§ 7
He had said nothing to her about his sister Jenny, though her marriage was so close as to seem almost more critical than his own departure. He felt the unfairness of sharing with Stella so difficult a secret, also he realised that the smaller the circle to which it was confined the smaller the catastrophe when it was either accidentally discovered or deliberately revealed.
About a week before the day actually fixed for the wedding, the former seemed more likely. Jenny met Gervase on his return from Ashford with a pale, disconcerted face.
“Father guesses something’s up,” she said briefly.
“What?—How?—Has anyone told him?”
“No—he doesn’t really know anything, thank heaven—at least anything vital. But he’s heard I was at tea at Fourhouses twice last week. One of the Dengates called for some eggs, I remember, and she must have told Rose when Rose was messing about in the village. He’s being heavily sarcastic, and asking me if I wouldn’t like Mrs. Appleby asked in to tea, so that I won’t have to walk so far to gratify my democratic tastes.”
“But Peter’s had tea with them, too—you told me it was he who introduced you.”
“Yes, but that only makes it worse. Peter’s been at me as well—says he’d never have taken me there if he’d thought I hadn’t a better sense of my position. He was very solemn about it, poor old Peter.”
“But of course they don’t suspect any reason.”
“No, but I’m afraid they will. I’m not likely to have gone there without some motive—twice, too—and, you see, I’ve been so secret about it, never mentioned it at home, as I should have done if I’d had tea at Glasseye or Monkings or anywhere like that. They must think I’ve some reason for keeping quiet.... I hope they won’t question me, for I’m a bad liar.”
“You’ll be married in ten days—I don’t suppose they’ll get really suspicious before that.”
However, a certain amount of reflection made him uneasy, and after dinner he drove over to Fourhouses, to discuss the matter with Ben Godfrey himself.
When he came back, he went straight up to Jenny’s room—she had gone to bed early, so as to give her family less time for asking questions.
“Well, my dear,” he said when she let him in, “I’ve talked it over with Ben, and we both think that you’ll have to get married at once.”
“At once!—But can we?”
“Yes—the law allows you to get married the day after tomorrow. It’ll cost thirty pounds, but Fourhouses can rise to that, and it’s much better to get the thing over before it’s found out. Not that anyone could stop you, but it would be a maddening business if they tried, and anyhow I think the parents will take it easier if it’s too late to do anything.”
“I think you’re quite right—absolutely right. But——”
“But what?”
“Oh, nothing—only it seems such a jump, now I’m standing right on the edge.”
“You’re not afraid, Jenny?”
“No—only in the way that everyone’s afraid of a big thing. But you’re absolutely right. Now there’s a chance of us being found out, we must act at once. I don’t want to have to tell any lies about Ben. I suppose he’ll go up to town tomorrow.”
“Yes, and you and I will follow him the day after. I must see about a day off. I’m not quite clear as to what one does exactly to get a special license, but he’ll go to the Court of Faculties and they’ll show him how. He’s going to wire me at Gillingham’s—lucky I’m still there.”
“I don’t envy you, Gervase, having to break the news to Father and Mother.”
“No, I don’t think it’ll be much fun. But really it will be better than if you wrote—I can let them down more gently, and they won’t feel quite so outraged. As for the row—there’ll be one about my own little plan in a short time, so I may as well get used to them.”
Jenny said nothing. She had known of Gervase’s “little plan” only for the last week, and she had for it all the dread and dislike which the active Englishwoman instinctively feels for the contemplative and supernatural—reinforced now by the happy lover’s desire to see all the world in love. The thought of her brother, with all his eager experimental joy in life, all his profound yet untried capacity for love, taking vows of poverty and celibacy, filled her with grief and indignation—she felt that he was being driven by the backwash of his disappointment over Stella Mount, and blamed “those Priests,” who she felt had unduly influenced him at a critical time. However, after her first passionate protest, she had made no effort to oppose him, feeling that she owed him at least silence for all that he had done to help her in her own adventure, and trusting to time and recovery to show him his folly. She was a little reassured by the knowledge that he could not take his final vows for many years to come.
He was aware of this one constraint between them, and coming over to her as she lay in bed, he gave her a kiss. For some unfathomable reason it stung her, and turning over on her side she burst into tears.
“Jenny, Jenny darling—don’t cry. Oh, why ... Jenny, if you’ve any doubts, tell me before it’s too late, and I’ll help you out—I promise. Anything rather than....”
“Oh, don’t, Gervase. It isn’t that. Can’t you understand? It’s—oh, I suppose all women feel like this—not big enough ... afraid....”
§ 8
The wedding had always been planned to take place in London, so it was merely the time that was being altered. Both Gervase and Jenny had seen, and Ben Godfrey had been brought reluctantly to see, that to be married at home would double the risks; so a room had been taken and a bag of Godfrey’s clothes deposited in a Paddington parish, where the Vicar was liberal in his interpretation of the laws of residence, and an ordinary licence procured. The change of plans necessitated a special licence, and Jenny had to wait till Gervase came home the next evening to know if all was in order. However, after the shock of its inception, the new scheme worked smoothly. Jenny came down early the next morning and breakfasted with Gervase, then drove off in Henry Ford, leaving a message with Wills that she had gone to London for the day, and her brother was driving her as far as Ashford.
Everything was so quiet and matter-of-fact as to seem to her almost normal—she could not quite realise that she had left her old life behind her at Conster, even more completely than most brides leaving their father’s house; that ahead of her was not only all the difference between single and married, but all the difference between Alard and Godfrey, Conster and Fourhouses. She was not only leaving her home, but her class, her customs, her acquaintance. It was not till she was standing beside Godfrey in a strange, dark church, before a strange clergyman, that she realised the full strangeness of it all. For a moment her head swam with terror—she found herself full of a desperate longing to wake up in her bed at Conster and find it was a dream—she thought of the catastrophe of Mary’s marriage, and she knew that she was taking far bigger risks than Mary.... And through all this turmoil she could hear herself saying quite calmly—“I, Janet Christine, take thee, Benjamin, to be my wedded husband.” Some mechanical part of her was going on with the business, while her emotions cowered and swooned. Now she was signing her name in the register—Janet Christine Godfrey—now she was shaking hands with the clergyman and answering his inane remarks with inanities of her own. It was too late to draw back—she had plunged—Jenny Alard was dead.
