Part 19 (1/2)

XII

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

We read Sheila Kaye-Smith because she alone among the women writers of to-day writes with the sure touch of a man. This is not to decry other writers of her s.e.x of the stamp of Clemence Dane (though there are very few good women novelists): it is that Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith has a masculine strength; her narrative flows strongly, she has an uncanny knowledge of and kins.h.i.+p with the elemental things of the soil.

We read her for her breadth of outlook, her sense of the beauty of the Suss.e.x that she has made hers as much as Thomas Hardy has made Wess.e.x his, for the dignity and excellent music of her English prose style. She has an accurate sense of history and can with equal ease place her characters at the beginning as at the end of Victoria's reign.

Her dialect (all her novels are full of dialect) is accurate if at times a little literary: there are too many ”howsumdevers,” ”dunnamanys,”

”vrotherings,” ”spannelings” and ”tediouses,” but this is a very little blemish.

Her strength is seen fully fledged in _Suss.e.x Gorse_, in the picture of Reuben battling with the forces of nature.

”He drank in the scent of the baking awns, the heat of the sun-cracked earth. It was all dear to him--all ecstasy. And he himself was dear to himself because the beauty of it fell upon him ... his body, strong and tired, smelling a little of sweat, his back scorched by the heat in which he had bent, his hand strong as iron upon his sickle. Oh, Lord! it was good to be a man, to feel the sap of life and conquest running in you, to be battling with mighty forces, to be able to fight seasons, elements, earth, and nature....”

He hates his son's poetic att.i.tude, the boy who saw in nature a kind of enchanted ground, full of mysteries of sun and moon, full of secrets that were sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying. ”It seemed to have a soul and a voice ... and its soul was that ... of a fetch, some country sprite.”

But Reuben's hardness becomes his undoing: his hardness kills his beloved wife through overmuch child-bearing; his hardness sends one son to prison for stealing; his hardness makes him turn another son out of the house; his hardness, his strength, his remorseless nature left him to fight his battles with the land alone. He falls under the personality of Alice Jury, who was the first to ask him whether it was worth while fighting so hard to reclaim waste earth, to give up so much for the sake of a piece of land. ”'Life is worth while,'” she says, ”'in itself, not because of what it gives you.'

”'I agree with you there,' said Reuben; 'it's not wot life gives that's good, it's wot you taake out of it.'”

But in the wrangles which he had with this new type of womanhood he failed ever to convince her of the ”worth-whileness” of his aim.

Meanwhile through his excessive zeal Reuben had driven his youngest, weakling son to his death and continued to try to ”draw out Leviathan with a hook.” The cleverest of his sons regarded his father as a primordial gorilla, and Tilly, his daughter, despised him and married his enemy: his ambition drove him to make slaves of his children, and one by one they break the fetters and leave him. Alice tries to make him see reason.... ”You don't see this hideous thing that's pursuing you, that's stripping you of all that ought to be yours, that's making you miss a hundred beautiful things, that's driving you past all your joys--this Boarzell....” Nearly, very nearly, he married Alice ... and she would have saved him. ”She was utterly unlike anything there was or had been in his life, the only thing he knew that did not smell of earth. The pity of it was that he loved that strong-smelling earth so much.”

She tells him that she would fight his schemes to the end, in love with him as she is: she would never beguile him with the thought that she could help him in his life's desire ... but she called him, as no woman had ever called him, with all that of herself which was in his heart, part of his own being, and she was within an ace of winning: she was in the act of crossing to where he stood waiting with outstretched arms when he caught sight of Boarzell lying in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. ”It seemed to call him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay, Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle.” So he turns his back on love and goes back to his lone fight with Nature. Almost immediately afterwards he meets Rose, tall, strapping, superbly moulded, animal Rose, free with her kisses, and experienced and energetic in love: he marries her: she wanted Reuben's love and she got it. ”She was a perpetual source of delight to him! Her beauty, her astounding mixture of fire and innocence, her good humour, and her gaiety were even more intoxicating than before marriage. He felt that he had found the ideal wife. As a woman she was perfect, so perfect that in her arms he could forget her shortcomings as a comrade.” She smoothed away the wrinkles of his day with her caresses, gave him love where she could not give him understanding, heart where she could not give him brain. She made him forget his heaviness and gave him strength to meet his difficulties, of which there were many. But she wanted no children, and Reuben had set his heart on more. She spent much money on the fastidious care of her person ... so that he ”sometimes had doubts of this beautiful, extravagant, irresponsible creature.” Gradually he came to realise her uselessness, but when one more grown-up son ran away to sea Rose bore him a child, and her rich near relative died and he began to think that his luck was in. Unfortunately this relative of his wife's left all his money to an illegitimate son of whom no one had ever heard, and the fortune that Reuben had expected to inherit by marrying Rose fell elsewhere.

