glass more direct in their modes of expression and more hilarious in their laughter. It was the day when all prudery was thrown aside, when each girl must look after herself as best she could or would, when from the earliest hour of exodus from the village along the road to the Downs the band of youths and girls fell into two primitive groups of hunter and quarry, a scramble of catch-who-catch-can, an escapade of wholesome license over the slopes of the Downs. It is true that they started out armed with trowels and rakes, but even these implements of homely design were soon garlanded with vetch and campion torn from the hedgerows as the party went along, nor were these, the ostensible justification of the expedition, the true weapons of the day; the true weapons were the muslin frocks, the black shoes and white stockings, the ribbons, the sunbonnets, and the eyes and curls beneath the sunbonnets; and the leather leggings of the young men, their strong brown hands, their belted smocks, their insolent air. Impossible that a few wounds should not result from the marshalling of such an armoury. And while the girls on their return must needs carry away to their bedrooms the secrets of the day, evading the inquisitive eye of their mothers, who, not condescending to ask, although burning to know, remembered with a sigh similar feasts of their own youth, the young men might gather in the tap-room and between hints and guffaws convey to all who cared to hear that they were fine young men worthy of their sex and of a sound country tradition. It was perhaps from an unacknowledged flicker of envy that the old men frowned upon their honest coarseness, for occasionally one of them, forgetting his attitude of rebuke, would let out a cackle of enjoyment and appreciation, much to his own dismay, and much to the amusement of the youths, who would cry, “Hey, gaffer, don’t you wish you’d be with us? Don’t you, you old dog?”

But until this lusty return filled the tap-room with its uproar, the cats and the ancients of the village were left undisturbed. Both in their several ways made the most of their opportunity, the cats to sleep, since little boys who threw stones had gone with the party, hangers-on and peeping-Toms of the day, and the ancients to utter their sage words, to echo approval of one another, and to bury their faces deep in the pewter mugs, from which they emerged with beards dripping foam. A suck of the lips, a wipe with the back of the hand, a long “A-ah,” of contentment, and the mumble of anecdote flowed again upon its course. Sitting there in the sun was favourable to such occupations. Since the strenuousness of life’s work was over,—the early winter rising, the trudges after a lost ewe across snow-swept Downs, the unearthing of mangolds from the frosted ridge, the hours of scything swathe by swathe under burning midday,—what could remain better to do than to sit upon a bench in the sun, with companions who in colour and outlook were the very spit of oneself, to grumble against new-fangled notions, and to wet one’s gizzard with a long pull of ale, which, at all events, however ignominious to admit it, had not deteriorated in quality since one’s youth?

