The lonely plough

As it happened, Harriet’s Attempt seized the Skirts of Happy Chance exactly at the right moment. Election fever had been rampant during the last six weeks, setting everybody canvassing his neighbour with delirious zeal. First, a county by-election had been rushed through in a glorious fourteen days of crowded life, taking the eye of the whole country by the fact that it was fought upon a pioneer question of national importance. Then the County Council reorganisation came on, loosing all the grinders at each other’s throats; and when that had passed, leaving the different divisions to settle down for the next three years, the District and Parish Councils followed. All sorts of unaccountable hatreds and differences were abroad, as well as still stranger enthusiasms for individuals who had not counted a snap of the fingers before. It was amazing how blood bubbled and boiled for or against some harmless person whose existence had hitherto mattered about once in a blue moon. Both men and women made each election a question of personal insult or exaltation, and said so as often and as loudly as possible; while the grinders ran from pillar to post, setting everybody by the ears, and talking loudest of all.

Into this whirlpool was flung the announcement of Harriet’s candidature as Rural District Councillor for Bluecaster. The district was still seething, but the strain was beginning to tell, and its enthusiasm showed signs of needing a fillip. Harriet gave it this fillip. The older generation was scandalised, the younger amused or contemptuous; while the earnest ladies who sit on Boarding-out and School Committees pronounced it publicly to be horrid presumption, and privately wished that they had thought of doing it themselves. In her own neighbourhood, however, when the first shock was over, she soon began to find supporters. Thorne was disliked by most outside his own peculiar, gullible clan. The story of the milk-fracas soon got round, bringing the farmers solidly to Harriet’s defence. Wild Duck milk needed no bush, and though Thorne’s slummites had a pleasant habit of shrieking “Milk O!” after his opponent, they did not succeed in bringing the blush of shame to the Knewstubb cheek of innocence. Ratepayers of standing signed her nomination, and all went merry as a marriage-bell. And in his thin, deceitful-looking, wedge-shaped boots, Ollivant Thorne shook.

Harriet did not do very much canvassing on her own account. She hadn’t the right grinding touch, which is either very bluff and “Come-along-be-a-good-dog!”-ish, or silkily insidious and appealing. Her request for a vote was apt to sound more like a County Court judgment, so she prudently left the work to her backers. Wiggie said little, but then Wiggie’s very presence smoothed the wrinkles out of the atmosphere and demoralised resistance; and Dandy sat behind, ready to hand out fresh suggestions when Hamer came to a halt. As for Stubbs, he had but one argument, the inevitable “In the family. Always in the family!” but it carried weight; and it seemed as if, in reminding others of the family honour, he was reminded of his own, for he certainly pulled himself together during this fateful time. But still it was Hamer who was the real canvassing success. These local elections are carried largely on the women, and Hamer went down with the women all the way. He turned up each evening at Wild Duck with his reports, triumphant over the certainties, miserable about the failures, and worried to death over the doubtfuls.

Wiggie often came with him, and on the first occasion was so delighted with Harriet’s dwelling that he couldn’t be made to attend to business. Wild Duck captured him from the start. While Hamer waved a pencil over the lists, he wandered round the room, worshipping the silhouette and the carriage-whip and the beer-barrel, and was positively childish about the clover-leaf into which Grandfather Knewstubb had squeezed the Lord’s Prayer. He sank happily into the comfortable rocker pulled close to the glowing bars, cuddling the kitten in his arm, and watched the colours floating in the lustres until Harriet’s voice in the background—“Oh, he’s no good! Let him slack”—brought him to his feet as if a live coal had sprung at him. She looked a trifle ashamed at his earnest apology, and, after a minute or two, muttered a word of excuse and went to fetch him a glass of new milk from the dairy; and when, on the following day, she found him at the gate with a message, she actually condescended to show him round the buildings. He looked regretfully behind him as he turned back into the road.

“I’ve always known there was a place like this somewhere,” he said, “ever since I was top angel in St. Somebody-Something’s choir, but I hardly believed I should ever really find it. It’s so beautifully restful, it almost makes me glad to be tired. I love Watters, and it’s very patient with me, but after all it only kind of shakes hands, whereas Wild Duck opens its arms and takes you on its knee. You won’t sell it, I suppose? You should have what you wanted for it. You’re a very honest person, I know. I wouldn’t haggle a farthing.”