They had lunch at a restaurant in Praed Street, and afterwards Gervase went with them to Paddington Station and saw them off to Cornwall. They were not going to be away long, partly on account of Godfrey’s spring sowings, and partly because Jenny felt that she could not leave her brother any length of time to stand the racket. She would still have liked to suppress his share in the business, but Gervase was firm—“It’s treating them better,” he said, “and, besides, it will help them a lot to have a scapegoat on the premises.”
Jenny felt almost sentimental in parting from the little brother, who had helped her so much in the path she had chosen, and who had taken for himself so rough and ridiculous a road. She kissed him in the carriage doorway, made him promise to write to her, and then did her best to put him out of her head for the first happy hours of the honeymoon.
Circumstances made this fairly easy. By the time they were at Mullion, watching the low lamps of the stars hanging over the violet mists that veiled Poldhu, even Gervase seemed very far away, and the household and life of Conster Manor almost as if they had never been. Nothing was real but herself and Ben, alone together in the midst of life, each most completely the other’s desire and possession. When she looked into his eyes, full of their new joy and trouble, the husband’s eyes which held also the tenderness of the father and the simplicity of the child, there was no longer any past or future, but only the present—“I love.”
The next day, however, recalled her rather abruptly to thoughts of her scapegoat. She received a telegram—
“Father kicked me out address Church Cottage Vinehall don’t worry Gervase.”
Jenny was conscience-stricken, though she knew that Gervase would not be much hurt by his exile. But she was anxious to hear what had happened, and waited restlessly for a letter. None came, but the next morning another telegram.
“Father had stroke please come home Gervase.”
So Jenny Godfrey packed up her things and came home after two days’ honeymoon. Happiness is supposed to make time short, but those two days had seemed like twenty years.
§ 9
Gervase reproached himself for having done his part of the business badly, though he never felt quite sure how exactly he had blundered. He had reached Conster two hours before dinner, and trusted that this phenomenon might prepare his father for some surprise. But, disappointingly, Sir John did not notice his return—he had grown lately to think less and less about his youngest son, who was seldom at home and whom he looked upon as an outsider. Gervase had deliberately alienated himself from Alard, and Sir John could never, in spite of Peter’s efforts, be brought properly to consider him as an heir. His goings out and his comings in were of little consequence to the head of the house. So when at six o’clock Gervase came into the study, his father was quite unimpressed.
“May I speak to you for a minute, Sir?”
“Well, well—what is it?”
Sir John dipped Country Life the fraction of an inch to imply a temporary hearing.
“It’s about Jenny, Sir.”
“Well, what about her?”
“She’s—I’ve been with her in town today. I’ve just come back. She asked me to tell you about her and young Godfrey.”
“What’s that? Speak up, Sir, can’t you? I can’t hear when you mumble. Come and stand where I can see you.”
Gervase came and stood on the hearthrug. He was beginning to feel nervous. Uncomfortable memories of childhood rushed up confusedly from the back of his mind, and gave him sore feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
“It’s about Jenny and young Godfrey, Sir.”
“Godfrey! Who’s Godfrey?”
“Benjamin Godfrey of Fourhouses—the man who bought your Snailham land.”
“Well, what about him?”
“It’s about him and Jenny, Sir.”
“Well, what about ’em? What the devil’s he got to do with Jenny?”
“Don’t you remember she went to tea at Fourhouses last week?”
“She hasn’t been there again, has she?”
Gervase considered that the subject had been sufficiently led up to—anyhow he could stand no more of the preliminaries.
“Well, yes, Sir—at least she’s having tea with him now—at least not tea.... I mean, they were married this morning.”
Sir John dropped Country Life.
“Married this morning,” he repeated in a lame, normal voice.
“Yes, Sir, at St. Ethelburga’s, Paddington. They’ve been in love with each other for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did, they thought they’d better wait to tell you till after the ceremony.”
“And where—where are they now?”
“At Mullion, Sir—in Cornwall.”
Sir John said nothing. His face turned grey, and he trembled. Gervase was distressed.
“Don’t take it so dreadfully to heart, Father. I’m sure it’s really for the best. He’s a decent chap, and very well-to-do—he’ll be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to”—remembering an old tag.
“Get out!” said Sir John suddenly.
“I’m frightfully sorry if you think we’ve treated you badly, Sir. But really we tried to do it in the way we thought would hurt you least.”
“Get out!” repeated his father—“get out of here. This is your doing, with your socialism, with your contempt for your own family, with your.... Get out of the room, or I’ll....”
His shaking hand groped round for a missile, and Gervase moved hastily to the door, too late, however, to escape a bound volume of Punch, which preceded him into the hall.
Wills was standing outside the dining-room door with a tray, and Gervase found it very difficult to look dignified. Such an attitude was even more difficult to keep up during the alarms that followed. He retreated to his bedroom, taking Punch with him, partly as a solace, partly in a feeble hope of persuading Wills that to have a book thrown at your head is a normal way of borrowing it. He had not been alone a quarter of an hour before he was summoned by Speller, his mother’s maid. There followed an interview which began in reproaches, passed on to an enquiry into Jenny’s luggage—had she bought brushes and sponges in London, since she had taken nothing away?—and ended cloudily in hysterics and lavender water. Gervase went back to his room, which ten minutes later was entered by the sobbing Doris, who informed him he had “killed Mother,” who apparently required a post-mortem interview. Once again he went down to the boudoir with its rose-coloured lights and heavy scents of restoratives, and to the jerky accompaniment of Doris’s weeping told his story over again. He had to tell it a fourth time to Peter, who had been summoned from Starvecrow, and found that it was hardening into set phrases, and sounded rather like the patter of a guide recounting some historic elopement from a great house.
“They’ve been in love for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did——”
“My God!” said Peter.
He was perhaps the most scandalised of all the Alards, and had about him a solemn air of wounding which was more distressing to Gervase than his father’s wrath.
“I introduced him to her,” he said heavily—“I introduced him. I never thought ... how could I think ... that she held herself so cheap—all of us so cheap.”
“You really needn’t treat the matter as if Jenny had married the rag-and-bone man——” began Gervase.
“I know Godfrey’s position quite well.”
