The lonely plough

Dandy Shaw looked round the Watters drawing-room with a little twist of the lips. She was perched on a high oak stool, with her feet on the rungs, and through the Chippendale mirror opposite she could see both her own figure and its setting. It was afternoon, and under the looped yellow silk blinds the sun pattered on dark wood and faint brocades, a carpet hushed as moss, elusive little water-colours, china ephemeral as frost-breath, books with the colouring of rare gems. There were no photographs in the room, and there was no silver, no flotsam and jetsam of Christmas and birthday offerings, but there were flowers everywhere, not massed with heavy ballroom effects, nor set at conventional intervals like a well-drilled regiment, but leading the eye on with unexpected thrills of pleasure from one delicate single shade to another, like tiny semitones in a fairy scale. From without, where the river crept beneath the dark splendour of turned beeches edging the terrace, the long, low, gray-faced house with its plain windows looked almost asleep, but there was a very active brain at work within.

Dandy—otherwise Anne—had no need to fear her image in the mirror, but she frowned at it, nevertheless. Even the image seemed joyously alive, with soft, bright hair, and blue eyes full of candid goodwill; and nothing about it clashed at first sight with its surroundings, yet she glanced from it to the old walls with amused yet abashed and apologetic resentment. For the first time in her life, Dandy Shaw was discovering that there are things which mean more than people.

From the still house and the simple, beautiful room her thoughts went back to Halsted, her late home on the outskirts of a Lancashire town—to the overwhelming magnificence of its ménage, the long, rich meals, the endless contrivances for comfort, the stream of guests, the intricate programmes of amusement. She saw the big, red pile, with the shining cars slurring up its drive, the long lines of hothouses, the priceless roses, the precious orchids flung into elaborate schemes of colour. It was all rich and splendid and inviting, luxurious and perfectly organised; but Watters cared for none of these things.

It was pale and gray and plain and cool and utterly aloof. It did not care a toss whether you looked at it or not, so of course you always did, leaning over the humped bridge, and wondering what ghosts moved in the darkened rooms and met by moonlight on the terrace. If you tried to bring a car up its twisting, cross-grained drive, the odds were you would find yourself in the river or a clump of clipped yews as old as Ernuin the Priest. And the roses at Watters would have died of sheer disgust in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a rose-show marquee. They grew and scrambled and climbed in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing cold stone with hearts of deep orange, flinging arches of tender pink or glowing crimson against opal skies, or lifting single, dewy heads like pale lamps in the hushed garden after sunset. And at any but simple food it looked rigidly askance, loftily permitting the butcher to drop his beef and mutton, and condescending to game, as a country house of standing, but shutting shocked eyelids upon French ménus and foreign cheeses. Anything bisqué or braisé or soufflé or au gratin scarcely dared trust itself near the stove, and a pot of foie-gras had positively to be smuggled.

It was a curious impulse that had driven the Lancashire tradesman from the home of his own creating to one with which he had apparently nothing in common. Less than a year ago, Dandy had found him on the Halsted drive, with his hands in his pockets and his hat on the back of his head, surveying the symbol of wealth with a puzzled frown.

“There’s something wrong, Dandy Anne!” he broke out, as she slid a hand through his arm. “It’s strong and it’s good, and it’s warm and it’s cool, and comfortable and convenient and clean, but it isn’t anything else. It doesn’t make you think of the past and the future. It doesn’t make you want to throw up your hat one minute and dry your eyes on your coat-sleeve the next. It’ll never have any troubles or joys bigger than an insurance-card or a mayoral invitation. It’s smug—that’s what it is! It doesn’t feel—it can’t, and so it can’t make you feel, either. When a man’s getting on in years, he wants the sort of house that can show him how to grow old kindly. This red elephant would be smug and smiling while I was tottering into the grave. Let’s go and find a hut, Dandy Anne, where I can grow old gently.”

And Watters, for some reason known only to himself, had seemed to him just that “hut.” He had had it decorated by an artist, who, recognising the individuality of the place, seemed to have listened in secret to its whispered wants; and when it was finished, Hamer Shaw strode happily up and down it, a burly, incongruous figure with its hat on the back of its head, satisfied to the very marrow, and growing younger every day. He had opened his eyes in a Westmorland cottage, and though he had left it so speedily that it was scarcely worth mention, some power, biding its time, had called him back, to his passionate content. Mrs. Shaw was of the type that belongs nowhere but to the absorbing house-world of the moment, and she had borne the transplanting cheerfully enough, if not with her husband’s bubbling ecstasy. But to Dandy it was almost as terrific an experience as a total change of planet.