“It’s Bluecaster property,” Harriet explained, “though I mean to buy it in the long run, if I can get his lordship to let me have it, and if Lanty doesn’t want too thieving a price. When my grandfather died, we had to turn out of the old place, and I took Wild Duck on the money he left me, though everybody said I’d have had enough in a year. But I haven’t; and I wouldn’t go back, not if I was paid! I’m sticking to the farm all right, so I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere as long as I’m over sod.”

Wiggie went a little further, looking sadder than ever.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean—I’m sorry we can’t both have it.” And as he vanished under the hedge, the wistful voice finished its speech—

“I believe I could get well here. I’m sorry.”

A surprising touch of concern startled Harriet as she heard him, prompting her to call him back to the rocker and the kitten; but she shook it off with impatient disgust. He suffered from nerves—anybody could see that. He lived too much in stuffy rooms and microbe-ridden railway-carriages, and ate all the poisonous messes they give you in towns. It was doubtful, indeed, whether he got enough to eat at all. His clothes looked prosperous, but he was as thin as a match; you could hardly see him sideways. These artist-people had to make a show, so probably he economised in food. No doubt he smoked excessively to make up for it—that was why he coughed and always looked tired. He was thoroughly under condition altogether, out of training and in a bad way generally. What he wanted was a stiff walk and a run with the bassets and ten miles or so on a push-bike; new milk, good butcher’s meat, and one pipe a week—poor, weedy rotter! Harriet drew up her own splendidly-working collection of organisms, and went within to swing dumb-bells.

And all the way home the voice repeated—as if it simply couldn’t get away from it: “I believe I could get well there. I do believe I could! I’m very sorry.”

Bluecaster affairs were keeping Lanty very busy just at this time, sending him to London more than once, and otherwise pinning him to his office, so that the electorate saw little of him and his particular friends less. His clerk, a young person of enthusiasms, with a vivid admiration for everything Blue—and Lancastrian, scamped his meal-hours in order to put in a little electioneering on his own, but he generally returned convinced that he had risked his digestion for nothing. The men he interviewed assured him that as long as a Lancaster was putting up he could be certain of their word. Happen they’d vote for Miss Harriet as well—Mr. Shaw (him over at Watters) seemed to think they ought to be having her on, and they weren’t saying but she’d her head set straight enough on her shoulders for a lass, and they’d all thought a deal of the old man, and pity there weren’t a few more like him—but Mr. Lancaster anyhow could be sure of their cross when the time came—ay, that he could! But he never got as far as the women, and indeed he never worried about them at all. The women always voted for Lanty, because he was young and unmarried. The clerk had a penchant for the study of human nature, and rather fancied he knew all about women—at least, politically. Perhaps he did; but straws may blow different ways in the same wind.

The poll opened on a Monday at twelve, but long before that hour the Watters cars—the limousine, driven by the chauffeur, and Dandy’s little Delage cheeping like a scurrying chick behind Hamer in the touring Austin—were running through the ring of villages. They made quite an effective little procession, carrying Stubbs’ old racing colours flying from the screens, and wonderful placards devised by Hamer: “Wild Duck Wins!” “Vote for the Old Stock!” “Help for Harriet!” etc. The candidate, rolling down the hill in the float five minutes after noon, with no more ostentation than lay in shining harness in front of her and a well-trimmed Stubbs at her side, frowned a little at the flaunting gaiety before the booth; but objection was impossible in face of Hamer’s joyful excitement as he hurried to her with outstretched hand. Thorne’s thin, furtive countenance could be seen peering round the doorpost for the children he had stationed at the gate with milkcans labelled “Watered Wild Duck.” He was puzzled to know why the war-cry arranged for Harriet’s arrival had missed fire, but the reason was not far to seek. On the front seat of the limousine sat Grumphy, very black and fat and swathed in ribbon, with a collar of snowdrops round his neck and a red rose nodding over his ear, smiling eternally at the wondering childish faces below.

Inside the booth the polling-clerk greeted the lady-farmer with polite amusement tinged with admiration, and the early voters, brought in by the Watters contingent, shook her warmly by the hand. Even Thorne offered her the same pledge of goodwill, and she returned it brusquely.