“He farms his own land, and comes of good old stock. He’s well off, and will be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to——”
“He won’t. She’s been accustomed to the society of gentlepeople, and he’ll never be able to give her that. She’s gone to live on a farm, where she’ll have her meals in the kitchen with the farm-men. I tell you I know the Godfreys, and they’re nothing more than a respectable, good sort of farming people who’ve done well out of the war. At least, I won’t call them even that now,” he added fiercely—“I won’t call a man respectable who worms himself into intimacy with my sister on the strength of my having introduced him.”
“However, it’s some comfort to think they’ve gone to the Poldhu hotel at Mullion,” said Lady Alard; “the Blakelocks were there once, you know, Doris, and the Reggie Mulcasters. She won’t notice the difference quite so terribly since he’s taken her there.”
“Yes, she will,” said Peter—“she’ll notice the difference between the kind of man she’s been used to meeting here and a working farmer, who wasn’t even an officer during the war. If she doesn’t—I’ll think worse of her even than I do now. And as for you——” turning suddenly on Gervase—“I don’t trust myself to tell you what I think of you. I expect you’re pleased that we’ve suffered this disgrace—that a lady of our house has married into the peasantry. You think it’s democratic and all that. You’re glad—don’t say you’re not.”
“Yes, I am glad, because Jenny’s happy. You, none of you, seem to think of that. You don’t seem to think that ‘the kind of man she’s been meeting here’ hasn’t been the slightest use to her—that all he’s done has been to trouble her and trifle with her and then go off and marry money—that now at last she’s met a man who’s treated her honourably——”
“Honourably! He’s treated her like the adventurer he is. Oh, it’s a fine thing of him to marry into our family, even if she hasn’t got a penny—his ancestors were our serfs—they ran at our people’s stirrups, and our men had the droit du seigneur of their women——”
“And pulled out the teeth of your wife’s forefathers,” said Gervase, losing his temper. “If you’re going back five hundred years, I don’t think your own marriage will bear the test.”
He knew that if he stayed he would quarrel with them all, and he did not want to do that, for he was really sorry for them, wounded in their most sensitive feelings of family pride. He walked out of the room, and made for the attic stairs, seeking the rest and dignity of solitude. But it was not to be. The door of his father’s dressing-room opened as he passed, and Sir John came out on the landing, already dressed for dinner.
“You understand that after what has happened I cannot keep you here.”
He was quite calm now, and rather terrifying.
“I—oh, no—I mean yes, of course,” stammered Gervase.
“You have work at Ashford, so you can go and lodge near it. Or you can go to your Ritualist friends at Vinehall. I refuse to have you here after your treachery. You are a traitor, Sir—to your own family.”
“When—when would you like me to go?”
“You can stay till tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks—I’ll leave tonight.”
So the day’s catastrophe ended in Gervase driving off through the darkness in Henry Ford, his suit-case and a few parcels of books behind him. He had decided to go to Luce—the Priest would take him in till he was able to go to Thunders Abbey.
“Well, anyhow, I’m spared that other row,” he thought to himself; “or, rather, I’ve got through two rows in one. Father won’t mind what I do with myself after this.”
He felt rather forlorn as the lorry’s lights swept up the Vinehall road. During the last few months he had been stripped of so many things—his devotion to Stella, his comradeship with Jenny—he knew that he could never be to her what he had been before she married—and now his family and his home. And all he had to look forward to was a further, more complete stripping, even of the clothes he wore, so that in all the world he would own nothing.
§ 10
Any lack of cordiality in Luce’s welcome was made up by his quite matter-of-fact acceptance of this sudden descent upon him at a late hour of a young man and all his worldly goods, including a Ford lorry. The latter was given the inn stable as a refuge, while Gervase was told he could have the spare bedroom as long as he liked if he would clear out the apples. This done and some porridge eaten, he went to bed, utterly worn out, and feeling less like Gervase Alard than he had ever felt in his life.
The next day he went off to work as usual, sending a telegram to Jenny on his way. When he came back he found a message had arrived from Conster—he must go home at once; his father had had a stroke.
“I’ve a ghastly feeling it was brought on by this row,” he said to Luce, as he filled up the lorry’s tank for the new journey.
“It must have been,” was all the reassurance he got.
Gervase felt wretched enough. The message, which had been left by Dr. Mount, gave no details, and as the cottage was empty when he called, there had been no verbal additions or explanations. He thought of calling at the doctor’s on his way to Leasan—he had meant to go there anyhow this evening and tell them about Jenny’s marriage—but he decided it was best to lose no time, and drove straight to Conster.
Here he received his first respite. The stroke was not a severe one, and Dr. Mount was practically certain Sir John would get over it. However, he seemed to think the other members of the family ought to be sent for, and Doris had telegraphed to Mary but not to Jenny, as she didn’t think Jenny deserved it after what she had done. She did not think Gervase deserved it, either, but evidently Dr. Mount had taken it upon himself to decide, and left a message without consulting her.
He was not allowed to go near his father that night, and spent the hours intermittently sleeping and waking in his little cold bedroom, now empty of everything that was really his. The next morning he went out and sent a telegram to Jenny. But by the time she arrived her presence was useless. Sir John had recovered consciousness and would see none of his erring children. Mary, Gervase and Jenny waited together in the drawing-room in hopes that the edict would be revoked. But, as Doris came down to tell them at intervals, it was no use whatever. He refused to let them come near him—indeed, the mere mention of their names seemed to irritate him dangerously. Towards evening Dr. Mount advised them to go away.
“I’m afraid there’s no hope, at present anyhow—and it’s best not to worry him. There’s often a very great irritability in these cases. He may become calmer as his condition improves.”
So Jenny, scared and tired, was taken away by her husband to the shelter of Fourhouses, and Gervase prepared to go back to Vinehall. They were both rather guiltily conscious that they did not pity those who had been denied the presence so much as those who were bound to it—Doris, who as unofficial nurse and substitute scapegoat, was already beginning to show signs of wear and tear—and Peter, worn with a growing sense of responsibility and the uncertain future brought a step nearer ... no doubt the younger ones had made an easy escape.
Only Mary looked a bit wistful.
“It’s so long since I’ve seen him,” she said as she stood on the steps, waiting for the car which was to take her back to Hastings.
“Cheer up, my dear—he’ll change his mind when he gets better,” said Gervase.
