South Riding (66 page)

He had kept his vow until he learned that at any moment he might cease to be able to write another cheque. Then he sat down and curtly explained the situation, declaring that as long as he lived and earned, he could keep Muriel, but if he died, there was money adequate for Midge alone.

But even now, in his new and strange tranquillity, his mind shied from the memory of that letter and of his father-in-law’s unexpectedly kind reply. Something warm and genial in the old man touched a chord of sentiment in Carne’s heart. He still loved lords. He still was proud to be Lord Sedgmire’s son-in-law. But the whole episode was too painful for voluntary recollection.

Riding south now, between the glazed purpling furrows and the white leaping waves, he escaped as usual from memory into judgment. He cast an experienced eye across the fields. Foster’s out ploughing late, he thought. That’s just it with smallholders. No trade union regulations, no tribunals. You can get on when you work on your own.

Those seeds are forward. I wonder if we can persuade Naylor to get the lambs out early enough this spring.

There was a yearly battle between shepherd and farmer. Carne preferred his seeds and lambs to grow up together, nourishing each other. Naylor, his eye on the lambs alone, liked to keep them under his eye as long as possible, in the paddocks round the farm.

A wheeling flock of seagulls screamed and circled up from the cliff. The black horse started and slithered on treacly clay. The path had been kneaded to the texture of butter by the small pointed hooves of a flock of ewes. A burst of sleet blew suddenly from the sea, stinging Carne’s face. He must hurry on but the path was bad, worse than he had believed it. He dared not canter on such a slippery surface. He flapped his rein and started forward into the long easy hacking trot of’ the riding farmer.

He was still thinking of Muriel. She haunted him as he rode south against the storm. Always until now he had reproached himself because he had married her and marriage had destroyed her. But now from his new-found assurance and pride of death, he could see the situation with greater justice. He had not pursued her; she had pursued him. From the beginning the choice, the initiative, had been hers and not his.

He loved her. He had been shaken by amazement at their first meeting, profoundly stirred by her beauty, her courage, her spirit. But it would never have occurred to him to cross the barrier which divides the county from sporting farmers. He was temperamentally conventional and emotionally docile. He would have served her in silence and lent her horses, sought for her picture in the
Tatler
, cherished her memory, and married a tennis-playing lawyer’s daughter from Kingsport. But Muriel had willed it otherwise.

It was she who manoeuvred their more frequent meetings. It was she who got herself invited again in the spring to the South Riding. It was she who persuaded him to buy a two-guinea ticket for the Hunt Ball at Lessil Grange. It was she who led the way to the high north tower. The leads were flat there, and artificial battlements gave a castellated effect to the nineteenth-century building. The snow powdered the roof and outlined the gables. She drew away from him and leaned in her scarlet cloak against the broken parapet, her face upturned to the moon. The swing and beat of a waltz rose from the unseen ballroom. Afraid of her, afraid of himself, afraid of her fierce charm for him and of his clumsy troubled passion, he said, “It’s cold up here. Hadn’t we better go back to the others?” Her high disdainful voice was cold as the frost. “By all means. Go down. I should hate you to catch cold.” And he, “But you? I’m all right. It’s you who’ll catch cold.” And she, “But I’m not going down.” Incredulous and stupid, he gasped, “Eh? What did you say?” She stamped her satin shoe on the white snow, and cried, “I’m not going. I don’t want to go. Don’t you see, you fool? I don’t want to go back to them—ever?”

To this moment, riding against the twilight storm, he could feel again that tumult of his senses as he blustered, “But you must, you know. Your people will be waiting.” “My people!” Her high shrill laughter flicked him. “Always thinking of my people, aren’t you? Oh, my dear Robert. What an impossible snob you are.”

Snob? Snob? Of course, he always thought of her people. Was it not her family which divided them? He stared at her, torn, furious, intimidated, not knowing how to take her— never knowing how to take her.