Bred in Lancashire, educated in London, finished abroad, she had no single tie with her new life and surroundings. She had been perfectly happy at Halsted, liking the constant excitement, the flow of money, the crowd of guests. She had understood everybody, and they had understood her. She had been an excellent hostess, and a very charming uncrowned queen, with not only Halsted, but all her circle at her feet. She had lived quickly and strongly, a little noisily, perhaps, but very vividly; and now, at the age of twenty-four, she was flung out of the rush into still water. Cessation may prove as distracting as revolution, and after five months she was even yet eminently perplexed. She had put no stone in the way of her father’s sudden desire, cheerfully resigning the old life for the new, for she was a happy creature with an interest in the world at large that would have stood the shock of almost any change. But this had proved so puzzling and disconcerting,—yielded so many emotions of an unexpected nature! Not only was she no longer a queen; she was scarcely an individual. With her somewhat exceptional powers of clear vision she soon discovered that. She was “the new girl from somewhere awful—I forget where; daughter of the new people at Watters—I forget who; new-rich dealers in something—I forget what.”

The word “new” followed her about like a witch’s curse. At Halsted it had been the last touch of praise for everything. If you made a purchase, you called everybody in the house to see it, whether it was a diamond necklace or the tiling in the bathroom. But in Gilthrotin nothing new was tolerated but necessaries like bread and butter; diamonds were nothing accounted of unless they had glittered first on a family neck in a family portrait; and when progress and the plumber forced you to a hot-water system or incandescents, you were always glad that your great-grandfather had not lived to see it. Under her cruel consciousness of “newness” Dandy was oppressed even to the earth. She frowned at the picture in the glass, much as Hamer had frowned at soulless Halsted.

Few people had called, as yet, except the neighbouring clergy, together with countless daughters of the horse-leech, cased in subscription-lists. More daughters had written. Indeed, begging letters dropped like hail. Hamer contributed to the first twenty-five, and then sat down to think about the rest. The county came slowly, however; in driblets, so to speak. Things would alter in time, of course, for even in the conservative country Hamer Shaw’s money would make its way, as well as—later—Hamer Shaw’s sterling worth and fine business capacity. And his daughter would be taken up, when it was discovered that she hadn’t actually worked in a mill and worn clogs, but was merely a charming and well-educated member of human society. But she would never be a queen again, even then. She would never be even one of the elect. She would always be “new.” In a ripe old age she would have progressed no further than “rather new.” She would always be an outsider at Watters in Gilthrotin.

To do her justice, though she sent a sigh after her lost crown, that was not the cause of her dissatisfaction. For the first time in her smooth career she was arrested, called to halt by something that thrilled almost to pain. For the first time, too, she saw herself no longer the pivot of her world, an outstanding figure on an obliging background of earth, but a mere unnecessary pigmy on its surface. She found the country cruel and very lonely, full of shut secrets, fearful, yet unquestionably alluring. In this new atmosphere, where the true Romance still brushed by on velvet wings, her unfledged soul shrank a little, and as yet was lost. The name of it in books had stirred her to a vague desire; the reality of it, keen as a sword, rich as purple curtains before God, made her afraid.

The house affected her in the same way. Its tranquillity, its dignity, its rapt air of hiding secrets mystic as the Grail, impressed her as the attributes of a living thing, with a mind and being larger than her own. Its susceptibility, too, amazed her. Halsted, for instance, had cared nothing for weather. When the sun burned, you drew the blinds, and, within, the luxury grew cool and fragrant; and when storm held sway without, again the blinds were drawn, shutting you into soft comfort, where electric light, silver, and china, laughter and the click of balls or the slur of dancing feet, struck always the same note of lapped pleasure. But, at Watters, when the sun shone, the old house stirred dreamily and smiled, and half-forgotten pictured faces looked alive from the dim walls, and threads of hot gold ran molten along the dark floors. There was no need to curtain the sun; the place needed it, and turned its old bones gratefully under its touch. And on days of stress the house shared it with the day; you could not shut the storm from Watters. The wind was in the house itself, lifting the rugs, whistling up the stair, crying like a lost soul in the eaves. The hurrying sky was mirrored in the glass of the panelling, and the beating rain filled the stone eyes with streaming tears. Outside, the full river swung above its banks, and the lost wail of sheep on the mist-hung fell rode on the tortured air.

But the silence was worse than anything, she found,—the real silence that is full of notes but never a note that jars. When she woke in the morning, it took her by the throat. No jangling of trams, mill-whistles, and trains; only, at times, faint music from the farm across the way, and the slow, sleepy call of church-bells. She could not lie, as she learned to do in later days, staring with quiet eyes at the sky, wrapped in a happy stillness more soothing than sleep. It often woke her in the night—that full silence.