Mary shook her head. She had altered strikingly since he had seen her last. She seemed all clothes—faultless, beautiful clothes, which seemed mysteriously a part of herself so that it was difficult to imagine her without them. Her real self had shrunk, faded, become something like a whisper or a ghost—she was less Mary Pembroke than a suit of lovely grey velvet and fur which had somehow come alive and taken the simulacrum of a woman to show off its beauty.
“Where are you going?” he asked her, moved with a sudden anxious pity.
“Back to Hastings. I’ve found a very comfortable small hotel, and I think I’ll stay there till I know more how things are going with Father. I expect I shall run over and see Jenny now and then.”
“I’m glad you’re going to do that,” he cried warmly—“it’ll mean a lot to her to have one of the family with her—especially when I’m gone.”
“You?—where are you going?”
He found himself quite unable to tell her of what he was looking forward to.
“Oh, my work at Ashford comes to an end in a week, and I’ll have to pack off somewhere else.”
He kissed her before she went away, and found an unexpected warmth in her lips. After all, the real Mary had always lived very far beneath the surface, and as years went by and the surface had become more and more ravaged she had retreated deeper and deeper down. But he was glad to think that at the bottom, and perhaps by queer, perverse means, she had somehow managed to keep herself alive.
§ 11
Jenny’s sudden return had the disadvantage of bringing her back into the midst of her family while the scandal of her marriage was still hot. As her father refused to see her, Ben had suggested taking her away again, but Jenny did not like to leave while Sir John was still in any danger, and by the time all danger was past, her husband’s affairs had once more fast bound him to the farm—besides, the various members of her family had adjusted themselves to her defection, and settled down either into hostility or championship, according to their own status in the tribe.
It was characteristic of the house of Alard that even its revolted members camped round it in its evil hour, held to it by human feeling after all other links were broken. No one would leave the neighbourhood while Sir John continued ill and shaken. Mary stayed at Hastings, and Gervase stayed at Vinehall, even after his apprenticeship to Gillingham’s had finally come to an end, and the men had given him a farewell oyster supper at the White Lion, with a presentation wrist-watch to add to the little stock of possessions he would have to give up in a few weeks.
However, by the beginning of February, Sir John had so far recovered as to make any waiting unnecessary. He still refused to see his disloyal son and rebellious daughters. His illness seemed to have hardened his obstinacy, and to have brought about certain irritable conditions which sometimes approached violence and made it impossible to attempt any persuasion.
He came downstairs and took up his indoor life as usual, though out of doors he no longer rode about on his grey horse. The entire overseership of the estate devolved on Peter, with the additional burden that his responsibility was without authority—his father insisted on retaining the headship and on revising or overthrowing his decisions. Nothing could be done without reference to him, and his illness seemed to have made him queerly perverse. He insisted that an offer from a firm of timber-merchants for the whole of Little Sowden Wood should be refused, though Peter explained to him that at present the wood actually cost more in its upkeep than was realised by the underwood sales in the local market.
“Why should I have one of the finest woods on my estate smashed up by a firm of war-profiteers? Confound you, Sir! Many’s the fox that hounds have put up in Sowden, and the place was thick when Conster started building.”
“But we’re in desperate need of ready money, Father. We can’t afford to start repairs at Glasseye, and this is the third year we’ve put off. There’s Monkings, too,—the place is falling to pieces, and Luck says he’ll quit if he has to wait any longer.”
“Quit?—Let him. He needn’t threaten me. Tenants aren’t so scarce.”
“Good tenants are. We aren’t likely to get a man who farms the land as well as Luck. He got the Penny field to carry seven bushel to the acre last year. He’s clockwork with the rent, too—you know the trouble we have over rent.”
“But I won’t have Sowden cut down to keep him. Timber! I thought we were done with that shame when the war ended, and we’d lost Eleven Pounder and Little Horn.”
“But I can’t see anything more shameful in selling timber than in selling land, and you sold that Snailham piece last year to——”
Peter tried to retrieve his blunder, but his mind was not for quick manœuvres and all he could do was to flush and turn guiltily silent. His father’s anger blazed at once.
“Yes—we sold land last year, and a good business we made of it, didn’t we! The bounder thought he’d bought my daughter into the bargain. He thought he’d got the pull of us because we were glad to sell. I tell you, I’ll sell no more of my land, if it puts such ideas into the heads of the rascals that buy it, if it makes all the beastly tenants and small-holders within thirty miles think they can come and slap me on the back and make love to my daughters and treat me as one of themselves. I’ll not sell another foot as long as I live. When I die, Sir, you may not get a penny, but you’ll get the biggest estate in East Sussex.”
Peter groaned.
§ 12
Gervase did not think it advisable to go near his family when the time came for him to leave Vinehall for Thunders Abbey. He would have liked to see his mother, but knew too well that the interview would end only in eau de Cologne and burnt feathers. Since he was exiled, it was best to accept his exile as a working principle and not go near the house. He knew that later on he would be given opportunities to see his parents, and by then time might have made them respectively less hostile and less hysterical.
So he wrote his mother a very affectionate letter, trying to explain what he was going to do, but not putting any great faith in her understanding him. He told her that he would be able to come and see her later, and sent his love to Doris and Peter and his father. He also wrote a line to Mary. His personal farewells were for Stella and Jenny only.
To Stella he said goodbye the day before he left. He found her making preparations for her own departure. She and her father were leaving for Canada as soon as Mrs. Peter Alard was through her confinement, which she expected in a couple of weeks. The practice had been sold, and the escape into a new life and a new country was no longer a possible resort of desperation but a fixed doom for her unwilling heart.
All she had been able to do during the last weeks had been to let her father act without interference. Her entire conflict had been set in withholding herself from last-moment entreaties to stay, from attempts at persuading him to withdraw from negotiations over the practice, from suggestions that their departure should be put off to the end of the summer. So negative had been her battle that she had never felt the thrill of combat—instead she felt utterly crushed and weary. She felt both dead and afraid ... the only moments in which she seemed to live were the moments in which she encountered Peter, passing him occasionally on the road or meeting him in a neighbour’s house. They were terrible moments of fiery concentrated life—she was glad afterwards to fall back into her stupor. She and he had had no more private conversations—she was able to pursue her negative battle to the extent of avoiding these—but his mere presence seemed to make alive a Stella Mount who was dying, whose death she sometimes thought of as a blessing and sometimes as a curse.