“I doubt you’ll be too much for me, Miss Harriet!” he remarked, with his thin smile. “You’re so popular, and those friends of yours have been working terribly hard. I’ve no cars to fetch folks along to vote for me, so I must just depend on a little kindly feeling and any service I may have done the district in all these years. That may carry me a bit of the way, but I fear it won’t go far against motors and ribbons!”

“Thorne’s funking you—that’s a sure thing!” Hamer observed outside. “He’s thinking he’s out of the game from the start. Lancaster’s certain to go through—everybody says that—so the Creeping Jesus has a very thin chance, I’m afraid. Now, Kavanagh, off you get to Stone Riggs for those almshouse folk—four of ’em, mind now! Dandy Anne, the Sunflatts district’s yours; you know how we mapped it out. I’ll run over to Halfrebeck for that old chap I couldn’t get a promise from. It might help a bit, Harriet, if you came along, too. It’s only about a mile.”

Wiggie, who was wearing her colours in his buttonhole, gave her his seat behind the driver, and hopped in behind; and, as they slid over the hill, found himself observing the candidate from a fresh mental standpoint. There was something new about Harriet, to-day, that wasn’t to be accounted for by the dark-gray tailor-made and trim suède hat. The impression of strength, almost of rough power, already familiar, was now fused with a more courteous dignity and a nervous self-possession very different from her usual sledge-hammer assurance. Memory had leaped upon her from under a snapped lock, showing her similar crises in her grandfather’s career. Just so had he said this, done the other, looked and thought—one of the fine men a county never quite forgets. It was pretty fair cheek, perhaps, to think she was fit to follow him. It would be a rotten turn-out if she made a mess of it. For all our vaunted superiority, what trembling children we are, in the first moment of feeling for our fathers’ shoes!

Lanty had arrived by the time they came back, with the wobbler triumphantly installed in the tonneau, and shortly afterwards Bluecaster motored down. Voters were coming in quickly, now, and a cheerful crowd was collecting round the booth, Helwise’s voice being easily distinguishable above the rest, as she informed his lordship that he must certainly call and see the perfectly sweet “porcelain on legs,” and there was also just one other little matter of a washhouse boiler. She had worked him up to offering her an entire kitchen range when the Watters limousine groaned round the corner, with four inside, a few more in front, and Grumphy fatly ensconced within the luggage-rail; and under cover of its entry he escaped.

The day wore on, but still the tireless cars ran in and out, and smiling ladies were dug from dark corners in strange garments that seldom saw the sun. After six o’clock the rush quickened again until closing-time at eight, and then, under the fallen curtain of night, began the weary wait during the count. The crowd that had ebbed and flowed all day now drifted back, and where the motor-lamps flung their rays, familiar faces stood out whitely. The door of the booth had shut with a final click as the last strokes from the church clock died, and the mean face of the Creeping Jesus had peered out for the last time. The black figures hung patiently round the railings, while the slow half-hours spoke over their heads. In the grouped cars the weary canvassers turned anxious eyes to the one bright window of the dark building. Grumphy alone slumbered soundly, with a fat head laid on the knee of the yawning chauffeur. It was very chill and dismal, and the lights ringing the square seemed lost in separate hollows of gloom. Dandy was sitting in the Austin with Helwise and Wiggie, exchanging conversation with the doctor and his wife, who had given them tea; and the passage of the fateful minutes filled her with vague depression. Close to the Austin’s lamps her father was standing with Bluecaster and Lanty’s clerk, Stubbs leaning against the door, and it struck her that they all looked worried. The clerk was talking rapidly in a low voice, hammering in his statements fist on palm, while Bluecaster nodded assent from time to time. The shrieking children playing on the outskirts of the crowd quietened suddenly, and the clerk’s words came up sharply over the car.

