Defeated, Reuben came in.
He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros. Besides, she was rather sorry for him. Amongst all the Starkadders, he looked as though he got the least kick out of life. After all, most of the family got a kick out of something. Amos got one from religion, Judith got one out of Seth, Adam got his from cowdling the dumb beasts, and Elfine got hers from dancing about on the Downs in the fog in a peculiar green dress, while Seth got his from mollocking. But Reuben just didn’t seem to get a kick out of anything.
‘Is it too hot?’ she asked, and handed him the milk, with a smile.
The opaque curve purred softly down into the teak depths of the cup. He went on blowing it, and staring at her. Flora wanted to set him at his ease (if he had an ease?) so she composedly went on with her tea, wishing there were some cucumber sandwiches.
After a silence which lasted seven minutes by a covert glance at Flora’s watch, a series of visible tremors which passed across the expanse of Reuben’s face, and a series of low, preparatory noises which proceeded from his throat, persuaded her that he was about to speak to her. Cautious as a camera-man engaged in shooting a family of fourteen lions, Flora made no sign.
Her control was rewarded. After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence:
‘I ha’ scranleted two hundred furrows come five o’clock down i’ the bute.’
It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was it a complaint? If so, one might say, ‘My dear, how too sickening for you!’ But then, it might be a boast, in which case the correct reply would be, ‘Attaboy!’ or more simply, ‘Come, that’s capital.’ Weakly she fell back on the comparatively safe remark:
‘Did you?’ in a bright, interested voice.
She saw at once that she had said the wrong thing. Reuben’s eyebrows came down and his jaw came out. Horrors! He thought she was doubting his word!
‘Ay, I did, tu. Two hundred. Two hundred from Ticklepenny’s Corner down to Nettle Flitch. Ay, wi’out hand to aid me. Could you ha’ done that?’
‘No, indeed,’ replied Flora, heartily, and her guardian angel (who must, she afterwards decided, have been doing a spot of overtime) impelled her to add: ‘But then, you see, I shouldn’t want to.’
This seemingly innocent confession had a surprising effect on Reuben. He banged down his cup and thrust his face forward, peering intently into hers.
‘Wouldn’t you, then? Ah, but you’d pay a hired man good money to do it for you, I’ll lay – wastin’ the farm’s takins.’
Flora was now beginning to see what was the matter. He thought she had designs on the farm!
‘Indeed I wouldn’t,’ she retorted, promptly. ‘I wouldn’t care if Ticklepenny’s Corner wasn’t scranleted at all. I don’t want to have anything to do with Nettle Flitch. I’d let’ – she smiled pleasantly up at Reuben – ‘I’d let you do it all instead.’
But this effort went sour on her, to her dismay.
‘Let?’ shouted Reuben, thumping the table. ‘Let? A mirksy, capsy word to use to a man as has nursed a farm like a sick mommet – and a man as knows every inch of soil and patch o’ sukebind i’ the place. Let … ay, a fire word—’
‘I really think we had better get this straight,’ interrupted Flora. ‘It will make things so much easier. I don’t want the farm. Really I don’t. In fact’ – she hesitated whether she should tell him that it seemed incredible to her that anyone could possibly want it, but decided that this would be rude as well as unkind – ‘well, such an idea never came into my head. I know nothing about farming, and I don’t want to. I would much rather leave it to people who do know everything about it, like you. Why, just think what a mess I should make of the sukebind harvest and everything. You must see that I am the last person in the world who would be any use at scranleting. I am sure you will believe me.’
A second series of tremors, of a slightly more complicated type than the first, passed across Reuben’s face. He seemed about to speak, but in the end he did not. He slapped down his cup, gave a last stare at Flora, and stumped out of the kitchen.
This was an unsatisfactory end to the interview, which had begun well; but she was not disturbed. It was obvious that, even if he did not believe her, he wanted to; and that was half the battle. He had even been on the verge of believing her when she made that lucky remark about not wanting to scranlet; and only his natural boorishness and his suspicious nature had prevented him. The next time she assured him that she was not out after Cold Comfort Farm, Reuben would be convinced that she spoke the truth.
