South Riding (68 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” squirmed Astell uncomfortably. He had no taste for metaphors and proverbs. He saw the fun of the fight before him, the smoke-filled halls, the older grey men with union badges in their buttonholes, the piles of fingered, soiled press cuttings in the offices. He was going back to work—back to life. He was happy, yet it never occurred to him that Snaith was envying him with a tormenting and bitter envy.

Snaith’s manservant came in with the evening paper.

“Sad thing this about Mr. Carne,” he said.

“What sad thing?”

Christie spread the paper on the lacquered table. Snaith read slowly the big black letters of the headline: “Fatality feared to well-known Yorkshire Sportsman.” And underneath: “Cliff Fall of Mr. Carne.”

“What is it?” asked Astell.

“Look at this.”

Astell came and stood behind him. Together they read.

“It is feared that Mr. Robert Carne, the well-known Yorkshire sportsman and gentleman farmer, who for thirteen years was member of the South Riding County Council for the division of Maythorpe, has met with a fatal accident. Last night he left the Crown Inn Stables at Kiplington at about 6 p.m. to ride home to his residence at Maythorpe Hall. On his way, he had arranged to call at Spring Farm for a business interview with his tenant, Mr. Eli Dickson. As he did not appear, Mr. Dickson visited Maythorpe Hall and learned from the servants that Mr. Carne had not arrived. It was supposed that business had detained him in Kiplington, but early this morning Mr. T. Beachall of Maythorpe, while gathering driftwood along the Maythorpe sands, at low tide, noticed a new and substantial fall of earth from the cliff, and on it, partially buried, the body of a horse. He quickly summoned help from Maythorpe village; the carcass was disinterred, and recognised as the famous Black Hussar, for many years winner of the Hunt Cup at the South Riding agricultural shows; Mr. Carne was riding this animal when he left the Crown Inn. His riding crop and hat were also found, but so far there has been discovered no trace of his body, which, it is thought, may have been washed out to sea. The path along the cliff had been newly broken and there is no doubt that while riding home yesterday evening, Mr. Carne found the earth breaking under him and was thrown from his mount in the act of falling. The coastal erosion along the south cliffs has long been a cause of anxiety to the local authorities. . . .”

“Suicide?” asked Astell.

“I doubt it,” Snaith replied.

There was a great deal more in the paper. About the Carnes of Maythorpe and their beneficent activities in the county; about Carne’s marriage to the Honourable Muriel Sedgmire (“now for some years an invalid”), about his war service, about his sporting and athletic prowess, about Midge (“now a pupil at the Kiplington High School for Girls, of which her father was a governor”), about the currents of the tide and the improbability of Mr. Carne’s survival after such a fall, even if the tide had not been high that evening.

“
Could
he be alive still?” asked Astell. “Could this be staged?”

“I hardly think so.”

“A getaway? He was in a fearful jam.”

“Yes; he was. But he wasn’t the sort to run away.” Snaith did not want to think so. He did not want to think of his opponent as less noble and obstinate than he had believed him.

He was shocked. This was something unforeseen and violent, something that disconcerted him, upsetting calculations.

Astell was less distressed. To him Carne had been a nuisance and an obstructionist. He had never forgotten that incident of the Public Assistance Committee, when the farmer had proved abler at comfort than himself. He could not pretend to feel any deep emotion. Carne was merely one enemy to his cause the less.

“Will this affect your plans—Schedule B, for instance?” he asked Snaith.

“No. Why should it?”

The little vice-chairman of the council seemed distracted, staring now at the paper, now at the dancing flames. Astell left soon. He had given his notice of withdrawal; he had agreed, as his last service to the council, to accept and work for Schedule B. He caught his bus in order to take a meeting at the Co-operative Women’s Guild at Dollstall.

