Part 4 (2/2)

Except your face. And even your face--”

”My face?--”

”_Could_ be cruel. But it never will be. Something's happened to it. Some cruelty. Some d.a.m.nable cruelty.”

”What makes you think so?”

”Every kind and beautiful thing on earth, Jeanne, has been made so by some cruelty.”

”That's all rot. Utter rot. You don't know what you're talking about.... It's milking time. There's Gwinnie semaphoring. Do you know old Burton's going to keep us on? He'll pay us wages from this quarter. He says we were worth our keep from the third day.”

”Do you want to stay on here?”

”Rather.”

”Very well then, so do I. That settles it.”

”Get up,” she said, ”and come along. Gwinnie's frantic.”

He sat up, bowed forwards, his hands hanging loose over his knees.

She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender back dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of her breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her lips parting.

He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her weight against his weight, tugging.

He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her pull. As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing forgotten, her right hand.

Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable--the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft behind it--she lay thinking.

Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.

”If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie”--She knew what Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another.

Thinking was the antidote to caring. If she had let her mind play freely over Gibson Herbert in the beginning--But Gibson stopped her thinking, and John Conway made her think. That was the difference.

There was nothing about John that was like Gibson. Not a look, not a gesture, not the least thought in his mind. His mind was like his body, clean and cold and beautiful. Set on fire only by dreams; loving you in a dream, a dream that burned him up and left him cold to you.

Cold and clean.

There were things she laid up against him, the poor dear; a secret h.o.a.rd of grievances now clear to her in the darkness; she found herself turning them over and over, as if positively her mind owed his romantic apathy a grudge. Little things she remembered. Three things.

Yesterday in the hayfield, John pitching hay on to the cart, and she standing on the top of the load, flattening down the piles as he swung them up. Gwinnie came with a big fork, sw.a.n.king, for fun, trying to pitch a whole hayc.o.c.k. In the dark of the room she could see Gwinnie's little body straining back from the waist, her legs stiffening, her face pink and swollen; and John's face looking at Gwinnie.

She shouted down at him, ”Why can't you _take_ the d.a.m.ned thing? She'll break her back with it.” And he shouted up, ”That's her look-out.” (But he took it.) He didn't like Gwinnie.

That time. And the time Cowslip calved, the darling choosing the one night old Burton was away and Jim down with flu. She had to hold the lantern. Straw littered in the half-lighted shed. Cowslip swinging her bald-faced head round to you, her humble, sorrowful eyes imploring, between her groans and the convulsive heavings of her flanks. A noise between a groan and a bellow, a supreme convulsion. The dark wall, the white funnel of light from the lantern, and John's face in the flash....

But he had been sorry for Cowslip. Going out with the lantern afterwards she had found him in the yard, by the wall, bent double, s.h.i.+vering and retching. And she had sung out to him ”Buck up, John. She's licked it clean. It's the dearest little calf you ever saw.”

Pity. Pity could drag your face tight and hard, like Burton's when his mare, Jenny, died of colic.

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