The fire was now burning brightly. Flora lit a candle, which she had brought down from her bedroom, and took up some sewing with which to beguile the time until supper in her own room. She was making a petticoat and decorating it with drawn threadwork.
A little later, as she sat peacefully sewing, Adam came in from the yard. He wore, as a protection from the rain, a hat which had lost – in who knows what dim hintermath of time – the usual attributes of shape, colour and size, and those more subtle race-memory associations which identify hats as hats, and now resembled some obscure natural growth, some moss or sponge or fungus, which had attached itself to a host.
He was carrying between finger and thumb a bunch of thorn twigs, which Flora presumed that he had just picked from one of the trees in the yard; and he held them ostentatiously in front of him, like a torch.
He glanced spitefully at Flora from under the brim of the hat as he crossed the kitchen, but said nothing to her. As he placed the twigs carefully on a shelf above the sink, he glanced round at her, but she went on sewing, and said never a word. So after rearranging the twigs once or twice, and coughing, he muttered:
‘Ay, them’ll last me till Michaelmas to cletter the dishes wi’ – there’s nothin’ like a thorn twig for cletterin’ dishes. Ay, a rope’s as good as a halter to a willin’ horse. Curses, like rookses, flies home to rest in bosomses and barnses.’
It was clear that he had not forgotten Flora’s advice about using a little mop to clean the dishes. As he shuffled away, she thought that she must remember to buy one for him the next time she went into Howling.
Flora had scarcely time to get over this before there sounded a step in the yard outside, and there entered a young man who could only be Seth.
Flora looked up with a cool smile.
‘How do you do? Are you Seth? I’m your cousin, Flora Poste. I’m afraid you’re too late for any tea … unless you would like to make some fresh for yourself.’
He came over to her with the lounging grace of a panther, and leaned against the mantelpiece. Flora saw at once that he was not the kind that could be fobbed off with offers of tea. She was for it.
‘What’s that you’re making?’ he asked. Flora knew that he hoped it was a pair of knickers. She composedly shook out the folds of the petticoat and replied that it was an afternoon tea-cloth.
‘Ay … woman’s nonsense,’ said Seth, softly. (Flora wondered why he had seen fit to drop his voice by half an octave.) ‘Women are all alike – aye fussin’ over their fal-lals and bedazin’ a man’s eyes, when all they really want is man’s blood and his heart out of his body and his soul and his pride …’
‘Really?’ said Flora, looking in her work-box for her scissors.
‘Ay.’ His deep voice had jarring notes which were curiously blended into an animal harmony like the natural cries of stoat or teazel. ‘That’s all women want – a man’s life. Then when they’ve got him bound up in their fal-lals and bedazin’ ways and their softness, and he can’t move because of the longin’ for them as cries in his man’s blood – do you know what they do then?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Flora. ‘Would you mind passing me that reel of cotton on the mantelpiece, just by your ear? Thank you so much.’ Seth passed it mechanically, and continued:
‘They eat him, same as a
hen-spider eats a cock-spider. That’s what women do – if a man let’s ’em.’
‘Indeed,’ commented Flora.
‘Ay – but I said “if” a man let ’em. Now I – I don’t let no women eat me. I eats them, instead.’
Flora thought an appreciative silence was the best policy to pursue at this point. She found it difficult, indeed, to reply to him in words, since this conversation in which she had participated before, (at parties in Bloomsbury as well as in drawing-rooms in Cheltenham) was, after all, mainly a kind of jockeying for place, a shifting about of the pieces on the board before the real game began. And if, as in her case, one of the players was merely a little bored by it all and was wondering whether she would be able to brew herself some hot milk before she went to bed that night, there was not much point in playing.
True, in Cheltenham and in Bloomsbury gentlemen did not say in so many words that they ate women in self-defence, but there was no doubt that that was what they meant.
‘That shocks you, eh?’ said Seth, misinterpreting her silence.
‘Yes, I think it’s dreadful,’ replied Flora, good-naturedly meeting him half-way.
He laughed. It was a cruel sound like the sputter of the stoat as it sinks its feet into the neck of a rabbit.
