Part 3 (1/2)
”The evening's coming, and I'm going to cry the Neck! I'm going to cry the Neck!”
CHAPTER IV
PAGAN PASTORAL
The last of the corn had been reaped in Cloom fields and all was ready for the ceremony of ”Crying the Neck.” The labourers, their womenfolk and children, had gathered together, and Annie, with a select party of friends, took her place in the forefront of the crowd. A very old labourer who bore the splendid name of Melchisedec Baragwaneth, went from sheaf to sheaf, picking out a handful of the most heavily-bearded ears, which, though they are apt to grind the worst, still make the bravest show. He was stiff with his great age and the cruel rheumatism that is the doom of the field-worker; and against the bra.s.s and leather of his boots the stubble whispered loudly. Overhead the rooks and gulls gave short, harsh cries as they circled around hoping for stray grains; but the thousand little lives which had thriven in the corn--the field mice and frogs and toads--had been stilled by the sickles; some few had escaped to the shelter of the hedges, but most were sacrifices to the harvest.
Melchisedec Baragwaneth intertwined with his wheat ears some splendid stalks of ragwort and chamomile, like a cl.u.s.ter of yellow and white stars, and twisted tendrils of bindweed, with frail, trumpet-shaped blossoms already drooping, around the completed bunch. His thick old fingers fumbled over the niceties of the task, but he pushed the women's officious hands aside, and by the aid of his toothless but bone-hard gums pulled the knot to successfully, and the bunch became the ”Neck.”
Then he set off, followed by the rest of the folk, to the highest field under gra.s.s, cresting the slope behind Cloom, the field that had been ploughed earth when the old Squire's dying eyes looked on it from his bedroom window.
The last of the day still held the world, and from the western rim the sunset beat up on to one vast level stretch of cloud that nearly covered the sky, drenching it with rose-coloured light which refracted to the earth, steeping everything in one warm glow. The stubble stood up like thin straight flames from a soil that showed wine-coloured, and the green of leaf and pasture was turned by the warmth of the light to that tender but brilliantly vivid emerald to which it wakes in the gleam of a lantern at night. All colour was intensified, though all was suffused with the triumphant rose, which steeped sky and air and earth till they seemed infused with some impalpable wine; and the procession moved through an atmosphere full of refractions and bright edges afloat in the tender glow.
Melchisedec Baragwaneth took his stand in the middle of the field beside the tall monolith, and his followers made a huge circle about him.
Jacka's John-w.i.l.l.y staggered round with a firkin of cider, and each man set his hands about its body and took a long drink. Then Melchisedec Baragwaneth bent slowly down, holding the Neck towards the ground, and all the labourers bowed low over their billhooks. Still more slowly the old man straightened himself, raising his arms till he held the bunch of corn high above his head, like some sylvan priest elevating the Host.
The billhooks, which a moment before had lain like s.h.i.+ning crescents on the gra.s.s, went flas.h.i.+ng up into blackness against the glow of the sky, and from each man came a great shout:
_”A nack! A nack! A nack! We hav'en! We hav'en! We hav'en!”_
Three times the rite was performed, and the rose-light, that so soon dies, had faded away, though no one could have told the actual moment of its pa.s.sing. A vibrant dusk, that to eyes still glamour-ridden seemed full of millions of little, p.r.i.c.king points of light, permeated the world, and in their harmonious-coloured clothes the people mingled with the soft grey-green of the pasture, only their faces and hands gleamed out a few tones paler.
With the fall of the billhooks fell solemnity, and men, women and children ran wildly hither and thither, shouting, singing, and breaking out into rough dances.
A new and blissful excitement tingled through Ishmael. When the labourers had shouted he had dropped Phoebe's hand and shouted with them, flinging up his arms. The glamorous light, the sense of something primitive and vital that the ceremony expressed, and the stir at the pulses caused by the sight of many people moved to do the same thing at the same moment, went to his head. He ran about singing and leaping like the rest, but keeping a little away from them, and quite suddenly there came to him for the first time that consciousness of pleasure which marks man's enjoyment off from the animal's. Hitherto, in his moments of happiness, he had not paused to consider the matter, but merely been happy as a puppy is when it plays in the sun. Now, suddenly, he stopped still, and stood looking at the distant blackthorn hedge that made a dark network against the last gleam in the west.
”I am happy? I am _being happy_!” he said to himself, and he turned this consciousness over in his mind as he would have turned a sweet in his mouth. Ever afterwards the memory of that moment's realisation was connected for him with a twisted line of hedge and a background of pale greenish sky. He stared at the distorted hedgerow that stood out so clearly, and to him this moment was so vividly the present that he did not see how it could ever leave off.... ”This is now ...” he thought; ”how can it stop being now?” And the shouting and the still air and the definite look of that hedge all seemed, with himself as he was and felt at that moment, to be at the outermost edge of time, suspended there for ever by that extreme vividness....
And then Phoebe ran up to him and dragged him off to where Sam Lenine stood examining some of the ears he had picked on his way past the sheaves. The miller took the toll of one twelfth of the farmer's grist, so Sam studied the ears with care. Owing to the drought the corn was very short in the straw, but that was not Sam's part of the business, and he nodded his head approvingly over the quality of the ear.