Then suddenly came the moment when she had swayed recklessly backwards, hanging out, her hands clutching the stone, over the black dizzy air. Still halting, stupid, he had stood there protesting, “That’s dangerous. Come back, Miss Sedgmire.” And she, laughing, jeered, “I’m not coming back. Don’t you see? I’m not coming back. I don’t want my people. I don’t want comfort. If you want me, come and get me. Look!” And she dropped her hold and leaned back, her arms outstretched to him, so that if he had not leapt forward, always quicker to move than to speak in any crisis, and caught hold of her hands, she must have fallen, down from the tower to the paved court below.

He had never understood her. Did she mean to do it? Did she really mean to kill herself unless he caught her? For once she lay in his arms his leaping instincts spoke louder than all the cautious faltering of his mind. Later he was to learn that her recklessness had no limit. The final barrier which less abnormal people set between themselves and complete fool hardiness had been omitted from her composition. But he never knew her, never, never. In all her fears and rages, her tempestuous outraging of conventionalities, her insolent mockery, her melting tenderness, she remained a stranger to him, lovely, enchanting, perilous, incalculable.

Nothing had happened as he had expected. She had flouted the country, upsetting rectors and insulting squires. She had been charming to his poorer relations, bewildering in her
bonhomie
to his farm labourers; Hicks and the men and the villagers adored her; she rode like a wild cat, danced like a bacchante, and took her own wild way from Maythorpe to Mayfair, from Paris to Vienna, from Monte Carlo to Baden-Baden. And wherever she went she dragged after her or summoned to her the farmer whom, for a thoughtless whim, she had desired to marry.

Perhaps she loved him. He would never know. They had had moments, though her rages were more frequent than her surrenders. Once she had thrown all his possessions, one after the other, out of their hotel window in Monte Carlo. Once she had maintained a terrifying silence all the way in the train from San Sebastian. She had gone there by herself, then telegraphed ordering him to join her, and when he came, lumbering across Europe, anxious and uncomfortable, she turned upon him, rated him for his incurable stupidity, and spoke no further word to him for a week.

He did not know if she had been faithful to him. She had boasted of a lover at Baden-Baden. She had once denied that Midge was his own daughter. She declared that she did not know which of the officers with whom she had played in her final escapade before his fatal last leave in the winter of 1917 might not have been the father of their child. And when it happened that the outcome had proved so tragic, when, after the child was born, she relapsed into intermittent insanity, there had been times when he had longed for proof that this was not his doing, that the one occasion when he had forced himself upon her, taking by violence what her whim refused, had not been the final cause of her destruction.

He did not know, and he would never know. She had not loved him as he understood love, had never desired to shield, to serve, to comfort; had never glowed with a rapture that lit the world with burning glory—as the pale slope of the earth burned now along the far horizon—because the beloved was near to be seen, heard, fondled.

But he had loved her. That at least she gave him, in return for the pain, the conflict, the violation of all his decent habits. She had dragged him from his familiar limitations, from farming, from sport, from comforts and conventions; she had shamed, outraged, derided, ruined and betrayed him. But she had given in return this unique experience. He had loved her. And because he was at heart quite a simple person, love for him had not meant—except for that one night of jealousy and anger—violence and domination and possession. His love had suffered long and was kind; it envied not, was not puffed up, sought not its own interest, was not easily provoked, and thought no evil. It had asked only the privilege of service—and that had been given in unusual measure. Loving Muriel Sedgmire had cost Carne all other things that he had been reared to value—and he had never even asked himself if she had been worth their loss.

Yet, just because he had never been certain of Muriel, it had amused him to flirt and quarrel with women like Sarah Burton. She was a grand girl, a sturdy, fine, vital, unfrightened creature. The thought of his illness in the hotel humiliated him. He was ashamed and disappointed. He felt that he had cut a poor figure. Even to remember what happened recalled that nightmare pain—the rending, overwhelming, unspeakable agony when he had rolled sweating and panting, incapable of control, making a complete fool of himself.

