Grey Wethers: A Romantic Novel

by V. Sackville-West

She had been almost afraid, for a brief period, to go out upon the Downs,—afraid of forms rising up round her, of hands pulling at her garments, and of eyes seeking hers until she was forced to look into their depths. It was not that she any longer felt resentment against the population her own imagination had evoked; no, the Downs were enriched by their company, and the calm heights acquired a new significance by contrast with their soft rustling tumult. It was that she feared the knowledge which would come to her if she spent many hours alone with those ghostly inhabitants whispering round her like dead leaves; she feared what she would learn; she would not probe her new half-guessed discovery. Things were a degree less terrible so long as they remained without a name.

But she could not fear for long. She had pushed them back, averting her head, into the shadows, and there they had taken up their abode. They would not leave her again. Not even in the midst of joy,—if joy should ever visit,—would they leave her, any more than the shadows were ever completely absent even in the midst of sunshine on the Downs. She was grateful to them for the way they had come, stealing in upon her, silent and gradual, not in a sudden irruption that would have broken her. But now that she no longer feared them, no longer feared the learning that solitude might bring, it was for solitude that she craved, and solitude, she found, was the thing that she might not have. Calladine, who was so content in her company, expected that she should be equally content in his. When she went out, he went with her; when he was not inclined to go out, he begged that she would remain at home. “It is a rough day, Clare; let us stay happily by the fire.” Or he would consent to pace the garden, sheltered now by a little wall, and together they would look at the bare winter beds, and he would talk cheerfully of the flowers that would blow there in the spring.

She renounced the Downs. Since she might not wander there alone, she restricted herself to the house and the square of garden, or to the green track that led to King’s Avon when she went to see her father. Even on this expedition Calladine accompanied her. He did not notice that she walked with her eyes bent upon the ground, never allowing them to lift and stray over the rolling country; or if he noticed he gave no sign. All the time he talked of minor things, and to his talk she made adequate response. Arrived at King’s Avon she would quicken her steps and pass rapidly down the village street, glancing about her only sufficiently to acknowledge the greetings of her humble acquaintances, and only when safe within the Manor House gates would she relax a little, and show herself gentle and affectionate towards her father, who, absent as ever, would presently forget that she was married and would invite Calladine to remain to dinner, “Clare and I, my dear friend, may so rarely welcome a visitor.” Through her laughter she looked at him wistfully; he was dear and familiar, his old beehive hat as wide and as shabby as ever, his spectacles still on his nose and his mild blue eyes looking out through them. She wondered how he got on without her, but Martha told her he did not seem to notice her absence much; only once, she had found him in Miss Clare’s old bedroom, wandering round, and touching everything in a gently puzzled way. Clare was glad that he should continue his busy, happy existence. Martha she could trust, “To be sure, Miss Clare, I look after him as though he was your own baby. It’s all I can do, not to powder him after his bath.” But she sometimes fancied that his eyes followed her a little sorrowfully down the avenue when she went away, as he stood watching their departure and waving his big silk handkerchief.

And they would set off on their homeward journey up the village street, along the road through the cut in the embankment, and along the road until it dissolved into the green track that led across the Downs. Still with her eyes upon the ground she walked rapidly, as though anxious to find herself once more safe within the shelter of Starvecrow. Calladine’s long legs easily kept pace with her; and she had the impression that, even were she to run, she could never escape from him. He strode beside her, talking of her father, talking of those minor things which, she had found, occupied so much of his attention, and always with the assumption that her interest equalled his own. Once or twice he wanted to leave the track and make their way home across country, but when he suggested this she always pretexed her anxiety to be once more ensconced in their own room. This invariably pleased him, and he acquiesced. She could not, no, she could not, stray across the Downs with him.

She renounced the Downs. She could not share them with Calladine; not even with his mere physical presence could she share them. She cramped herself within the house and the little garden. The moment came when Calladine commented upon it. “Don’t you want to go for a walk, Clare?” She did not;—she clung to their meagre patch of cultivation. “You are grown quite stay-at-home,” he prodded, fondly.

The great Downs,—that stealthy population out on the Downs. Waiting for her,—the call of nature, always, and now the call of humanity. Out there, she could respond, she could feel, she could learn. Once she had not wanted to learn. She had shirked knowledge. Now, she had acquired knowledge, and could bear a yet deeper learning. She was avid, indeed, for the deepest draught of knowledge. Those bare great Downs, they were not bare; they were peopled. She might learn the first lesson from their storm, and the ultimate lesson from their serenity. But it was not in Calladine’s company that she would learn it. Such lessons were learnt in the severest solitude, with the senses of the soul stripped to flagellation.

