The Freelands

Mr. Cuthcott turned to the room and let his screwed-up glance wander. He looked just then particularly as if he were going to bite.

“If you take ‘em at their own valuation: Yes. If at the country’s: So-so. If at mine: Ha! I know what you’d like to ask: Should I be a Bigwig in THEIR estimation? Not I! As you knock about, Miss Freeland, you’ll find out one thing – all bigwiggery is founded on: Scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. Seriously, these are only tenpenny ones; but the mischief is, that in the matter of ‘the Land,’ the men who really are in earnest are precious scarce. Nothing short of a rising such as there was in 1832 would make the land question real, even for the moment. Not that I want to see one – God forbid! Those poor doomed devils were treated worse than dogs, and would be again.”

Before Nedda could pour out questions about the rising in 1832, Stanley’s voice said:

“Cuthcott, I want to introduce you!”

Her new friend screwed his eyes up tighter and, muttering something, put out his hand to her.

“Thank you for our talk. I hope we shall meet again. Any time you want to know anything – I’ll be only too glad. Good night!”

She felt the squeeze of his hand, warm and dry, but rather soft, as of a man who uses a pen too much; saw him following her uncle across the room, with his shoulders a little hunched, as if preparing to inflict, and ward off, blows. And with the thought: ‘He must be jolly when he gives them one!’ she turned once more to the darkness, than which he had said there was nothing nicer. It smelled of new-mown grass, was full of little shiverings of leaves, and all colored like the bloom of a black grape. And her heart felt soothed.

