South Riding (65 page)

She spun round as the urbane handsome school inspector entered.

Carne’s reactions were less rapid.

“Oh, Miss Teasdale, how are you?” cried Sarah, over-effusive, on the crest of a wave of hysteria yet unbroken, which never now would break. “It
is
nice to see you again. You found your way all right? Do come in. This is one of our governors, Mr. Carne, of Maythorpe.”

She caught a glimpse of a huge dark lowering figure, Jove from the thunder cloud, heard a rumbling mutter, saw an inclination which might be a bow or a menace, and he was gone.

“One of your local problems?” smiled Emily Teasdale, who liked Sarah.

“One of my local problems,” agreed Sarah, and her high light laughter rang down the passage after him.

She hoped he heard it.

W
HEN
Carne strode out of Sarah Burton’s office, he was furious. He experienced all the physical symptoms of discordant passion. His pulses thumped in his temples, his throat was dry, his palms moist with perspiration, his breath rapid; but as he left the High School and walked rapidly down the street to his lawyer’s office, he was surprised to find how soon his rage diminished.

For the fact was that part of him had really enjoyed the quarrel. He was the hot-tempered son of a hot-tempered father, and for many years he had suffered from the necessity of controlling his turbulent nature. The woman with whom he had been most closely associated, his mother, whom he had loved and who had died, Muriel whom he adored and feared, Midge for whom he felt troubled solicitude, Elsie who gave notice if even mildly rebuked, were not of the type to whom a man can let himself go. One of the attractive qualities about Sarah Burton was the sense of robust self-confidence which she gave him. A real red-head, a fighter; she could look after herself. He felt at home with her and had, though he hardly knew it, gone out of his way to pick a quarrel with her as a self-prescribed tonic for his over-strained, exhausted nerves.

He had, indeed, a wretched day ahead of him. For the rest of the morning he sat closeted with Briggs, hearing exactly what kind of a fool his lawyer thought him. Within his heart he was almost growing sorry that he had ever called Snaith a thief and Huggins a cheating swindler. But since it seemed that he was beaten anyhow, he might just as well go down in a grand uproar as retire meekly from the South Riding. If he could expose this scandal before he went, he would at least leave his mark upon the county; he might not check corruption, but he would not be forgotten.

So he spent his morning with Briggs and his afternoon with his bank manager. He had decided to sacrifice Maythorpe; that was clear. The bank must take it, and if it sold the place to the Public Health Committee, that was its own business. After all, Midge was provided for; Sedgmire would pay for Muriel; Carne could go to that riding school outside Manchester.

It seemed odd to him that he was so indifferent. Perhaps when everything was lost, one cared no longer. Odd too that he could not see himself in Manchester. He did not really believe that he would ever lead out hacks for the fat wives of manufacturers, nor teach Lancashire schoolgirls how to groom their horses. Before the summer was over, he would have left the county; he would have begun a new life. But he just did not believe it.

On his way from the bank he met Mrs. Beddows, walking.

“Where are you off to?” she asked.

“Home now. I’m just fetching my horse.”

“And I’m just off to the High School. Sybil’s picking me up there and going to drive us home. They’ve had the inspector to-day.”

“I know. I saw her.” Carne heard himself chuckle.

“When did you see her?”

“This morning. Fine big woman.”

“What were you doing up there this morning?”

He rubbed his chin with a shy boyish movement. Then he smiled at his friend.

“Having a grand blow up with Sarah Burton. My word, she’s got a temper, hasn’t she?”

“You mean you have. Whatever were you quarrelling over?”

“Blest if I know now. Oh, yes. The new buildings. You know, really, she asks a bit too much. She practically told me to take Midge away.”

“Robert! It’s not serious?”

“Not on my part.”

“Can I tell her so?”

“If you want to.” His curious buoyancy took possession of him. Uncharacteristically he added, “Give her my love and tell her she’s a grand lass. I wouldn’t miss quarrelling with her for a great deal.”

But when Mrs. Beddows reached the High School, Sybil and Wendy and Midge were already waiting, Sarah closeted with Miss Teasdale, and the message, which was no more than a joke at most, went undelivered.

It was nearly six o’clock before Carne handed a shilling to the ostler and rode Black Hussar out of the inn yard.

The evening was wild with wind and clear with the lucid radiance of a stormy sunset. The big black horse pounded heavily across the cobbles and out on to the smooth cemented road. It had been raining heavily, and the polished surface was wet with showers and silvered with opalescent oil.

“Steady, boy, steady.” Carne reproved his horse. “You’re not in for the Grand National.” He did not want him slipping and straining his back again.

He trotted briskly on to the esplanade. A heavy pall of cloud overhung the sea. Waves crashed in foam round the solid breakwaters. The gulls blew screaming about a livid sky, but to the west, over the level land, a glory of liquid gold flooded the fields.

If I’m not back soon, I shall be caught in a storm, Carne told himself, and decided to take the short-cut along the cliffs.

He passed Dr. Dale, cycling home from a missionary talk— he passed Astell, taking the air after work at his printing press—he saw Huggins swaggering cheerfully from Drew’s office. He buttoned his coat against the buffeting wind, and turned his horse towards the south cliff path.

On his way home he had arranged to call on Dickson. He should catch him just before his evening round with the milk. Carne had given his three tenants notice, and had been arranging with the bank that they might buy their own land on easy terms. These were the men who could make modern farming pay, smallholders, milk-men, who asked only peasants’ incomes, and set all their families to work for them in the fields and buildings.

Carne felt no enmity for his successors. He felt extraordinarily little enmity for any one, even for the defrauding councillors whom he fought. Though he attributed his failure to their malice, his loss of his seat on the council to their opposition, he was amazed at the lightness of his spirit.