But Snaith could not so easily evade the thought of Carne’s accident. Directly Astell had left, he set in motion the obsequious instruments of his active life. He seized the telephone and rang up the police, the bank, the lawyers. He became master of the facts of the situation. He learned of Carne’s financial failures, of his swollen expenses, of his recent efforts to set his house in order. He learned that already the insurance company was a little dubious. He tapped his pencil against his teeth and pondered, inexplicably distressed and yet somehow gratified by his discoveries.

He did not know quite what emotion moved him. He left the telephone, put on his overcoat, and went out into the garden. Away to the west the final tattered banners of a vivid sunset paled the sky. A ploughman, topping the rise, stood silhouetted for a moment against it, a grave traditional figure. On Snaith’s lawn his ancient ash creaked in the nagging wind. Old, thin, decaying; it had better come down, thought Snaith.

The Carnes of Maythorpe, he thought, were like that tree—rooted deep in the earth; they understood that; their leaves and branches were lifted high and all men saw them, a conspicuous growth, proud, decorative. What they could not see, what they had never learned to recognise, were the winds that blew from all the ends of the world, Canada, Argentine, Denmark, New Zealand, Russia. They would survive. But the wind and the rain and the storms from west to east, taxes and tariffs and subsidies and quotas, beef from the Argentine, wool from Australia, economic nationalism, fashions and crazes—all those imponderable influences of which their slow, strong, rigid minds took no heed—these would destroy them. If Carne were dead, or if he were in flight, what difference did that make? He was defeated. The tree must be cut down.

Yet there was no triumph in Snaith’s heart as he stood with his hand on that half-hollowed trunk. Carne had lived; he had been rooted deep in the soil; he had loved and hated and begotten and feared and dared. He had never shrunk back from life; he had done everything that struck his limited imagination as worth doing. When he fell into a blind passion for his peer’s daughter, he had married her. When his country went to War, he put on uniform. When his hounds hunted, he rode after them. He never held himself back as Snaith had done. His violent, immense, instinctive growth had brought him sorrow, but he had known colour, increase and passion. He had lived.

And I? thought Snaith. Between Carne who lived by instinct and Astell who lived by an idea, he felt that he was nothing—a stream of water, cold, metallic, barren, without colour or form, moving along its self-chosen channel till the sand sucked it up and it disappeared. Unfecund, flavourless, formless—a direction—a flow—a nothing. Here lieth one whose life was lived as water. It has evaporated; it no longer exists.

Then with a twist of vanity he lifted himself above his self-disgust.

After all, water has power, he thought. It does not only reflect pictures, it turns wheels, it irrigates valleys, it drives dynamos. Snaith thought of his houses, his works, his railways. Even now on the far bank of the Leame the ragged lights began to twinkle, first one, and then another; the trains roared up to Kingsport; the ships moved silently along the river. This was his world. He had
largely
helped to built it.

All that Astell could do was to stir a few more Clydesiders to sedition. All that Carne had done was to leave a wife who was mad and a daughter of tainted stock, a ruined farm and a dark romantic memory.

But I—thought Snaith. When he died the entire face of the South Riding would have changed, because he once had lived there.

I shall do better than any of them, he told himself.

At Willow Lodge, Alderman Mrs. Beddows held to her heart a sobbing quivering child, comforting her own sorrow by giving comfort.

Along the widening strip of earth-clogged sand, Hicks groped with his lantern, seeking for his master. Heyer and Sawdon followed him.

Up in her attic bedroom Sarah Burton crouched on her bed, dry-eyed, shocked by incredulous dismay and grief and horror.

She could hear her shrill wounding anger, telling Carne to take his daughter elsewhere. She could feel her shameless pursuit, her uncontrolled repulsion. She did not know if he had killed himself, as some were saying, or had fallen by accident, or if, perhaps, his illness had come upon him. But she could feel in her own body the wild sickening lurch as the horse stumbled, the rush through the cold air, the furious shock of the icy water. And she could not bear it.