CHAPTER IX

“…When I first saw Derek I thought I should never feel anything but shy and hopeless. In four days, only in four days, the whole world is different… And yet, if it hadn’t been for that thunder-storm, I shouldn’t have got over being shy in time. He has never loved anybody – nor have I. It can’t often be like that – it makes it solemn. There’s a picture somewhere – not a good one, I know – of a young Highlander being taken away by soldiers from his sweetheart. Derek is fiery and wild and shy and proud and dark – like the man in that picture. That last day along the hills – along and along – with the wind in our faces, I could have walked forever; and then Joyfields at the end! Their mother’s wonderful; I’m afraid of her. But Uncle Tod is a perfect dear. I never saw any one before who noticed so many things that I didn’t, and nothing that I did. I am sure he has in him what Mr. Cuthcott said we were all losing – the love of simple, natural conditions. And then, THE moment, when I stood with Derek at the end of the orchard, to say good-by. The field below covered with those moony-white flowers, and the cows all dark and sleepy; the holy feeling down there was wonderful, and in the branches over our heads, too, and the velvety, starry sky, and the dewiness against one’s face, and the great, broad silence – it was all worshipping something, and I was worshipping – worshipping happiness. I WAS happy, and I think HE was. Perhaps I shall never be so happy again. When he kissed me I didn’t think the whole world had so much happiness in it. I know now that I’m not cold a bit; I used to think I was. I believe I could go with him anywhere, and do anything he wanted. What would Dad think? Only the other day I was saying I wanted to know everything. One only knows through love. It’s love that makes the world all beautiful – makes it like those pictures that seem to be wrapped in gold, makes it like a dream – no, not like a dream – like a wonderful tune. I suppose that’s glamour – a goldeny, misty, lovely feeling, as if my soul were wandering about with his – not in my body at all. I want it to go on and on wandering – oh! I don’t want it back in my body, all hard and inquisitive and aching! I shall never know anything so lovely as loving him and being loved. I don’t want anything more – nothing! Stay with me, please – Happiness! Don’t go away and leave me!.. They frighten me, though; he frightens me – their idealism; wanting to do great things, and fight for justice. If only I’d been brought up more like that – but everything’s been so different. It’s their mother, I think, even more than themselves. I seem to have grown up just looking on at life as at a show; watching it, thinking about it, trying to understand – not living it at all. I must get over that; I will. I believe I can tell the very moment I began to love him. It was in the schoolroom the second evening. Sheila and I were sitting there just before dinner, and he came, in a rage, looking splendid. ‘That footman put out everything just as if I were a baby – asked me for suspenders to fasten on my socks; hung the things on a chair in order, as if I couldn’t find out for myself what to put on first; turned the tongues of my shoes out! – curled them over!’ Then Derek looked at me and said: ‘Do they do that for you? – And poor old Gaunt, who’s sixty-six and lame, has three shillings a week to buy him everything. Just think of that! If we had the pluck of flies – ’ And he clenched his fists. But Sheila got up, looked hard at me, and said: ‘That’ll do, Derek.’ Then he put his hand on my arm and said: ‘It’s only Cousin Nedda!’ I began to love him then; and I believe he saw it, because I couldn’t take my eyes away. But it was when Sheila sang ‘The Red Sarafan,’ after dinner, that I knew for certain. ‘The Red Sarafan’ – it’s a wonderful song, all space and yearning, and yet such calm – it’s the song of the soul; and he was looking at me while she sang. How can he love me? I am nothing – no good for anything! Alan calls him a ‘run-up kid, all legs and wings.’ Sometimes I hate Alan; he’s conventional and stodgy – the funny thing is that he admires Sheila. She’ll wake him up; she’ll stick pins into him. No, I don’t want Alan hurt – I want every one in the world to be happy, happy – as I am… The next day was the thunder-storm. I never saw lightning so near – and didn’t care a bit. If he were struck I knew I should be; that made it all right. When you love, you don’t care, if only the something must happen to you both. When it was over, and we came out from behind the stack and walked home through the fields, all the beasts looked at us as if we were new and had never been seen before; and the air was ever so sweet, and that long, red line of cloud low down in the purple, and the elm-trees so heavy and almost black. He put his arm round me, and I let him… It seems an age to wait till they come to stay with us next week. If only Mother likes them, and I can go and stay at Joyfields. Will she like them? It’s all so different to what it would be if they were ordinary. But if he were ordinary I shouldn’t love him; it’s because there’s nobody like him. That isn’t a loverish fancy – you only have to look at him against Alan or Uncle Stanley or even Dad. Everything he does is so different; the way he walks, and the way he stands drawn back into himself, like a stag, and looks out as if he were burning and smouldering inside; even the way he smiles. Dad asked me what I thought of him! That was only the second day. I thought he was too proud, then. And Dad said: ‘He ought to be in a Highland regiment; pity – great pity!’ He is a fighter, of course. I don’t like fighting, but if I’m not ready to, he’ll stop loving me, perhaps. I’ve got to learn. O Darkness out there, help me! And Stars, help me! O God, make me brave, and I will believe in you forever! If you are the spirit that grows in things in spite of everything, until they’re like the flowers, so perfect that we laugh and sing at their beauty, grow in me, too; make me beautiful and brave; then I shall be fit for him, alive or dead; and that’s all I want. Every evening I shall stand in spirit with him at the end of that orchard in the darkness, under the trees above the white flowers and the sleepy cows, and perhaps I shall feel him kiss me again… I’m glad I saw that old man Gaunt; it makes what they feel more real to me. He showed me that poor laborer Tryst, too, the one who mustn’t marry his wife’s sister, or have her staying in the house without marrying her. Why should people interfere with others like that? It does make your blood boil! Derek and Sheila have been brought up to be in sympathy with the poor and oppressed. If they had lived in London they would have been even more furious, I expect. And it’s no use my saying to myself ‘I don’t know the laborer, I don’t know his hardships,’ because he is really just the country half of what I do know and see, here in London, when I don’t hide my eyes. One talk showed me how desperately they feel; at night, in Sheila’s room, when we had gone up, just we four. Alan began it; they didn’t want to, I could see; but he was criticising what some of those Bigwigs had said – the ‘Varsity makes boys awfully conceited. It was such a lovely night; we were all in the big, long window. A little bat kept flying past; and behind the copper-beech the moon was shining on the lake. Derek sat in the windowsill, and when he moved he touched me. To be touched by him gives me a warm shiver all through. I could hear him gritting his teeth at what Alan said – frightfully sententious, just like a newspaper: ‘We can’t go into land reform from feeling, we must go into it from reason.’ Then Derek broke out: ‘Walk through this country as we’ve walked; see the pigsties the people live in; see the water they drink; see the tiny patches of ground they have; see the way their roofs let in the rain; see their peeky children; see their patience and their hopelessness; see them working day in and day out, and coming on the parish at the end! See all that, and then talk about reason! Reason! It’s the coward’s excuse, and the rich man’s excuse, for doing nothing. It’s the excuse of the man who takes jolly good care not to see for fear that he may come to feel! Reason never does anything, it’s too reasonable. The thing is to act; then perhaps reason will be jolted into doing something.’ But Sheila touched his arm, and he stopped very suddenly. She doesn’t trust us. I shall always be being pushed away from him by her. He’s just twenty, and I shall be eighteen in a week; couldn’t we marry now at once? Then, whatever happened, I couldn’t be cut off from him. If I could tell Dad, and ask him to help me! But I can’t – it seems desecration to talk about it, even to Dad. All the way up in the train to-day, coming back home, I was struggling not to show anything; though it’s hateful to keep things from Dad. Love alters everything; it melts up the whole world and makes it afresh. Love is the sun of our spirits, and it’s the wind. Ah, and the rain, too! But I won’t think of that!.. I wonder if he’s told Aunt Kirsteen!..”

