The lonely plough

In the road, Dandy came to halt, dismayed.

“It’s too late, now, for the rest of the Tram-Party, and there’s all that food hurrying to meet them! Miss Lancaster, please come and help to eat it.”

“The boy, too,” Hamer added. He often called Lancaster “the boy,” with a quaint, protective accent. “We’ll catch it from Mother if you don’t lend a hand, giving her all that trouble for nothing. Don’t you hark to Dandy Anne—the Tram-Party’s only her nonsense. She wanted to give one or two down-in-the-mouth folk a bit of a feed, but they’ll have to have their particular wire-in another night. You’ll come, won’t you now? We’ll send you back in the car.”

Lancaster hesitated, his business-conscience pricking, but his aunt’s declaration that she could not remember whether she had ordered tinned sardines, or tongue, or both, or neither, for their evening meal, did not tend to waken his homing instinct, and he found himself following up the Lane, swinging the lantern over Dandy’s path. It was black, as Harriet had prophesied. In the shifting light the hedges looked huge and dense, climbing to where their sombre tops scarred the fainter dark of the starless heaven, and every curve and turn loomed a barrier impenetrable as the Sleeping Beauty’s Forest. The dream-traps yawned emptily, with witless mouths and vacant eyes.

“Will Harriet really stand, do you think?” Dandy asked, keeping with difficulty in the middle of the narrow road, so subtly were track and hedge blended by the Northern night. “It was only a joke, wasn’t it?”

“Well, it started as a joke, of course, but I shouldn’t wonder if it didn’t end there. It would be an innovation, just here, but there must always be pioneers, and the lot may have fallen to Harriet. She’s young, but she’s a better man than Thorne, not only in position, but in business and brain. I shouldn’t be surprised if she does have a shot at it. You see, her grandfather’s name still carries weight, and in this county half of us run our reputations on those of our forbears.”

“That’s true enough!” Dandy laughed. “Why, only the other day, when we were going over Bluecaster, I heard you say to the housekeeper: ‘Tell me who her mother was, and I’ll know what she is!’ It all comes back to the same thing.”

“There’s a lot of reason in it, though, don’t you think? You’ll hear the very man who breeds prize-dogs and specialises in orchids insist that all human beings are equal. He’ll sniff at a cross-bred mongrel and sneer at a dandelion, but he’ll tell you straight that he himself is as good as the bluest blood and the finest stock, though he may be sprung from a collier’s cot or twenty nameless mixed strains. ’Tisn’t common sense, to my thinking! There is no good or evil done, (fine thoughts put into shape or base ones grown secretly,) but blossoms again somehow in later lives. We’ve got to fight our own way, but there’s both help and binding from those gone before.”

“But you—surely you stand alone?”

They were well on towards Watters by now, and the rhythmic dance of the light had broken over one of the gaps, catching a sudden reflection from clean steel. They stopped to look.

It was only a plough, flung on its side in the hedge, waiting the morrow and renewal of toil. The bright share told that it had been in use that day, and Lanty knew that, near it in the dark, the long, clean furrows curved up over the hill. It seemed a small, inadequate tool for its great work; simple, too, as are all enduring things; yet it had the whole of history behind it.

“Yes, I suppose I do,” he said at last. “We all stand alone, if it comes to that. We drive our furrow single-handed, out of the dark into the dark, though we’ve got to reckon with the soil that others have left, just as others must reckon with our leavings after us. But it’s our job while we’re on to it, all the same. It’s our job while the light lasts, to make the best of it we can. It’s always one man’s hand on the lonely plough.”

For a long moment they stood silent, ringed round by the night, in closer communion than they had ever found themselves. Strange talk still and new was this, but she did not shrink from it, now; and he, opening his heart, did not find it shuttered by an alien hand. Together they looked through the dim Gate, so near that, when he stooped his head to the lantern, he felt her hair against his face.

Calls for help came out of the vast beyond, and they took guiltily to pursuit, to find Helwise and Hamer marooned up a blind alley in the swamping sea of the dark, and, as they set them right again, a new elf-candle appeared from the opposite direction, having Wiggie somewhere in its vicinity. He was just back from an engagement in town, and in the glowing hall at Watters looked shockingly thin and ill, though excellently clothed and brushed, making Lancaster conscious of muddy boots and the general wear of a busy day. He began to have his favourite complaint of feeling old, and when Dandy, after a miracle-change into something softly pink, danced in to dinner on the singer’s arm, the lightly-welded link of the Lane snapped as lightly, leaving her farther than before.

Wiggie had brought her from town an infinite variety of excitements, new books, new music, even new fashions, described after his own manner. There was also an umbrella-thing meant especially for country use—so they had told him in London; indeed, they had been quite feverish about it. You could sit on it when you went shooting or fishing or mushrooming or marketing on Saturday, and it had buttoned pockets for carrying anything from grouse to reels of cotton, and collapsible spokes that could be adjusted to cover any part of a hat, and a purse and a pocket-handkerchief and a plate with the owner’s name. He had practised with it in the train, but he had been dreadfully stupid and allowed it to take steck in the door, so that, when the train stopped, none of the ordinary umbrella-people inside could get out, and a very cross inspector on the platform couldn’t get in. However, the collapsible spokes had collapsed before they were carried on to Carlisle, and he was quite sure that Dandy would manage them in a few lessons. Dandy was quite certain of it, and could scarcely live through the enormous Tram-Dinner in her anxiety to try. It was a first-class Highways-and-Hedges Dinner; and now that Wiggie had turned up, they were only one or two short, after all.