That young doctor in Manchester had cured him of all enduring bitterness or hatred.

For Robert Carne was in his way a religious man. He worshipped the creator of earth and heaven, the Lord of Harvest, the Ancient of Days and Seasons, who had in his beneficent providence ordained that Yorkshire should be the greatest county in England, which was the grandest country in the world, the motherland of the widest empire, the undoubted moral leader of civilisation, the mistress of the globe. He worshipped the God of order who had created farmers lords, of their labourers, the county and the gentry lords over the farmers, and the King lord above all his subjects under God. He worshipped the contrast of power and humility implied in his religion, and on Sunday evenings, in the pew which was his property, sang that God had put down the mighty from their seat, and had exalted the humble and meek, with no effect upon his social principles.

He had attended funerals and memorial services; he knew that man who is born of woman cometh up and is cut down, like a flower, fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. His mother had died when he was a boy; his father, a powerful and passionate man, during his son’s brief honeymoon with Muriel Sedgmire. ‘

Carne knew all about death. He had seen it on the hunting field and on the race-course, he, had seen it during air-raids on the remount depot where he had served in France. He had himself risked death a hundred times as sportsman and as soldier.

But he had never thought very much about it.

And now he knew that he lived under a threat, and quite calmly, since as a farmer he was trained to accept what was inevitable, he had come to terms with life.

Quietly and unobtrusively, on his return from Manchester, he had prepared himself for death, sitting up late at night in the small smoking-room, clipping elastic bands round rolls of paper, adding, subtracting, reckoning. His affairs were all in order.

He was tired. Never in all his life, not after the longest day’s hunting, not after devastating scenes with Muriel, had he known such devitalising, such complete fatigue. His arms ached; a compression wound itself about his chest; he found himself muttering as he rode about the fields: I’m so tired. Oh, God—I’m so tired. Yet he was curiously little troubled. A burden of responsibility had fallen from him. Always since he was a boy he had carried it. As eldest son, farmer, squire, husband, landlord, father, he had shouldered his obligations to other people.

But now he had been released. He was going to die. Somebody else must assume that burden for him. Somebody else must mend the roof of Dickson’s cowshed. Somebody else must expose corruption on the council. Somebody else must restrain the High School governors from indulging in extravagant new buildings. Somebody else must buy party frocks for Midge, take her to the dentist, and decide whether she should have special drill for her round shoulders.

It would have surprised Astell, meditating upon his own valediction to the South Riding, to realise how Carne, riding home along the cliffs to Maythorpe, thought with pride and anxiety of his own work on the council. He really believed that by fighting Socialism, expenditure and pauperism he was serving his generation and his people. So long as he lived he would strive for his principles, but death meant an easy surrender of his sword to any one wise enough to take and wield it.

He feared no more. His worst moment had come and he had survived it. Sitting at his desk in the small smoking-room, using the last sheets of his handsome expensive notepaper, he had written his first and last letter to Lord Sedgmire. After that, no other ordeal was intolerable. He had met his father-in-law on two occasions. There had been the interview when he went to Shropshire to declare his love, and announce that he intended to marry Muriel. That had been a tremendous scene. Lord Sedgmire had stamped up and down the great gaunt silver gallery and finally ordered Carne out of his house for ever. Lady Sedgmire, in her winged satin chair, had cursed and wept until her companion—a trained mental nurse—had conducted her, wailing and prophesying, from the room.

Carne had not gone home then. He had settled himself down at the local inn and waited till, on the following midnight, Muriel, superfluously dramatic, had climbed from her window and come to him, bright-eyed, furious, in a mackintosh, calling, “Take me in! Take me in! I cannot bear it!” So he had taken her—there—before the wedding, and married her three days later in London by special licence.

It had been a nine days’ wonder, a society elopement, a grand news story. The gossip columnists of two continents had reported how Lord Sedgmire’s daughter, the beauty of three seasons, had been locked in her room by irate parents, and run away with a polo-playing farmer. There had been photographs of Muriel in her court dress, and photographs of Carne in his polo kit, Carne holding a cup won in a point-to-point, Carne, in his velvet cap, riding to covert.

He had never been surprised that Lord Sedgmire hated him. He shared his father-in-law’s prejudices. He thought the publicity perfectly appalling. He never understood Muriel’s obvious enjoyment of it.

Only once again did he see Lord Sedgmire. In 1918 he had returned from France to find his infant daughter a little squirming red rat in the nurse’s arms, and his wife quietly raving with a persistent monotony which terrified him, and the doctors gravely diagnosing mental derangement.

He had driven his sluggish temperament then to rapid action. He had engaged nurses, sent for specialists. Everything that could be done, he had done. And when the final verdict was known, the disease named, defined and docketed, Carne had travelled down again to Shropshire, and called for the second time on his wife’s family, to announce the outcome of their ill-omened marriage.

It never occurred to him to evade the interview. All his life he had ridden straight at his fences. He faced his father-in-law and told him that, as the result of childbirth, his wife had lost her mental balance, and the doctors doubted her complete recovery.

“You knew her mother went that way?” Sedgmire asked, his white eyebrows bristling ferociously.

“Muriel told me,” Carne said, “after we were married.”

“I suppose you blame me, eh? Want me to take her back now—damaged goods, hey?”

“I’m damned if I do, sir. But I thought I ought to tell you.”

“All right, my boy. Very right and proper. If ever you’ve had enough of her, I’ll take her back. Make proper provision for her. But on conditions, you know. On conditions. You’ll have to give her up and leave her alone.”

Carne’s jaw had set. His stubborn smile had stiffened itself on his troubled face. He had stalked out of that house all pride and independence, vowing never to take a farthing from the Sedgmires, but to give Muriel every luxury of treatment, or of comfort that money could buy.