Therefore she clung to Starvecrow. “An uncouth name,” said Calladine discontentedly, after relishing it for years; “shall we change it?” But she begged him not to, without clearly knowing why. “Very well, we keep it,” said Calladine, smiling down at her, “as a contrast to the snug life we live beneath that uncomfortable label.” She smiled back; she could smile, always; it had become mechanical, costing her little. She clung to Starvecrow, without affection, but also without anything so precise as distaste; it, like Calladine, was negligible really, and she had never gone back on her first opinion of it,—that it was not austere enough to excuse its barrenness, and merely mean in its lack of comfort. It was no different from the Manor House, which, although at first sight incongruous perhaps in the midst of the village and its barbarous temple, was in truth no more incongruous than her old father, who pottered in his big hat about the garden, or peered through his big spectacles at the shards set out upon his desk.

But still she clung to Starvecrow; it was just bleak enough to match the bleak, small disaster of her life; just comfortless enough to accord with the blank at the root of her life with Calladine.

There had been the days of her engagement, when convention demanded that she should go over and at least appear to take an interest in her future home. She had gone, driven by Calladine himself through the village in the high dog-cart; holding on to her hat she had gone, rattling along the lanes behind the raw-boned animal, the gig rocking slightly from side to side, and the low branches of the trees almost sweeping against her as they passed. Calladine had looked fondly down upon her holding on to her hat, and in response to his murmur as he bent down towards her, she had looked up, and thought, in a detached way, that he was agreeable to look at, very gentlemanly and rather interesting, with his sallow, high-bred face, his many-caped driving coat, and his fine skilful hands encased in his gauntlets. She wondered, in the same detached fashion, what it would feel like when he stood tall by her side, and she could say “my husband.” Already she had had little foretastes of it, when he accompanied her to the village shops, and the shopkeepers said, in their familiar, respectful way, with an admiring gaze at the couple, “Here’s our best wishes, I’m sure, Miss Clare, to you and your gentleman.” And they had come to Starvecrow, where Mrs. Quince was waiting to receive them, and for all the smiles and curtseys and the insistence that Clare should inspect every cupboard, Clare had been conscious of the hostility of the elderly woman. But she had gone,—gone all over the house under the escort of Mrs. Quince, accompanied by Calladine as far as the first floor, where with his elaborate deferential manner he had retired, conveying by all that he left unsaid, that women were best left to themselves over household matters. There was in the manner of his retirement the indefinable condescension which to Clare was so subtly irritating. A wholesome male contempt she could more easily have pardoned.... But she had not stopped to think of that, in her dismay at finding herself alone with Mrs. Quince; she needed all her wits to balance the tension between herself and the housekeeper. Mrs. Quince seemed determined to outrage down to the least detail of her own feelings; all the doors of her most sacred cupboards were thrown open with a jingling of keys, and their immaculate depths revealed to Clare, who, her criticism being all the time slavishly invited, could respond with nothing but approval. “Though I am sure, miss, there’s many a thing in this house not carried out according to your ideas.” Mrs. Quince, indeed, seemed so anxious to be found fault with, that Clare, feeling that she must exhibit her own competence or forfeit from the outset the housekeeper’s respect, at last did offer some small disparaging comment. “Ah, there, what did I tell you?” said Mrs. Quince instantly, as though satisfied to have got finally what she had been expecting all along; “’tis not likely that old eyes and young ones should always see alike.” After this her urbanity and her constant return to the point that Clare had condemned became so excessive that Clare devoutly wished she might have forfeited all Mrs. Quince’s esteem for ever only not to be pursued by this constant reference and exaggerated subservience. And Mrs. Quince would spare her nothing, but led her up to the second storey, where, pausing on a landing carpeted with coarse matting and lit by a small skylight, she explained that “the girl” slept. Clare shrank; “Oh, no, Mrs. Quince, don’t disturb her if she is in her room.” “Indeed, and why not, miss?” said Mrs. Quince stoutly, advancing towards the door; “’tis only her room on sufferance, as you might say; and likely there would be something you would wish altered.” She threw open the door as she spoke, and Daisy Morland, rising in confusion, let fall on to the ground the scraps of white linen at which she had been stitching.

Clare recoiled on the threshold; she had known that Daisy Morland was in the house, but had not expected to come face to face with her. Nor had Daisy expected to see Clare,—whose arrival with Calladine she had watched on tiptoe from her little dormer window,—thus ushered into her room. The mischievous eye of Mrs. Quince superintended the clash between the two girls. She had manœuvred ably; she congratulated herself. Daisy,—Daisy was curtseying,—had recovered herself so far as to remember her curtsey,—what gall, what mockery, was in that curtsey!—Miss Warrener,—Miss Warrener was nodding to her,—saying something about “nice little room,” and looking sideways all the time at the pieces of linen fallen on the floor. Mrs. Quince folded her arms and superintended. She wore a smile,—outwardly benevolent, inwardly immensely ironical. The two girls,—much of an age. Daisy, blowsy and flustered, hardly able to repress her jeer; Clare, cool and wounded, but too proud to betray her wound. A lady: Mrs. Quince paid her that grudging acknowledgment. Well, Daisy had got the gipsy fellow, and Miss Warrener had got Mr. Calladine. As it should be.