When she saw Gervase, so quiet and sweet-tempered and happy, she wondered if she would possibly be like that when her love for Peter was dead, as his for her was dead. But then his love for her was not dead—that was the whole point; like Enoch, it was translated—it was not, because God had taken it. As she looked into his peaceful eyes, her own filled with tears. She wondered if he had won his battle so quickly because it had been a slighter one than hers, or because he was better armed. Probably because of both. He was younger than she, his passions still slept in his austere, hard-working youth—and would probably awake only to find themselves reborn in his religious life—also, she realised that he might be naturally spiritual, whereas she had never been more than spiritually natural—a distinction. He was a man born to love God as she had been born to love men, and she knew that, in spite of all he said, he would have found his beloved sooner or later without any help of hers.
“Goodbye, dear Gervase,” she said, and pressed his hand.
“Goodbye, Stella”—surprisingly he kissed her, like another girl. She had not thought he would dare kiss her at all, and this warm, light, natural kiss—the kiss of a gentle friend—showed her a self-conquest more complete than any she had imagined—certainly than any she would ever know. She might be strong enough to deny her kisses to Peter, but she would never be able to give him the kiss of a friend.
§ 13
The next day Gervase drove off to Thunders Abbey, and went by way of Icklesham. It was a windless afternoon; the first scent of primroses hid in the hollows of the lanes, and the light of the sun, raking over the fields, was primrose-coloured on the grass. The browsing sheep and cattle cast long shadows, and the shadows of the leafless trees were clear, a delicate tracery at their roots.
As he drove up and down the steep, wheel-scarred lanes he watched familiar farms and spinneys go by as if it were for the last time. He knew that he would see them all many times after this, but somehow it would not be the same. Gervase Alard would be dead, as Jenny Alard was dead, and he felt as Jenny had felt the night before her wedding—glad and yet afraid. He remembered her words—“Can’t you understand?—It’s because I don’t feel big enough ... afraid.” He, too, felt afraid of his new life, and for the same reason—because he knew he was not big enough. Yet, in spite of her fear, Jenny had gone on, and now she was happy. And he was going on, and perhaps he would be happy, too.
He found her baking little cakes for tea. She tapped on the kitchen window when the lorry rattled into the yard, and he came in and took her in his arms, in spite of her protest that she was all over flour.
“Hullo, Gervase! this is splendid—I haven’t seen you for ages.”
She was wearing a blue gingham overall, and with her face flushed at the fire, and her background of brick, scrubbed wood and painted canisters, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than he could ever have imagined possible. She had grown plump, too, since her marriage, and her eyes had changed—they looked bright, yet half asleep, like a cat’s eyes.
“I’ve come to say goodbye, Jen. I’m off to Thunders.”
“When?—Tomorrow?”
“No—this very evening. I’ll go straight on from here.”
“Gervase!”
She looked sad—she understood him less than ever now.
“Father Lawrence wrote two days ago and said they were able to take me—and I’ve nothing to wait for. Father won’t see me. I’ve written to Mother—I thought it better than farewells in the flesh.”
“And Stella?”
“I’ve said goodbye to her.”
“Gervase, I know—I feel sure you’re only doing this because of her.”
“Well, I can’t show you now that you’re wrong, but I hope time will.”
“I hope it won’t show you that you’re wrong—when it’s too late. My dear——” she went up to him and put her hands on his shoulders—“My dear, you’re so young.”
“Don’t, Jen.”
“But it’s true. Why can’t you wait till you’ve seen more of life—till you’ve lived, in fact?”
“Because I don’t want to give God just the fag-end of myself, the leavings of what you call life. I want to give Him the best I’ve got—all my best years.”
“If Stella had accepted you, you would have married her, and we shouldn’t have heard anything about all this.”
“That’s true. But she refused me, and it was her refusal which showed me the life I was meant for. The fact that I loved Stella, and she would not have me, showed me that God does not want me to marry.”
He seemed to Jenny transparent and rather silly, like a child.
“But you’re only twenty-one,” she persisted gently, as she would with a child. “You’d have been sure to fall in love again and marry someone else.”
“And there’s no good telling you I’m sure I shouldn’t. However, my dear, I’m not going to prison on a life sentence—I can come out tomorrow if I don’t like it; and probably for a year or so the whole community will be trying to turn me out—they’re as much afraid of a mistake as you are.”
“I don’t trust them. They only too seldom get hold of men in your position.”
“My dear, don’t let’s talk any more about me. It’s making us quarrel, and probably this is the last time I shall see you for months. Tell me how you’ve been getting on. Has the County called yet?”
“Not so as you’d notice. As a matter of fact, the Fullers left cards the other day. Agney’s far enough off for it not to matter very much, and I think Mrs. Fuller has a reputation for being broad-minded which she’s had to live up to. But I’m getting to like Ben’s friends—I told you I should. There’s the Boormans of Frays Land and the Hatches of Old Place, and a very nice, well-educated bailiff at Roughter, who collects prints and old furniture. I see a lot of them—they’ve been here and I’ve been to their houses; and as Mrs. Godfrey and the girls keep to their own part of the house, I’ve got my hands full from morning to night, and don’t have much time to think about anything I may have lost.”
“It seems to suit you, anyhow. You look fine.”
“I feel splendid. Of course, I couldn’t do it if it wasn’t for Ben. I don’t pretend I’ve found everything in the life agreeable, after what I’ve been used to. But Ben makes everything worth doing and worth bearing.”
“And that’s how it is with me. Can’t you understand now, Jen?—I’ve got something, too, which makes it all worth doing and worth bearing—though I don’t pretend, any more than you do, that I expect to find everything in my life agreeable.”
“I’ll try to understand, Gervase; but I don’t suppose I’ll succeed—and you really can’t expect it of me.”
“All right, I won’t, just yet.” He picked his cap and gloves off the table—“I really must be going now.”
“Won’t you stay and have some tea? I’ve got over the failure stage in cakes—I really think these will be quite eatable.”
“No, thanks very much, I mustn’t stay. It’ll take Henry quite two hours to get to Brighton.”
She did not seem to hear him—she was listening. He could hear nothing, but a moment later a footstep sounded in the yard.
“There he is,” said Jenny.