“It doesn’t do to take a thing for granted with the women! There’s never any getting at what they understand and what they don’t. You can explain till you’re black in the face, and then have to start at the beginning and say it all over again. Why, at the Parish Council Elections, I’ve known them stick their mark against every man-jack on the card, though the whole boiling had been at them telling them they could only vote for nine! They do other daft things, too—put the cross half-way between a couple of names, or plump for the very man they don’t want, thinking it’ll out him, and then swear afterwards that you told ’em to do it! I don’t know what sort you breed in Lancashire, Mr. Shaw, but some of our lot up here want a lot of looking after. A deal of them don’t bother much about politics in between election-times, and I’m not saying they’re any the worse for that; but it makes it a bit stiff working with them when it comes to the vote. You’ve got to be dead sure that they know what you want of them, and then you have to go back and see that they haven’t got it upside down in the meantime! I may be wrong, sir, and nobody’s wishing it harder than myself, but I’m very much afraid that you’ve gone and done it, this time, without meaning to. It’ll be a bad day for Bluecaster, if you have!”

Dandy looked questioningly at Wiggie as their acquaintances melted into the dark.

“Is there anything wrong? They seem put out, over there.”

He shook his head.

“I haven’t an idea. I saw Harriet about half an hour before the poll closed—all three of them have scarcely stirred out of the place since six o’clock—and I thought she looked tired and rather white, but it has been a big ordeal for her, and she’s—well—different to-day, anyhow. It just entered my head to wonder whether things were going right. Thorne was somewhere in the background, looking rather pleased with himself. They said Harriet’s votes were coming in like smoke this afternoon, but of course the luck may have turned since then.”

“Oh, I do hope she won’t be out!” Helwise lamented. “It will send Stubbs simply running to the White Lion, and her grandfather will be so disappointed up in Heaven, or wherever it is Rural District Councillors go when they’re finished with. Lanty was saying only yesterday that Lancaster and Knewstubb had represented Bluecaster for many a long year, so it would be quite like old times to have the two names going to the Board together. I’m sure he will be disappointed if he has to be coupled with Thorne again. Lanty always gets in, of course. You see, he’s so frightfully well known. He always gets in.”

Inside the room the last vote fluttered down, the last figure cut the air, and, at long last, Harriet, white to the lips, looked up and across at Lancaster. He smiled as he met her eyes, a smile of franker, kinder comradeship than he had ever given her, putting out his hand to her as she passed, and she felt the hot tears fill and burn her throat. Thorne smiled also, his own thin, furtive smile. The polling-clerk looked with some curiosity at all three, as, paper in hand, he turned to the door.

Outside, there was a sharp murmur as the square of light broke the dark mass of the house, framing the figure in whose hands lay the will of the people. Dandy saw the keen face of the Bluecaster clerk thrust forward like that of a leashed hound, and afterwards her father’s, braced as if for shock; and then the far-away voice from the door came thinly over the heads of the silent crowd.

Through the roar that followed she heard Helwise burst suddenly into tears, and saw the clerk spin round on Hamer with a fierce nod and exclamation, his face flushed violently as if he had been struck. She turned blindly to the comforting of Helwise, surprised to find her hands trembling and her own eyes full of tears. Wigmore slid from the car, and joined the little band of men as Lancaster came up. He met them with a cheerful shrug, and they stood in silence while Harriet, Head of the Poll, spoke her thanks to her supporters. It was strange to hear her steady, strong English, devoid of slang adornments—old inhabitants thought of Grand Old John as they listened—stranger still to hear her voice quiver as she added her regret at Mr. Lancaster’s defeat. More than one of her friends wondered secretly if they were meeting the real Harriet for the first time. Only Stubbs, shining with happiness, muttered: “In the family. Always in the family!” with an uplifting pride worth all the temperance sermons in the world.

When the cheer had died, Thorne said his few, plausible, little sentences. His cheer was isolated to a deliberate section, but he seemed quite satisfied with it. He had expressed his pleasure that the lady was to be his partner on the Board, and now he turned to her, offering a furtive paw with something like real admiration in his shifty eyes.

“It’s to be you and me, after all, Miss Harriet!” he said kindly. “I’m not sorry I interfered in that milk business, if it’s ended in bringing you to this!”

And John Knewstubb’s granddaughter, whose fine diction had so recently filled delighted ears, remarked: “Go to the devil, you Creeping Jesus!” and strode off into the crowd.

Hamer Shaw laid a hand on Lancaster’s shoulder.