She would forgive him. He was sure of her fundamental courage and generosity. But it would be long before he would forgive himself—except, thank God, for the fact that it had happened with Sarah and not with Muriel.

He had not been surprised by her advances. He knew that women found him attractive, and he liked them. These brief and casual encounters had made the bitter tragedy of his marriage bearable. They meant nothing to him after they were over but a certain flattery, a certain gratitude, a certain memory of passing pleasure. He hoped that the women enjoyed them as much as he did.

The path grew narrower. Here the cliff had crumbled. In one case the furrows led straight into empty air, where headland and all had been washed away after a heavy rain.

The horse trod carefully. Carne had left the reins loose. He was massaging his fingers. A pain in his arms made him wonder if this was the ghost of an old pain or the herald of one that was coming on. He groped for his nitrate of amyl and remembered that he had left the tin at home in his other waistcoat. He did not want to be seized by an attack here on the cliff. He urged the horse more quickly, but still his mouth curved in a smile of preoccupation. Below him, the waves broke as they touched the landfall, reared and fountained, tossing their spray with the sleet into his face. He had little love for the unquiet water, but to his right lay the element that he had always trusted. The land stretched dark and unbroken to the sunset. A curious tawny bar of copper lay pressed between the dark clouds and ragged trees of the horizon. It reminded him of something.

He was watching it idly when a startled blackbird lurched from a wind-blown thornbush, squawking shrilly, and was off with a flurry of black feathers and golden beak. The horse, rearing sideways, brought his feet down together on to an overhanging ledge of turf. Beneath that sudden blow the earth broke and crumbled. Carne’s mind was on the sunset, and the confusion of its colour with some pleasant recollection. Before he could draw his reins, it was too late. Recognising Sarah’s brave oriflamme of hair, remembering her gallantry, comforted and flattered by her kindness, he turned to see the white waves roaring upwards beneath him, and saw no more for ever.

“
The Clerk submitted the Draft Preliminary Statements, Schedules A & B in connection with the Kingsport (Southern and Eastern Districts) Town Planning Scheme which had been received from the Kingsport Corporation and South Riding Joint Committee, and the Committee considered the observations of the County Surveyor on the Schedules.

“
Resolved
—
That the Committee consider the Kingsport (Southern and Eastern Districts) Town Planning Scheme
—
Schedule B—should if possible be incorporated in the South Riding Rural Planning Scheme, and that the Clerk be instructed to take the necessary steps for inclusion of the scheme in the draft to be submitted to the County Council.
”

Minutes of the Housing and Town Planning Committee
of the South Riding County Council. April, 1934.

T
HE DAFFODIL
sheathes bent in the harsh bleak wind. Beneath the shrubbery the soil was brindled with frail sooty-faced snowdrops and green-frilled golden aconites. Jonquils and narcissi pierced with their upthrusting spears the unmown grass; but showed no flowers. Snaith strolled round his garden, a froth of cats at his feet.

Now he scolded a tabby for the hideous vice of bulb-eating; now he stooped and touched a rich purple tuft of primula on the rockery; now he stood contemplating the hard black buds on the half-hollow ash-tree.

He did not love the spring. He felt himself alien and outcast among all this building of nests, this mating of birds and animals. The wild white-flowered dead nettle, with its sweet honeyed lip, the clinging goose grass and gross squatting dock were inimical to him. He saw the fierce needles of fine green corn, the young savage lambs knocking and thrusting at their mothers, the swelling reddish buds on the hawthorn hedge, combine in the monstrous battle for rebirth, and it angered him that so fragile a creature as a wren, a mouse or daffodil should renew its lusty life while he moved through the earth without desire of increase.

He was aware that sometimes, in his plans for the happiness of the South Riding, he was moved by a secret desire to press down, to raze, to subjugate the spring. He would bind it with cement and concrete, crush it with engines, scoop out great wounds from the fecund earth, and set there race-tracks and roads and villas. He would drive away the rustling, purring, mating creatures that lurked in the banks and hedges. All this chaos of natural life should respond to his dominating will. It should. It should.