She went out into the passage and closed the door behind her.
He was left alone in the big kitchen. The fire and the kettle hummed together to the ticking of the clock, and there was a soft, sweet smell of baking cakes. The last of the sunshine was spilling through the window on to the scrubbed, deal table, and over all the scene hung an impalpable atmosphere of comfort, warmth and peace. Outside in the passage he could hear the murmuring of a man’s and a woman’s voices.... His eyes suddenly filled with tears.
They were gone when Jenny came back into the room with Ben, who had evidently been told the reason for his brother-in-law’s visit, for he shook hands in clumsy silence.
“How do you do?” said Gervase—“and goodbye.”
Ben still said nothing. He neither approved nor understood young Alard’s ways. Religion was for him the ten commandments, Parson’s tithes, and harvest thanksgivings—anything further smacked of Chapel and the piety of small-holders. But he was too fond of Gervase to say openly what was in his heart, and as he was not used to saying anything else, he was driven into an awkward but well-meaning silence.
“I’m glad you’re taking Henry with you,” said Jenny, attempting lightness—“It would have been dreadful if you’d had to leave him behind.”
“Yes—‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed’ wouldn’t have been in it. But I’m taking him as my dowry. They’ll find some use for him at Thunders—he’s got at least one cylinder working. If they hadn’t wanted him I’d have given him to Ben—just to encourage him to start machinery on the farm.”
“I’d sooner keep my horses, thank you,” said Ben, relieved at having something to say at last. “Give me a horse-ploughed field, even if it does take twice the labour.”
“But you’ll be getting a tractor soon, won’t you? That’s another idea altogether, and you’ll never find horses to beat that.”
Thus talking of machinery the three of them went to the door, and said goodbye under cover of argument.
“You’ll see me again before long,” cried Gervase, as he drove off.
“Will you be able to write to us?”
“Of course I will—look out for a letter in a day or two.”
With hideous grindings, explosions and plaints, the lorry went off down the drive. As it disappeared between the hedgerows, Jenny felt her heart contract in a pang of helpless pity.
“Oh, Ben ... he’s so young—and he’s never had anything.”
She would have cried, but her husband’s arm slipped round her, drawing her back into the darkening house.
§ 14
Jenny had been candid with Gervase in her account of herself. She was happy—supremely so—but there was much that would have been difficult were it not for the love which “made everything worth doing and worth bearing.” She had nothing to complain of in Ben himself. He was after marriage the same as he had been before it—gentle, homely, simple and upright, with a streak of instinctive refinement which compensated for any lack of stress on the physical cleanliness which was the god of her former tribe. It is true that he expected more of her than Jim Parish, for instance, would have done. The sight of Jenny rising at half-past six to light the kitchen fire, cooking the breakfast, and doing all the housework with the help of one small girl, did not strike him as the act of wifely devotion and Spartan virtue that it seemed to her and would have seemed to Jim. It was what the women of his experience did invariably, and with a certain naïve thickheadedness he had not expected Jenny, taken from a home of eight o’clock risings, to be different. But in all other ways he was considerate—ways in which the men of her class would most probably not have considered her; and she soon became used to the physical labour of her days. Indeed, after the first surprise at his attitude, she realised that anything else would have brought an atmosphere of unreality into the life which she loved because it was so genuine. Farmers’ wives—even prosperous farmers’ wives—did not lie in bed till eight, or sit idle while the servants worked; and Jenny was now a farmer’s wife—Mrs. Ben Godfrey of Fourhouses—with her place to keep clean, her husband and her husband’s men to feed, her dairy and her poultry to attend to.
But though she loved Ben, and loved working for him, there were other things that were hard, and she was too clear-headed not to acknowledge the difficulties she had chosen. She often longed to be alone with her husband, instead of having to share him with his mother and sisters. According to yeoman custom, his wife had been brought into his home, which was also his family’s home, and she must take what she found there. Jenny realised that she might have been worse off—she was genuinely fond of Mrs. Godfrey and Lily and Jane, and their separate quarters gave her a privacy and a freedom she would not have had on many farms—but she would have been less sensitive to the gulf between her new life and the old if she had been alone with Ben. His women, with their constant absorption in housework—making it not so much a duty to be done and then forgotten as a religion pervading the whole life—with their arbitrary standards of decorum, and their total lack of interest in any mental processes—often begot in her revolt and weariness, especially when her husband was much away. She had not known till then how much she depended on stray discussions of books and politics, on the interchange of abstract and general ideas. Ben himself could give her these stimulations, for the war had enlarged his education, and his love for her made him eager to meet her on the ground she chose. But his work often took him into the fields soon after dawn, and he would not be privately hers again till night, for the meals at Fourhouses were communal and democratic; not only Mrs. Godfrey and her daughters, but the stockman, the cow-man, the carter and the ploughboys sat down to table with the master.
Moreover, after a month or two, she began to feel her estrangement from her people. She did not miss her old acquaintances among the county families, but she felt the silence of her home more than she would ever have imagined possible. No one from Conster—her father or mother or Doris—had come near her or sent her a word. There had been the same silence up at Starvecrow which surprised her more, for she and Vera had always been friends—though of course Vera had her own special preoccupations now. Rose had called, but evidently with a view to replenishing her stores of gossip for Leasan tea-parties, and Jenny had done all she could to discourage another visit. Mary generally came over from Hastings once a week, but hers were only the visits of a fellow-exile.
In her heart, the estrangement which Jenny felt the most was between herself and Peter. She had not expected such treatment from him. She had expected anger and disappointment, certainly, a stormy interview, perhaps, but not this blank. Sometimes she told herself he was anxious about Vera, and that his own troubles had combined with her misbehaviour to keep him away. She forced herself to patience, hoping uncertainly that the fortunate birth of an heir would bring old Peter to a better frame of mind.
Meanwhile, she was reviving her friendship with Mary, or rather was building up a new one, for in old times she had felt a little afraid of her elegant, aloof sister. She was not afraid of Mary now—indeed, from the vantage of her own happy establishment she almost pitied this woman who had left so much behind her in dark places.
Mary liked Ben—but her temperament had set her at a great distance from his homely concreteness. Though she stood by her sister in her adventure, she evidently could not think “what Jenny saw in him,” and she was openly full of plans for his improvement and education.