They had had visitors, at first. Before they were fairly settled in the place, a crowd of friends had descended on them, and Hamer Shaw would sooner have shut his door to a Royal honour than an old acquaintance. But the circle, so pleasant and suitable at Halsted, was altogether out of the picture at Watters. The very house itself would have nothing to say to the guests; indeed, it deliberately sulked at them with grudging fires and lukewarm baths. It had other tricks, too—sudden stairs down which they tumbled in the dark; rattling windows, creaking boards and whistling key-holes for the hag-ridden hours of the night; soot in spotless grates, burst pipes and skilfully situated coal-buckets; while the outside world co-operated subtly, from the early rooster to the midnight owl. These drawbacks had been unknown at Halsted, and the guests asked each other dismally what could have possessed old Hamer to quit his palace for a God-forsaken monument like Watters. Their torpedo-nosed cars had a kind of abnormality in the little village at the river’s edge. The Halsted habitués rent the night with gramophones, and across the cool water flung the frenzied parlance of snooker. They were Halstedites who had tangoed through a dream in the lane. Dandy found herself shrinking from them unintentionally but unmistakably. She was glad when they went; and yet, when they had gone, she was sorry, for she felt her place to be with them. And the friends bemoaned themselves as they motored home, saying sadly—“That’s the end of you, Hamer, old man! In another year he’ll have forgotten he ever knew us. It’s the country does it—the benighted, besotted, be-swank-ridden country. Give him six months more, and he’ll be as rooted an old tree-stump as any of them!”

It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Dandy realised that thankfully. The hosts had been kind as usual, the guests hearty as ever, but the new conditions had laughed the old friendships to scorn. It was very sad, and it was also rather terrible, if you were once fully convinced that a house, a senseless mixture of stone and mortar, had done it all on its own!

Thus Dandy held review as she sat with her feet on the rungs of the high stool. Later in the day, on a sudden impulse, she unburdened her mind to her parents.

“It’s going to be a bit hard for me,” she said frankly, “so you must not be disappointed if I’m a failure! I don’t match here, and I’ve lost my old element, so at present I’m neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I’ll have to grow to this place, and that sort of thing takes time. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy; it’s only that I don’t fit in. You’re all right, aren’t you, mummy? You touched ground over the Bluecaster butcher with the Halsted smile. And father’s been all right all along. It doesn’t seem fair that I should still be struggling in deep water.”

Mrs. Shaw said—“6 tr., 3 lacets, 1 sp., 31 tr.—have you seen the new stair-rods?—4 sl. sts. from third horizontal tr., turn!”

And Hamer took his pipe out of his mouth and added—“It’s great!” and put it back again.

“Yes, it’s great.” Dandy laughed and sighed. “So great that I’m not sure I’ll ever get round to the far side of it! It’s small and mean, too—does everybody keep a pet charity chained like a dog to nobble new-comers? And those that don’t beg seem to be tied up in a pride as big as a bath-towel—that nice, cross agent-person, for instance, who looks rather like a high-class keeper, and nabobs you off his land like a reigning duke. He’ll never want to be kind to us, I’m sure, and we must have somebody to pass the time of day with. Perhaps the house will decide. It turned a cold enough shoulder on the poor Halstedites; it owes us somebody in return. I hope it will send an interesting selection soon, though it seems queer to have to let a house choose your friends for you! I get on fairly well with the villagers, though they’re not exactly flattering. ‘Very pleased to meet you, miss, I’m sure! You mind me something surprising of her as was last school-teacher but two!’ That was the ‘Jeanne’ frock, mother, that Wiggie used to say looked like concrete moonshine, at Halsted. It looks like the fairy queen in a ballet, here. Even my sporting clothes are wrong—they sport too much. And I find I don’t know any of the things that matter—when the grass begins to grow, and which weather is coming up from the sea, and what to call it when it has come. No, I don’t fit in. Perhaps I’ll learn, after a while.”

Hamer Shaw said—“The land’ll teach you,” and leaned back and shut his eyes. He could hear milk-pails on the flags at the Parsonage Farm.

“And love,” Mrs. Shaw added, very unexpectedly, “7 lacets, 7 tr., 9 ch., turn—don’t forget to look at the rods!”

“The land—and love.” Dandy said no more, knowing nothing of either. On the fell opposite a floating wreath of mist was lifting delicately upward like a lawn kerchief drawn from a sleeping face. “The land—and love.” Great Masters. But the land, as yet, would have none of her, and love might never look her way. She could win the one if she chose to woo it; the other and greater must come unasked.