CHAPTER X

While Nedda sat, long past midnight, writing her heart out in her little, white, lilac-curtained room of the old house above the Spaniard’s Road, Derek, of whom she wrote, was walking along the Malvern hills, hurrying upward in the darkness. The stars were his companions; though he was no poet, having rather the fervid temper of the born swordsman, that expresses itself in physical ecstasies. He had come straight out from a stormy midnight talk with Sheila. What was he doing – had been the burden of her cry – falling in love just at this moment when they wanted all their wits and all their time and strength for this struggle with the Mallorings? It was foolish, it was weak; and with a sweet, soft sort of girl who could be no use. Hotly he had answered: What business was it of hers? As if one fell in love when one wished! She didn’t know – her blood didn’t run fast enough! Sheila had retorted, “I’ve more blood in my big toe than Nedda in all her body! A lot of use you’ll be, with your heart mooning up in London!” And crouched together on the end of her bed, gazing fixedly up at him through her hair, she had chanted mockingly: “Here we go gathering wool and stars – wool and stars – wool and stars!”

He had not deigned to answer, but had gone out, furious with her, striding over the dark fields, scrambling his way through the hedges toward the high loom of the hills. Up on the short grass in the cooler air, with nothing between him and those swarming stars, he lost his rage. It never lasted long – hers was more enduring. With the innate lordliness of a brother he already put it down to jealousy. Sheila was hurt that he should want any one but her; as if his love for Nedda would make any difference to their resolution to get justice for Tryst and the Gaunts, and show those landed tyrants once for all that they could not ride roughshod.

Nedda! with her dark eyes, so quick and clear, so loving when they looked at him! Nedda, soft and innocent, the touch of whose lips had turned his heart to something strange within him, and wakened such feelings of chivalry! Nedda! To see whom for half a minute he felt he would walk a hundred miles.

This boy’s education had been administered solely by his mother till he was fourteen, and she had brought him up on mathematics, French, and heroism. His extensive reading of history had been focussed on the personality of heroes, chiefly knights errant, and revolutionaries. He had carried the worship of them to the Agricultural College, where he had spent four years; and a rather rough time there had not succeeded in knocking romance out of him. He had found that you could not have such beliefs comfortably without fighting for them, and though he ended his career with the reputation of a rebel and a champion of the weak, he had had to earn it. To this day he still fed himself on stories of rebellions and fine deeds. The figures of Spartacus, Montrose, Hofer, Garibaldi, Hampden, and John Nicholson, were more real to him than the people among whom he lived, though he had learned never to mention – especially not to the matter-of-fact Sheila – his encompassing cloud of heroes; but, when he was alone, he pranced a bit with them, and promised himself that he too would reach the stars. So you may sometimes see a little, grave boy walking through a field, unwatched as he believes, suddenly fling his feet and his head every which way. An active nature, romantic, without being dreamy and book-loving, is not too prone to the attacks of love; such a one is likely to survive unscathed to a maturer age. But Nedda had seduced him, partly by the appeal of her touchingly manifest love and admiration, and chiefly by her eyes, through which he seemed to see such a loyal, and loving little soul looking. She had that indefinable something which lovers know that they can never throw away. And he had at once made of her, secretly, the crown of his active romanticism – the lady waiting for the spoils of his lance. Queer is the heart of a boy – strange its blending of reality and idealism!