“Why don’t you lift him up to your level instead of stooping to his? You could easily do it. He’s deeply in love with you, and, in my opinion, very much above his own way of life. Fourhouses is a good estate and he’s got plenty of money to improve it—with a little trouble he could make it into a country house and himself into a small squire.”
“Thanks,” said Jenny—“that’s what I’ve just escaped from—country houses and squires—and I don’t want to start the whole thing over again. Why should Ben try to make himself a squire, when the squires are dying out all over the country, and their estates are being broken up and sold back to the people they used to belong to?”
“Jenny, you talk like a radical!—‘God gave the land to the people’ and all that.”
“My husband’s a vice-president of the Conservative Club. It isn’t for any political reasons that I don’t want to fight my way back into the county. It’s simply that I’m sick of two things—struggle and pretence. Situated as I am, I’ve got neither—if I tried to keep what I gave up when I married Ben, I’d have both.”
“It’s all very well for you to talk like this now—when everything’s new. Even I know what the first months of marriage can be like.... But later on, when things have sobered down, you’ll feel different—you’ll want to see some of your old friends again, and wish you hadn’t shut them out.”
“If you mean the Parishes and the Hursts and the Wades and all that lot, nothing I could ever do would make them my friends again. You see, they’re friends of Father’s, and, considering his attitude towards my marriage—which would be the same whatever I did to ‘raise’ myself—they can never be friends of mine. It isn’t as if I’d moved thirty miles off and had a new sort of ‘county’ to visit me. I’m in the middle of the old crowd, and they can never be friendly with me without offending my people. No, I must be content with Ben’s friends—if I tried to ‘improve’ him we’d lose those, too, and then I’d have nobody.”
“I daresay you’re right, my dear—you sound practical, anyway. And I’ve no right to teach anyone how to arrange their lives.... It’s queer, isn’t it, Jen? I took, generally speaking, no risks when I married. I married a man I loved, a man of my own class, whom my people approved of—and look at me now. You, on the other hand, have taken every imaginable risk—a runaway match, a different class, and the family curse....”
“You’ll have to look at me twelve years hence to compare me with you.”
“I think you’re going to be all right, though—even if you don’t take my advice.”
“I’m sure I shall be all right. You see, I’m doing everything with my eyes open. You didn’t have your eyes open, Mary.”
“I know I didn’t. Very few women do. Most brides are like newborn kittens with their eyes shut.”
“Are you happy now?”
It was the first time she had dared ask the question. Mary hesitated—
“Yes, I suppose I am happy. I have enough to live on, I have my friends—I travel about, and see places and people.”
“Have you ever regretted that you didn’t marry Charles?”
“Regretted! Good Lord, no! The very opposite. I didn’t love him in that way, and we’d both have been wretched. Poor old dear! I’m glad I’d strength enough to spare him that, though I spared him nothing else....”
“Do you ever see him now?”
“Sometimes. He’s married, you know—a very young thing, who doesn’t like me too much. I didn’t expect him to marry, but I believe he’s happy. I hear that Julian is happy, too—he has two little boys and a baby girl. So I haven’t really done either of my men much harm.”
“No—it’s you who’ve suffered the harm. Why haven’t you married again, Mary? I’ve always expected you to.”
Her sister shook her head.
“I can’t—there’s something in me lacking for that. I can’t explain, and it sounds an extraordinary thing to say, but I feel as if I’d left it with Julian. I don’t mean that I still love him or any nonsense like that—I hadn’t loved him for a year before I left him ... but somehow one doesn’t get rid of a husband as easily as the divorce-courts and the newspapers seem to suppose.”
“If you’d married again you’d have forgotten Julian.”
“No, I shouldn’t, and I should have made another man unhappy—because of what’s lacking in me. I know there are lots of women who can go from the church to the divorce court and from the divorce court to the registrar’s, and leave nothing behind them in any of these places. But I’m not like that—I left my love with Julian and my pride with Charles. Sometimes I feel that if only I’d had the strength to stick to Julian a little longer, we’d have weathered things through—I’d have got back what I’d lost, and all this wouldn’t have happened. But it’s waste of time to think of that now.... Don’t worry about me, Jen. I’m happy in my own way—though it may not be yours, or many women’s, for that matter. I’ve just managed to be strong enough not to spoil Charles’s life—not to drag him down—so I’ve got one good memory.... And I’m free—that means more to me than perhaps you can realise—and I enjoy life as a spectator. I’ve suffered enough as an actor on the stage, and now I’m just beginning to feel comfortable in the stalls.”
“Don’t,” said Jenny.
She could not bear any more—this was worse than Gervase. To have spent all the treasure of life on dust and wind was even worse than to give up that treasure unspent. She found the tears running out of her eyes as she put her arms round Mary—softness of furs and sweetness of violets, and in the midst of them a sister who was half doll and half ghost.
§ 15
Towards the end of March, Peter’s daughter was born. He bore the disappointment better than anyone had expected. But lately it had not seemed to him to matter very much whether the child were a boy or a girl. His horizons were closing in upon him—they had even shut out his own inheritance, with the new powers and freedoms it would bring, and he could not look so far ahead as the prospects of his heir. Even Gervase’s defection had not stirred him long. In his first shock of outrage and disgust he had motored over to Thunders Abbey and tried to persuade his brother to come back with him, but finding him obdurate, his emotions had collapsed into a contempt which was queerly mixed with envy. If Gervase preferred these debased states of life—first in a garage and then in a monastery—to the decencies of his position as an Alard, then let him have what he wanted. It was something to know what one wanted and take it unafraid. Gervase might be a traitor, but he was not a fool.
So Peter heard unmoved Dr. Mount’s announcement that a little girl had been born, and only a trifle less unmoved received the woolly bundle of his little daughter into his arms. He did not, as some men, awake to a new sense of fatherhood at the touch of his first-born. His failure as a husband seemed to affect him as a father. He did not ask himself what he would have felt if the child had been a boy. The only question in his heart was what he would have felt if it had been Stella’s child ... but that was a useless question.