It is my fault; she lacerated herself with her reproaches. I could have helped him. If I had thought of his need more than my pride. But now there is no comfort. Grief passes and life closes over loss; but for this, there is no remedy. He is dead and now I can never comfort him.

Oh, no, I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it. There will be no end for ever to this pain.

T
HE CYMBALS
clashed and were still; the violins held their last faint piercing note, then faded; the saxophone wailed to silence. Only the drums rattled their implacable thunder as eight hundred and seventy-six hearts quickened their beat, eight hundred and seventy-six pairs of lungs drew in their breath and held it, and the fifth Cingalese cyclist slowly reared himself upright from the shoulders of number four, who was already perched upon the shoulder of number three, who stood straddled from those of one and two as they swooped abreast round the stage on their glittering bicycles.

It was the fourth turn before the interval during the second house at the Kingsport Empire on the Saturday evening after the gigantic victory of the Kingsport Rangers over the West Riding Wanderers, and the city was en fête. There were well over a thousand people at the little Empire, but some were asleep, some in the bar, some already so much exalted by beer and noise and victory that they were incapable of further heightening of excitement as the human column swung circling, the head of number five hidden behind dark crimson drapery. After that glorious contest in the mud on the ground between Skerrow Road and St. Swithin’s place, after that last goal shot just before the whistle blew, even the sight of men risking their lives lacked flavour.

The air was thick with the sweet sickly pervasions of beer, rank tobacco, oranges, hot packed humanity and some perfumed disinfectant that the attendants, like amazons slaughtering invisible foes, sprayed haughtily down the gangways during the intervals. During the act of the Dillar Dancing Belles, streamers, balloons and paper balls had been flung from the stage into the auditorium, so that performers and audience were linked together by a broken net of scarlet, green and yellow. Balloons hung like bubbles between the stalls and circle. Every now and then an enterprising spectator made a grab for one, winning shouts of applause or boos of derision, which distracted attention from the hard-working artistes. Several youths in the gallery had brought the rattles and toy trumpets with which they had encouraged the football players, and with these they now saluted the actors in this other drama. Three men, leaning over the parapet of the upper circle, wore paper caps bearing the favours of the Kingsport team, and as a sign of applause cheered on every turn as it appeared by the View Hallo trumpeted down a toy bugle.

A shipowner’s wife from London, who had taken a box to amuse her artist friend, swept with her glasses the blurred mist of the auditorium. “We may not be highly refined here in the north,” she observed, “but you must admit we do enjoy ourselves.”

The five Cingalese cyclists swept circling off the stage; the crimson curtains fell together. The illuminated panels pricked out the figure 8, and the orchestra blared its raucous comment.

The curtains reopened to disclose a Jewish comedienne, fat, restless, vital, her bold eyes snapping, her harsh merry voice almost irresistible. If it had been quite so, she would have been delighting London or New York instead of Kingsport.

“Watch those three,” the London lady instructed her friend. “
Too
sweet, the little man with the trumpet. Not a care in the world. I
adore
him.”

“Up for the match, I suppose,” said the friend intelligently, “Look, the poor fellow with the rattle has only one arm.”

The comedienne wagged her plump buttocks at the stalls, leering over her shoulder. She made a joke which was not very funny but extremely coarse. The lady in the box beamed with proprietary delight.

“Robust, isn’t it? The real thing this. Several hundred cubic feet of sheer enjoyment. I doubt if you would find a tougher audience in England—seamen drinking their pay, touts, tarts and tote-operators. The air positively stiff with S.A., B.O. and all other fashionable human qualities. Oh, do listen to the little man with the trumpet!”

For behind the comedienne galloped a team of chorus girls, with bells across their brassieres and plumed tails streaming behind. They curveted, trotted, reared and pranced, driven by a young man dressed as a coachman, while the Jewess sang:

“Who wouldn’t change a ten-bob stall for a not
too
loose loose box?”

An equestrian joke which enchanted the London party by directing attention to their own position.