“See here, my boy!” he began, looking old and troubled in the sharp light. “Your lad here says it’s my fault they’ve outed you. He says I was so taken up asking the women to vote for Harriet I forgot to remind ’em to vote for you, too. He asked at least ten as they came out, and they all said they’d plumped for Harriet and that I’d told ’em to! Of course, I didn’t do anything of the sort, but it’s true enough I never thought of bothering them about you. Everybody said you were safe, that the usual crowd always voted for you. Anything else never entered my head. Your lad says I was so busy running Harriet I made them think they could only vote for one candidate. He says those ten female plumpers could have put you at the head of the poll. If that’s so, I deserve to be shot—drowned—anything—as the most interfering old ass in England!”

Lancaster laughed as cheerfully as he knew how. Hamer he might deceive, but there were too many natives round him who knew exactly what he must be feeling.

“Oh, Garnett’s talking through his hat!” he said lightly. “They put me out because they were tired of me and wanted a change; it had nothing to do with you. Let’s get home. It’s been a long day. Harriet came out fine, didn’t she? Nothing like the old stuff! Really, my dear Mr. Shaw, there’s no need to worry.”

“But the female plumpers!” the clerk put in eagerly, still writhing and bitter.

“Oh, stop it, Garnett!” Lanty frowned, then softened. The boy’s partisanship was sweet, after all. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. It’s hard lines on you, after the way you slaved for me in your off-time, but it can’t be helped. As for the women, half of them have forgotten what they did by the time they get outside the door.”

The young man opened his lips again, but shut them at once with an effort. Only, as he turned and groped for a bicycle leaning somewhere against a tree, Dandy heard him reviling the female plumpers with bitter if bated breath, ending with his original statement: “It never does to take things for granted with a woman!”

She also heard Stubbs inquiring for Harriet, and when it appeared that that undutiful daughter had driven off without him, the stranded parent was stuffed into the Austin. Bluecaster had taken charge of the still-sobbing Helwise, murmuring incoherent consolation in the shape of boilers, and persuaded Lanty to come with him as well, leaving Armer, whose groans could be heard all over the square, to follow with the trap. But first the ex-councillor went back for a final word with the ex-canvasser.

“It’s really all right!” he said, feeling as sorry for Hamer as for himself. “I’ve far too much on my hands, anyhow, and this will ease me a bit. Don’t you think any more of Garnett’s nonsense. These young ’uns are always too clever by half. He’s wrong, I tell you—dead wrong!”

But he knew, and Hamer, looking down at him, knew that the “young ’un” had been perfectly right.

At Watters, the poor man tried to eat his wife’s carefully-thought-out supper and could not; and Dandy played an intricate game with a chicken-wing that was always on its way to her mouth and never got there, while Wiggie ate nothing either, in his efforts to keep Mrs. Shaw from observing the others. They drifted to a warm hearth, and were presently comforted a little, but Hamer was still very low when he took his girl in his arms for her good-night kiss.

“This is the Last Tram, little one!” he said sadly. “I’ve made a fine mess of it, and I’ll never forgive myself. There’ll be no more tramming for Hamer Shaw!”

Soon after eleven o’clock, Harriet, standing at her window in the dark, caught the shuffling of feet in the road, and directly afterwards a lusty cheer startled the sleeping peace of Wild Duck. She knew at once what it meant. So, in her grandfather’s time, had his supporters come to seal his victory. She remembered to this day the thrill of pride with which, as a child, she had listened to the demonstration, creeping from her bed to peep at the massed enthusiasts without. Lighting the lamp, she called to Stubbs and threw up the window, to meet a second cheer as she came into sight. Standing there, with her father’s hand on her shoulder, she thanked them briefly and told them to get off home, with just the same rough humour that Grand Old John had used with such effect; and after a final tribute they withdrew. She went to bed with the warmth and the pride of it glowing at her heart.

But in the night she woke and saw the thing that she had done in all its naked, irrevocable folly, saw how her stratagem had twisted in her hand, to the undoing of the man she loved. Power and adulation were sweet, but real love will have first place even in a Knewstubb heart. She had meant to-day to draw them together—deep down she knew that she had had no other hope but that—and instead it had set them leagues asunder, probably for ever. She had put herself in the very place where he could not love her—his own place. She had cut her throat with her own so subtle weapon, the clever lady of Wild Duck Hall. She hid her face in her hands, and wept.