Suddenly Archelaus sprang forward, s.n.a.t.c.hed the Neck from Melchisedec Baragwaneth, and made for the house, everyone crowding after him to see the fun. At the front door stood the dairymaid, Jenifer Keast, holding a pail of water in her strong arms, ready to souse him unless he succeeded in entering by another way before she could reach him with the water, when he could claim a kiss. Archelaus made a dash for the parlour window, but the bucket swept round at him threateningly and he drew back a moment, as though to consider a plan of campaign. He was determined to have his kiss, for through the soft dusk that veiled any coa.r.s.eness of skin or form, and only showed the darkness of eyes and mouth on the warm pallor of her face, she looked so eminently kissable. Before she could guess his intention he ran round the angle of the house wall, down to the dairy window, and, plunging through it, came up the pa.s.sage at her back. Seizing her by the waist, he swung her round and took his kiss fairly from her mouth, and, though she struggled so that the water drenched him, he felt her lips laughing as they formed a kiss.
CHAPTER V
HEAD OF THE HOUSE
For years Ishmael was unable to remember that evening without a tingling sense of shame. The unwonted excitement, combined with the prominence which the Parson successfully achieved for him, went to his head and caused him to ”show off.” The thought of how he had chattered and boasted, talking very loudly and clumping with his feet when he walked, so as to sound and feel like a grown-up man, would turn him hot for years, when, in the watches of the night, it flashed back on him. Long after everyone else had forgotten, even if they had ever noticed it, his lack of self-control on that evening was a memory of shame to him. He clattered across to his place at the head of the table, and was mortified that a couple of big old calf-bound books had to be placed on his chair to make him sit high enough. Phoebe and the Parson were at either side, and the foot of the table was taken by Annie, Archelaus, defiant and monosyllabic, on her left, and Lawyer Tonkin, glossy with black broadcloth, on her right. The lawyer had a haunting air as of cousins.h.i.+p to things ecclesiastical, and, indeed, he was lay-preacher at a Penzance chapel. Tom, who had taken care to set himself on his other hand, kept a careful eye for his plate and gla.s.s, being particularly liberal with the cider. The lawyer spoke little; when he did his voice was rich and unctuous--the sort of voice that Ishmael always described to himself as ”porky.” He was as attentive to Mrs. Ruan's wants as Tom to his, and she, never a great talker save in her outbursts, still kept up a spasmodic flow of low-toned remarks to him, whom of all men she held in highest veneration.
His spiritual powers she rated far higher than those of the Parson, who never fulminated from the pulpit till she felt the fear of h.e.l.l melting her bones within her. This the lawyer did, and managed at the same time to make her feel herself a good woman, one of the saved, and the piquancy of the double sensation was the hidden drug of Annie's life.
She dallied with thoughts of eternal suffering as a Flagellant with imagings of torture, and when her mind was reeling at the very edge of the pit she would pull herself back with a loud outcry on the Almighty, followed by a collapse as sensuous in its utter laxity.
Annie would have been shocked if anyone had tried to force on her the idea, that, in the unacknowledged warfare which enwrapped Ishmael, Tonkin was on her side as against the child; but even she was dimly aware that he and Boase, joint guardians as they were, stood in opposite camps. But it was towards her, the respectable widow-woman, the owner, but for Ishmael, of the biggest estate in all Penwith, that Tonkin's current of consideration flowed, whereas hers, after her religion, was perpetually set about Archelaus. He, the beautiful young man with the round red neck and the white arms and the strong six feet of height, whom she had made and given to the world, to him she would have given the world and all the heavens had it been in her power. And, as things were, she could not even give him Cloom Manor and its fruitful acres. Of this impotency Archelaus was even more aware than usual as he sat beside her and glowered down the table at his little brother.
Ishmael was still showing off, though less noisily, for he was feeling very tired and sleepy; the unaccustomed cider and the heavy meal of roast mutton, in a house where there was rarely any meat except occasional rashers, were proving too potent for him. The room was intensely hot, the prevailing notion of comfort being to shut every window at night, and a large fire, before which the side of mutton had been gravely twirling for hours, was only now beginning to subside. The candles guttered and grew soft in the warmth, beads of moisture stood out on the faces of the company, and the smell of incompletely-washed bodies reminded the Parson of hot afternoons with his Sunday school.
Phoebe found Ishmael dull since his volubility had begun to desert him, and turning a disdainful shoulder, she tried to draw Jacka's John-w.i.l.l.y into conversation--a difficult matter, since, though he had been placed there instead of in the barn for Phoebe's benefit, he felt the watchful eye of his mother, who was waiting at table, too frequently upon him for his comfort.
Katie Jacka, her colour more set than it had been when she witnessed that marriage eight years ago, was as emotional as ever, her facile feelings only restrained at all by her husband's rigid taciturnity, even as her high bosom was kept up by the stiffest of ”temberan busks”--a piece of wood which, like all self-respecting Cornishwomen, she wore thrust inside the front of her stays. Philip Jacka, who was now headman at the farm, presided at the labourer's supper in the big barn, whither everyone would presently repair, including Ishmael, if he were not too sleepy. The Parson divided his attention between him and Mr. Lenine, who was expanding to greater and greater geniality, always with that something veiled behind his eyes. He encouraged Ishmael, trying to draw him out when the Parson, seeing the child was, in nursery parlance, ”a bit above himself,” would have kept him quiet.