Climbing at a great pace, he reached Malvern Beacon just as it came dawn, and stood there on the top, watching. He had not much aesthetic sense; but he had enough to be impressed by the slow paling of the stars over space that seemed infinite, so little were its dreamy confines visible in the May morning haze, where the quivering crimson flags and spears of sunrise were forging up in a march upon the sky. That vision of the English land at dawn, wide and mysterious, hardly tallied with Mr. Cuthcott’s view of a future dedicate to Park and Garden City. While Derek stood there gazing, the first lark soared up and began its ecstatic praise. Save for that song, silence possessed all the driven dark, right out to the Severn and the sea, and the fastnesses of the Welsh hills, and the Wrekin, away in the north, a black point in the gray. For a moment dark and light hovered and clung together. Would victory wing back into night or on into day? Then, as a town is taken, all was over in one overmastering rush, and light proclaimed. Derek tightened his belt and took a bee-line down over the slippery grass. He meant to reach the cottage of the laborer Tryst before that early bird was away to the fields. He meditated as he went. Bob Tryst was all right! If they only had a dozen or two like him! A dozen or two whom they could trust, and who would trust each other and stand firm to form the nucleus of a strike, which could be timed for hay harvest. What slaves these laborers still were! If only they could be relied on, if only they would stand together! Slavery! It WAS slavery; so long as they could be turned out of their homes at will in this fashion. His rebellion against the conditions of their lives, above all against the manifold petty tyrannies that he knew they underwent, came from use of his eyes and ears in daily contact with a class among whom he had been more or less brought up. In sympathy with, and yet not of them, he had the queer privilege of feeling their slights as if they were his own, together with feelings of protection, and even of contempt that they should let themselves be slighted. He was near enough to understand how they must feel; not near enough to understand why, feeling as they did, they did not act as he would have acted. In truth, he knew them no better than he should.

He found Tryst washing at his pump. In the early morning light the big laborer’s square, stubborn face, with its strange, dog-like eyes, had a sodden, hungry, lost look. Cutting short ablutions that certainly were never protracted, he welcomed Derek, and motioned him to pass into the kitchen. The young man went in, and perched himself on the window-sill beside a pot of Bridal Wreath. The cottage was one of the Mallorings’, and recently repaired. A little fire was burning, and a teapot of stewed tea sat there beside it. Four cups and spoons and some sugar were put out on a deal table, for Tryst was, in fact, brewing the morning draught of himself and children, who still lay abed up-stairs. The sight made Derek shiver and his eyes darken. He knew the full significance of what he saw.

“Did you ask him again, Bob?”

“Yes, I asked ‘im.”

“What did he say?”

“Said as orders was plain. ‘So long as you lives there,’ he says, ‘along of yourself alone, you can’t have her come back.’”

“Did you say the children wanted looking after badly? Did you make it clear? Did you say Mrs. Tryst wished it, before she – ”

“I said that.”

“What did he say then?”

“‘Sorry for you, m’lad, but them’s m’lady’s orders, an’ I can’t go contrary. I don’t wish to go into things,’ he says; ‘you know better’n I how far ‘tis gone when she was ‘ere before; but seein’ as m’lady don’t never give in to deceased wife’s sister marryin’, if she come back ‘tis certain to be the other thing. So, as that won’t do neither, you go elsewhere,’ he says.”

Having spoken thus at length, Tryst lifted the teapot and poured out the dark tea into the three cups.

“Will ‘ee have some, sir?”

Derek shook his head.

Taking the cups, Tryst departed up the narrow stairway. And Derek remained motionless, staring at the Bridal Wreath, till the big man came down again and, retiring into a far corner, sat sipping at his own cup.

“Bob,” said the boy suddenly, “do you LIKE being a dog; put to what company your master wishes?”

Tryst set his cup down, stood up, and crossed his thick arms – the swift movement from that stolid creature had in it something sinister; but he did not speak.