Part 19 (2/2)
Pa.s.sages of this sort abound:
”The moon was climbing up above the mists, and among them huddled the still shapes of the sleeping country, dim outlines of woods and stacks and hedges. Here and there a star winked across the fields from a farmhouse window, or a pond caught the faint, fog-thickened light of the moon. There was no wind, only a catch of frost on the motionless air, and the mist had m.u.f.fled all the lanes into silence, so that even the small sounds of the night--the barking of a dog at Bantony, the trot of hoofs on the highroad, the far-off scream and groan of a train, the suck of all the Fullers' feet in the mud--were hushed to something even fainter than the munch of cows on the other side of the hedge.”
Or this: ”The mists had sunk into the earth or shredded into the sky, and the distances that had been blurred since twilight were now almost frostily keen of outline and colour. The air was thinly sweet-scented with the sodden earth, with the moist, golden leaves, with the straw of rick and barn-roof made pungent by dew.”
Robert Fuller of Bodingmares falls in love with Hannah Iden, a gipsy, who is not so easy to conquer as the other girls he had made love to....
”'I want her, Clem,'” he says to his brother. ”'She's lovely ... her mouth makes my mouth ache ... she smells of gra.s.s ... and her eyes in the shadder--they maake me want to drownd myself. I wish her eyes wur water and I could drownd myself in 'em.'”
Eventually she gives in to his importunity.
”'I love her,' said Robert, 'not because she's sweet, but because I can't help it; surelye ... she'll let me love her--that's all I ask. All I ask is fur her to taake me and let me love her.... She doan't want a boy to love her--she wants a man.... Hannah wurn't born to maake men happy--she wur born to maake them men.'”
Clem, the young brother, is unhappy about Robert and confronts Hannah, who retorts: ”'You're afraid of me because I've taught your Bob how to love, as none of the silly, fat young girls in this place have taught him.... I could teach you how to love, little hedgehog, if I hadn't your brother for scholard.'”
”For long afterwards her shadow seemed to lie on the dusk--on the wet gleam of the road, on the twigs and spines of the th.o.r.n.y hedges, on the clear sky with its spatter of yellow rain. Yet it was not her beauty which defiled, but the cruelty in which it was rooted like a rose-tree in dung.... Her crude physical power would not have disgusted him if it had had its accustomed growth out of a healthy instinct.... She was like the bitter kernel of a ripe, sweet fruit--she was the hard stone of Nature's heart....”
All the same she contributed to Clem's own manhood, for it is not long after that he holds his own sweetheart Polly, despite her struggling, and loves her like a man at last with a pa.s.sion that is not free from fierceness. So he at any rate achieves his happiness in marriage and becomes Polly's ”dear Clemmy ... his sweetness and gentleness were fundamental--a deep grat.i.tude stirred in her heart, making her take his dark, woolly head in her hands and kiss it with the slow, reverent kisses of a thankful child, and then suddenly find herself the mother with that head upon her breast.”
But Robert finds no such happiness with his gipsy love.
”'Nannie, you're cruel--I can't maake you out. You let me love you, and I'm full of heaven, but in between whiles you're no more'n a lady acquaintance.'”
To which she replies: ”'I'm not one of your Gentile rawnees who loves and kisses all day and half the night.... I love when I feels like it, and I bet I give you more to remember than any silly fat girl in these parts....'”
He has to take her on her own terms ... but she loves his bulk and beauty, and on this occasion she yields and her hardness melts into his pa.s.sion ”as a rock melts into a wave.”
But she goes away, and betrays him by marrying one of her own kind and so drives Robert almost out of his mind.
As a reaction he turns to Mabel, an anaemic, town-bred, artificial type of girl who imparted to his ”flagging taste a savour as of salt and olives.”
”She brought the atmosphere of streets and shops and picture-houses into the stuffy little parlour of a country cottage.... After his country loves, it excited him to touch the novelty of a powdered skin--Mabel's powder and scent were part of a new and very gripping charm....”
”It was June when Hannah came back. The hay had been cut in the low fields by the river, but the high grounds were still russet with sorrel and plantain, and sainfoin waiting for the scythe. The lanes were dim with the warm dust that hung over them and mixed with the cloud of chervil and cow-parsley and fennel that filmed the hedges, making with it a sweet, stale scent of dust and flowers. Down by the watercourses the hawthorn had faded, and the meadowsweet sicklied the still air that thickened above the d.y.k.es and at night crept up as a damp, perfumed mist to farmhouse walls.”
Suddenly Robert makes up his mind. To forget Hannah he decides to marry Mabel, and does so. ”She was a lovely little girl, with her soft, powdered skin and her fluffy hair and her dainty ways.” But she does not take kindly to her new life.
”Lying there in bed, in her flimsy, town-made night-gown, staring at the black, star-dazzled sky, listening to the sough of the reeds and the moan of the water ... she would feel strangely and terrifyingly lonely ... the common, homely fields seemed to take on a savage remoteness ...
even the man at her side, so familiar and commonplace to her now, by day her playfellow and companion and master, now seemed to take his part in the strangeness of it all ... he belonged to this dark, unfriendly country, he was part of its clay; it had worked itself into him, his very skin smelt of its soil.”
She gets jealous lest he should still hanker after his early love, and she taunts him with it. A frequent drinker, one night he returns drunk and has an accident: he is rescued by a frenzied zealot, who frightens him by depicting the terrors of h.e.l.l and tries to save his soul, with the result that when he is well again he tramps round the country-side trying to convert all those who are not yet ”saved.” Mabel somewhat naturally looks on his phase as evidence of lunacy. He gives up smoking and drinking and looks on himself as one of G.o.d's chosen.
”'I'm saafe, I'll never go in fear of h.e.l.l no more.... When I think wot I wur--a very worm and no man, as the Scriptures say--and then I think how He has accepted me.... I reckon I'll give all my life to Him, to serve Him and love Him, and reckon as I'll never drink nor smoke nor grumble at Mabel as long as I live.'”
But Clem and Polly are not satisfied about him.
”'I can't help wis.h.i.+ng,'” said Polly to her husband, ”'as he hadn't got hold of such a Salvation sort of religion--I can't help thinking as he'll find as much trouble on his way to G.o.d as ever he found on his way to the devil.'”
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