Vera was secretly glad to have a girl. She had always wanted a daughter, and lately, as her mind had detached itself more and more from her husband’s wishes, the want had become anxious. A boy she always pictured as a second Peter—heavy, obstinate, his heart set on things she did not care about—but a girl would be a companion, and her own. There would be, she felt, some chance of her growing up like her mother and sharing her mother’s adventures in intellect and beauty; also, in that new florescence of her race which had accompanied her pregnancy, she felt that her daughter would be truly a daughter of Abraham, whereas her son would be born into a public-school tradition and the heirship of a big estate—a child of the Goyim. So she stretched out her arms gladly when the baby girl was put into them, and as she looked down into the mysterious, ancient little face of the newborn, her heart leapt with joy and pride to see the tokens of her blood already discernible, not so much in its later Hebraic characteristics as in some general oriental quality, older than Abraham.
“There’s nothing of the Goy about her, is there?” she said to her mother, who had come to be with her in her confinement.
“No, indeed, there’s not. She takes after us. It’s curious how they nearly always do in a mixed marriage.”
But, in the midst of her own gratification, Vera was glad to find that her husband was not bitterly disappointed. Poor old Peter! He had been estranged from her, she knew, and had wanted to marry the Mount woman, but she could forgive him in the triumph of her recovery. She had the child, and was rapidly getting well. When she was herself again she would win him back. She knew how ... it never failed.
In her presence Peter made his disappointment seem even less than it really was. The sight of her lying there in loveliness both opulent and exhausted—knowing vaguely what she had suffered and accepted—stirred in him a strange, admiring pity which forbade an unthankful word. He bore no resentment against her now. It was not her fault that she stood between him and Stella. Probably he had treated her badly—she might have suffered nearly as much as he.... And he was glad she had her reward.
But even when looking tenderly down on her, speaking tenderly to her, he could not picture himself going on with their marriage again. When his family and acquaintance tried to cheer him up for the disappointment of having a girl, they always said, “But it’s only the first, Peter...” “The first never really matters....” and all the time he was feeling that there could not be another. It was a preposterous feeling, he knew, for, after Gervase’s defection, it was imperative that he should have an heir; and men are not like women in these things. He had never had Stella—he could never have Stella. Why should he feel this aversion from doing his duty as a husband and an Alard? He did not know—but he felt it, almost to shrinking. He felt that his marriage was at an end—broken and yet binding—for Stella could not take him after divorce any more than she could take him without it. And everyone said “It’s only the first”.... “It’s just as well for the girl to come first—to be the oldest.”...
A few days after the baby’s birth Vera had a letter from Jenny, congratulating her and sending her love to Peter. She did not ask her brother to come over and see her, but Peter guessed what was behind her message. In the loneliness of those first days when the house seemed full of women and affairs from which he was shut out, he had a longing to go over to Fourhouses, and see Jenny and be friends again. But he was held back, partly by a feeling of awkwardness, a sense of the explanations and reproaches his visit would involve, partly by a remaining stiffness against her treachery, and most of all by a dull stirring sense of envy—the same as, though more accountable than, the envy he had felt for Gervase. Here again was someone who knew what she wanted and had got it, whom the family had not bound fast and swallowed up—and the worst of it all was that, unlike Gervase, she had got what Peter wanted, too. In vain he told himself that she could never be happy with Godfrey, could never adapt herself to the life she had chosen, that her plunge would be no more justified than his withdrawal. He dared not go near Fourhouses all the same.
§ 16
The hopes on which the baby’s birth seemed to have fallen heaviest were Sir John’s. The old man had had none of Peter’s uncertainty or anxiety before the event—he had felt sure the child would be a boy. The news that it was a girl had been a terrible shock, and though it had not, as was feared at first, brought on another seizure, it was soon seen to have increased the nervous unsteadiness of his constitution. He alone, of all the Alards, did not join in the cry of “This is the first.” First or last, it was probably the only grandchild he would live to see, and he expressed his disappointment with the candid selfishness of old age.
“Here have I been waiting for a boy—counting on a boy—and it’s a girl after all. What good’s a girl to us? We’ve got plenty of girls—or those who were once girls”—and he glared at Doris—“all they do is either to disgrace us in the divorce-courts, marry the sweep, or turn into bad-tempered old maids. We’ve got enough girls. It’s a boy we want—with that Gervase gone off to be a monk. I’ve been badly served by my children.”
“But, Father, it wasn’t Peter’s fault,” urged Doris unskilfully.
“Wasn’t it, Ma’am? You do know a lot—more than an unmarried woman ought to know about such things. I believe you even know that the baby wasn’t found under a gooseberry bush.”
“Oh, Father, don’t talk in such a dreadful way—He’s really getting quite awful,” she said as she let Peter out—“I sometimes think there’s something wrong with his brain.”
“There probably is,” said Peter.
Indeed, of late Sir John had grown alarmingly eccentric. His love of rule had passed beyond the administration of his estate, and showed itself in a dozen ways of petty dominion. He seemed resolved to avenge his authority over the three rebellious children on the two who had remained obedient. Not only did he put up a forest of forbidding notices over his estate, to keep out the general public, which had hitherto had free entrance to most of his fields and woods, but he forbade his own children to use certain paths. He would not let Peter come by the field way from Starvecrow, but insisted on his going round by the road. He would stop Doris on the threshold of an afternoon’s calling, and compel her to sit and read to him, by choice books which he calculated to offend her old-maidish susceptibilities. He found Doris better game than Peter, for whereas the son remained silent under his kicks, Doris never failed to give him all the fun he wanted in the way of protests, arguments, laments and tears. But from both he obtained obedience, through their dread of exciting him and bringing on another stroke.
His warfare was less open with his wife. He attacked her indirectly through the servants, who were always giving notice owing to his intimidation. Even Wills had once distantly informed his mistress that since Sir John did not seem to appreciate his services he might soon have to consider the advisability of transferring them elsewhere. Appleby had actually given notice, after a mysterious motor drive, from which Sir John had returned on foot—but had been persuaded by Peter to reconsider it and stay on. The female staff was in a state of perpetual motion. No cook would stand her master’s comments on her performances, no housemaid endure his constant bullying and bell-ringing. He had perversely moved into a top-floor bedroom, so as to be out of reach of his wife and Speller, who disliked stairs. Here he would make tea at five o’clock every morning with water from his hot-water bottle boiled up on a spirit lamp. This procedure filled Lady Alard with a peculiar horror when she discovered it; indeed, from her remarks it would appear that all her husband’s other misdoings were negligible in comparison.