He was immensely thrilled about Harriet, and full of hope that the “joke” would prove serious. He hadn’t another engagement for—oh, next door to never!—except, of course, “Elijah” in Bluecaster—and would love to run round and help if they would let him stay so long. His joyousness set Dandy shining like a clear light on gems, bringing home to Lancaster how different she was with himself. Probably he seemed old and staid to her, certainly dull and one-sided. Wigmore’s was her natural atmosphere. Wiggie could ring every pretty change on her as easily as he rippled the vocal octave, but the elder man had no key to her moods. The sympathy in the Lane had been shallow and fleeting. Not here—not here was the making of his “silly home”!

He said little during the evening, and, in the car, showed scant enthusiasm for his aunt’s surprise-packet from town—a large pot pug, with a chocolate-box interior and an almanac on his chest. Wiggie loved people’s little weaknesses, and saw no reason for refusing to pander to them. He did it charmingly enough, too, but, after all, it wasn’t Wiggie who had to live with the pot dogs.

Helwise was in ecstasies over the luxurious car, and more than once nearly wrecked them all by switching on the electric light just as the unhappy chauffeur rounded a bend. She thought Lancelot might see his way to giving up his horse and buying a motor. Bluecaster would help. Look what he had done about the bath!

Lanty answered unkindly that if ever he did own a car, it would certainly not be at Bluecaster’s expense, and that he preferred the old gee to all the petrol-puffers in creation; and then felt ashamed when she sighed and was hurt. No doubt he did sound cross and discourteous after Wiggie’s chocolate-box consideration, just as in all probability he had seemed countrified and slow beside the singer’s wit and finish. That was the worst of these pandering sympathisers! They showed you up as a very bad second, though you might really be carrying a big load quite respectably. Still, he need not have snubbed Helwise so brutally. It was partly Bluecaster’s own fault that she looked upon him less as an employer than as a free emporium and family asset. He could see him buying her the car without a murmur. He had to admit, too, that the padded elegance of the limousine fitted her to a nicety, just as the luxury of Watters seemed her natural setting. There was no doubt you couldn’t expect the best of people out of their special environment—certainly not weak creatures like Helwise, formed for others to pity and sustain.

Nevertheless, his philosophy did little to soothe him on arrival at their own cheerless dwelling. The fires were all out, of course, and they were met by a wandering odour of kippered herring not to be located anywhere, certainly not in the burnt slices of chilly ham congealed on the dining-room table. He found a telephone-message from the House ingeniously concealed in the barometer, and could have sworn that there was a fresh scratch on the maltreated wall. He waited while Helwise introduced the new pug to the old collection, and then requested a candle for his empty stick. His nightly tour discovered bolts unshot, gases burning and taps half-turned, not to speak of a general back-premises condition sufficient to set a fastidious taste hunger-striking for weeks. And so upstairs with the rocking candle to his cold bedroom, and had barely shut his door before Helwise called him to unhook her gown. There was only carbolic soap to wash with, and the kitchen fire had long ago left the cylinder in the lurch. Probably the flue wanted cleaning, anyhow. He thought of the bathroom at Watters, with its hot rails and shining taps, and hated himself for even remembering them. They reminded him, however, that there offered to be a sharp frost in the early hours, and he betook himself to an icy attic to see that a certain pipe was properly wrapped. Finally, to a lumpy bed with wandering sheets. Sleep brought oblivion, but no magic. He did not dream, as Dandy, of swung lanterns in a lover’s lane.

But before that dream-flower blossomed, she asked Hamer whether he really meant to back Harriet’s Attempt. She was curled on the hearth at his knee, with her mother nodding asleep at one side, and Wiggie’s overbright eyes on the other. Hamer took his cigar from his mouth, and pressed her head against him before replying.

“I’ll let it lie till morning,” he said thoughtfully, “and then, if it doesn’t seem too much of a forlorn hope, I’ll run over and set her going. She won’t need overmuch persuasion! I’m new, of course, but I can do a bit of talking and getting folks interested. She’s well enough known, and there’s a good many that think a lot of her judgment. They’ll laugh, at first, but I shouldn’t wonder if she went through, and I don’t mind laying that they’ll find her pretty useful. She’s not the ordinary woman. She looks at things like a man, and she’s get-up-and-git enough to run a train. She wants more outlet, too, and Fate owes her more than a bit for that halma-board of a father, especially as all the elections in the kingdom will never get her the one big thing——”

He stopped abruptly. Wiggie was looking at him.

“Tramming again, old dear?” Dandy put up her hand to meet his. “It’s rather a dangerous experiment, playing Providence in your wholesale fashion. And what do you know about Harriet’s ‘one big thing’?”

“I was only talking. Probably I’m right out of it, but one just wonders. Hadn’t you and Mother better be getting off to bed?”

But when they had taken his advice, and Wigmore had closed the door behind them, Hamer got up slowly and knocked his ash into the fire, a sorrowful expression on his handsome face.

“Some have Paradise and some Elections,” he said, not looking at Wiggie, collapsed now like a tired child in his chair. “And the others—what have the others got, Cyril, my boy?”

“Dead candles and a tune in the throat!” Wiggie answered, with closed eyes, and began to croon—

Good Hamer sighed.