Amongst the four old men, he who carried perhaps most authority, if any difference could be said to exist amongst the ancient cronies, was John Sparrow, who out-topped them by a year or so of age. Not that this fact in itself constituted so marked a superiority; it placed the senior rather at a disadvantage, since there existed amongst the four a tacit competition as to which should outlive the other, and each within his own mind dwelt upon the day when a fresh mound should be turned in the neighbouring church-yard, and a shrunken row of three should sit upon the bench, and the new topic, surprising by virtue of its very novelty, be introduced among them, the topic of their missing member. Each probably knew his companions well enough to hope for little charity at their hands. It would be fine fun, to have John Sparrow, or Caleb Patch, or Timothy Cutbush, or Eli Sheppard, lying there silent and unable to protest, to pick to pieces at their leisure. No, the few additional years of John Sparrow were not precisely the reason of his weight of word. But Sparrow’s daughter Martha, called “my gal,” although she would never again see sixty, was servant at the Manor House, where lived the only gentry of the village, and consequently whenever Sparrow began his phrase, “My gal says,” his utterance was awaited with a certain degree of respect. The village was proud of its gentry; Mr. Warrener was a scholar, and Miss Clare a lady. Although she went everywhere alone, and rode her pony like a boy, her ladylikeness could never be in question. Hence it came about that John Sparrow’s quotations from Martha held a little flavour of high life, a very remote echo of fashion; nothing more vicarious could well be imagined, but to the fuddled minds of the other three it sufficed: John Sparrow was in touch with elegance. He did not much look like it, as he sat at the end of the row on the bench, the colour of a hayseed, having now deposited his empty mug on the bench beside him and drawn from his pocket a long clay pipe whose small bowl he was very carefully ramming with tobacco. His daughter Martha was altogether a different question; she wore a lilac print dress and an apron over it; her grey hair was partly covered by a cap; she had a sedate manner and shining old cheeks; she was clean and respectful. She had entirely ceased to live at her father’s house, having her own bare but immaculate attic bedroom at the Manor House, and periodically she allowed her father to come there to tea in the kitchen, where he sat very neat and intimidated and impressed, enjoying most that part of his visit when he was boasting about it to his cronies afterwards. Being without subtlety they betrayed every corner of their envy and curiosity, to which John Sparrow was not loth to pander. They had had a table-cloth, and cups and saucers—china, not tin—and Martha had put flowers on the table. After tea Martha had played the musical box, but in the garden he had heard Miss Clare laughing as she strolled up and down with her father. That young lady was getting to a marriageable age; and here John Sparrow’s recital, which began with veracity, was apt to go astray. He would make a feeble attempt to convey a sense of his privity to secret counsels by pursing up his lips, nodding his head, spreading out his hands, and suchlike indications, without actually committing himself to the indiscretion of words; but presently under the fire of questions, the “Come now, John, out with it,” and the final shaft of scepticism to the effect that he knew no more than they did themselves, he would invariably be led into confidences which had no bearing whatsoever upon the truth. Martha had whispered this, Martha had told him that, Miss Clare, he doubted, was not in truth the daughter of Mr. Warrener; or, if so be she was his daughter, then no daughter that he ought to own to, but rather should pass her off as his niece or his ward.... The other three accepted all such statements round-eyed, and the more they gaped the more inventive he grew. Their credulity was his undoing.

And as they drowsed and maundered, they saw Miss Clare emerge presently from the gates of the Manor House, with their glimpse of garden, lawn, and cedars, riding astride upon her pony, whose little hoofs came slipping and shambling over the cobbles, down the street, past the old men, and took the road out towards the Downs. The old men raised their heads at all this little clatter, and a greeting passed between them and Miss Clare; they touched their hats, she waved her whip to them and called out something which they were too deaf to catch, but to which they responded with the “Ay, ay” and the gesture of tolerant encouragement accorded by age towards popular youth. There was a mumble amongst them after she had passed, of unspecified vague approval, before the straggly old beards drooped again upon the chests, and the street resumed the quiet broken by that small disturbance.

It was not a very great wonder that the village should look upon its gentry as so exclusively its own. Its situation was such, that everything which took place within its enclosure was peculiarly focussed and self-contained. In the first place, it was isolated far from other villages, at the foot of the Downs, which loomed over it on three sides like a huge natural rampart, and in the second place it was entirely surrounded by an ancient earthwork in a complete and perfect circle. This earthwork was broken only at two points, to allow the road to enter the circle, and to leave it again on the opposite side. Within this little enclosed ring of thirty acres lay the village, complete with church, Manor House, and village street, incapable of expansion in any direction, unless it overflowed its boundary, which it had never done. A few outlying farms at a little distance were included, properly speaking, in the parish, but they were either too remote or too well screened by voluminous trees to distract the eye from the compact symmetry of the little town within the circle. Strangers to the country, coming unawares upon this singular encampment, were at first amazed; but presently there crept into their minds the sense that the whole country traversed by them had been, in a way, but the natural preparation to precisely such a mysterious and secluded patch of human habitation. They recalled the straight white road driven across the Downs; the pits of poor blanched chalk; the shaven clumps of beech, like giant ricks, upon the skyline; mounds and barrows; the perfect cone of Silbury Hill, which, rooted in its greater antiquity, had forced the Roman road to deflect from its course; the loneliness of the magnificent Downs; the primitive shapes surviving in the White Horses cut as landmarks upon their flanks. Above all they would recall those strange monuments of English paganism, the sarsen stones, hewn by Nature and transported by man to be the instruments of his superstition, left where they had fallen, singly or in rings, obscure in a fold of the Downs, or reared to accord with the eternal procession of the heavens in the gaunt majesty of Stonehenge.