Shortly after this Rose finds the thirty years' difference between herself and her husband too much for her and she allows herself to love his foreman. Reuben locked her out of his house late one night when she had been out with her lover, so she has no alternative but to go off with him and leave Reuben in the lurch once more. He turns again to Alice: ”Wot sort o' chap am I to have pride? My farm's ruined, my wife's run away, my children have left me--wot right have I to be proud?... She deceived me. I married her expecting money, and there wur none--I married her fur her body, and she's given it to another.” This love of Alice Jury's had nothing akin to Naomi's poor little fluttering pa.s.sion, or to Rose's fascination, half appet.i.te, half game. Someone loved him purely, truly, strongly, deeply, with a fire that could be extinguished only by death or ... her own will. He is sorely tempted to give up his ambitious struggle--all his great plans had crumbled into failure. ”Far better give up the struggle while there was the chance of an honourable retreat. He realised that he was at the turning-point--a step further along his old course and he would lose Alice, a step along the road she pointed and he would lose Boarzell.... His mind painted him a picture it had never dared paint before ... comfort ... his dear frail wife ...

himself contented, growing stout, wanting nothing he hadn't got, so having nothing he didn't want....” But he turned his back on this with a shudder. Boarzell was more to him than any woman in the world....

Through blood and tears ... he would wade to Boarzell, and conquer it at last. Alice should go the way of all enemies. ”And the last enemy to be destroyed is Love.” So he tore women out of his life, as he tore up the gorse on Boarzell. Caro, his sole remaining daughter, then gives herself to a sailor and goes off with him as his mistress. She felt very few qualms of conscience, even when the barrier was past which she had thought impa.s.sable ... her life was brimmed with beauty, unimaginable beauty that welled up into the commonest things and suffused them with light. Also, about it all was that surprising sense of naturalness which almost always comes to women when they love for the first time, the feeling of ”For this I was born.” Sheila Kaye-Smith has a wonderful gift for depicting the pa.s.sion of true love in the most beautiful manner.

”She never asked Dansay to marry her. He had given her pretty clearly to understand that he was not a marrying man, and she was terrified of doing or saying anything that might turn him against her. One of the things about her that charmed him most was the absence of all demand upon him.”

But she is remorseless as Nature herself in her processes. A hundred pages later we see her own young brothers attempting to ”pick her up” on the Newhaven Parade. She has become a third-rate harlot, a bundle of rags and bones and paint.

”'I'm not happy, but I'm jolly. I'm not good, but I'm pleasant-like....

Mind you tell father as, no matter the life I lead and the knocks I get, I've never once, not once, regretted the day I ran off from his old farm.'”

The Boer War claims his youngest sons and Reuben is left alone at Odiam, except for his brother Harry, who grows more shrivelled, more ape-like every day. ”Reuben was not ashamed at eighty years old to lie full length in some sun-hazed field, and stretch his body over the gra.s.s, the better to feel that fertile quietness and moist freshness which is the comfort of those who make the ground their bed.”

In the end we leave him victorious: out of a small obscure farm of barely sixty acres he had raised up this splendid dominion, and he had tamed the roughest, toughest, fiercest, cruellest piece of ground in Suss.e.x, the beast of Boarzell. His victory was complete. He had done all that he set out to do. He had done what everyone had told him he could never do. He had made the wilderness to blossom as the rose, he had set his foot on Leviathan's neck, and made him his servant for ever.... He knew that not only the land within these boundaries was his--his possessions stretched beyond it, and reached up to the stars. The wind, the rain, dawns, dusks and darkness were all given him as the crown of his faithfulness. He had bruised Nature's head--and she had bruised his heel, and given him the earth as his reward.

”'I've won,' he said softly to himself--'I've won--and it's bin worth while.... I've fought and I've suffered, and I've gone hard and gone rough and gone empty--but I haven't gone in vain. It's all bin worth it.

Odiam's great and Boarzell's mine--and when I die ... well, I've lived so close to the earth all my days that I reckon I shan't be afraid to lie in it at last.'”

There is a sense of complete unity, of complete mastery in this long novel that is lacking in nearly all other modern novels. It is a very high achievement for any author; for a woman it is amazing. Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith has given us the inside workings of a rough man's life from his earliest youth to his full four-score years: the secrets of the soil lie bare before her scrutiny, and both in characterisation and in descriptive power she shows a power which is nothing short of genius.

All her books deal with a mighty conflict between a man's tugging desires. In _Tamarisk Town_ the conflict is between a man's love of a woman and his ambition to build and develop a seaside town. In _Green Apple Harvest_ the conflict lies between a man's love for a woman and his soul's salvation. It is in this last novel of hers that we get perhaps Sheila Kaye-Smith's most telling descriptions.