‘Dreadful … ay! You’re all alike. You’re just the same as the rest, for all your London ways. Mealy-mouthed as a school kid. I’ll lay you don’t understand half of what I’ve been saying, do you? … Liddle innercent.’
‘I am afraid I wasn’t listening to all of it,’ she replied, ‘but I am sure it was very interesting. You must tell me all about your work some time … What do you do, now, on the evenings when you aren’t – er – eating people?’
‘I goes over to Beershorn,’ replied Seth, rather sulkily. The dark flame of his male pride was a little suspicious of having its leg pulled.
‘To play darts?’ Flora knew her A.P.H.
‘Noa … me play that kid’s game with a lot of old men? That’s a good ’un, that is. No. I goes to the talkies.’
And something in the inflection which Seth gave to the last word of his speech, the lingering, wistful, almost cooing note which invaded his curiously animal voice, caused Flora to put down her sewing in her lap and to glance up at him. Her gaze rested thoughtfully upon his irregular but handsome features.
‘The talkies, do you? Do you like them?’
‘Better nor anything in the whoal world,’ he said, fiercely. ‘Better nor my mother nor this farm nor Violet down at the Vicarage, nor anything.’
‘Indeed,’ mused his cousin, still eyeing his face thoughtfully. ‘That’s interesting. Very interesting indeed.’
‘I’ve got seventy-four photographs o’ Lotta Funchal,’ confided Seth, becoming in his discussion of his passion like those monkeys which are described as ‘almost human’. ‘Ay, an’ forty o’ Jenny Carrol, and fifty-five o’ Laura Vallee, and twenty o’ Carline Heavytree, and fifteen of Sigrid Maelstrom. Ay, an’ ten o’ Penella Baxter. Signed ones.’
Flora nodded, displaying courteous interest, but showing nothing of the plan which had suddenly occurred to her; and Seth, after a suspicious glance at her, suddenly decided that he had been betrayed into talking to a woman about something else than love, and was angry.
So, muttering that he was going off to Beershorn to see ‘Sweet Sinners’ (he was evidently inflamed by this discussion of his passion) he took himself off.
The rest of the evening passed quietly. Flora supped off an omelette and some coffee, which she prepared in her own sitting-room. After supper she finished the design upon the breast of her petticoat, read a chapter of ‘Macaria, or Altars of Sacrifice’, and went to bed at ten o’clock.
All this was pleasant enough. And while she was undressing, she reflected that her campaign for the tidying up of Cold Comfort was progressing quite well, when she thought that she had only been there two days. She had made overtures to Reuben. She had instructed Meriam, the hired girl, in the precautionary arts, and she had gotten her bedroom curtains washed (they hung full and crimson in the candle-light). She had discovered the nature of Seth’s grande passion, and it was not Women but the talkies. She had had a plan for making the most of Seth, but she could think that out in detail later. She blew out the candle.
But (she thought, settling her cool forehead against the cold pillow) this habit of passing her evenings in peaceful solitude in her own sitting-room must not make her forget her plan of campaign. It was clear that she must take some of her meals with the Starkadders, and learn to know them.
She sighed and fell asleep.
CHAPTER VIII
She found some difficulty during the ensuing week in meeting her Cousin Amos, while no one so much as breathed a word about introducing her to Aunt Ada Doom. Each morning, at nine o’clock, Flora watched Mrs Beetle stagger upstairs with tray laden with sausages, marmalade, porridge, a kipper, a fat black pot of strong tea and what Flora caustically thought of as half the loaf; but when once Mrs Beetle had entered Aunt Ada’s bedroom, the door was shut for good. And when Mrs Beetle came out she was not communicative. Once she observed to Flora, seeing the latter regarding the empty tray which had come out of Mrs Starkadder’s bedroom:
‘Yes … we’re a bit off our feed this morning, as you might say. We’ve only ’ad two goes of porridge, two soft-boiled eggs, a kipper just on the turn and ’alf that pot o’ jam Adam stole from the Vicarage bazaar lars summer. Still, there’s room for it where it goes, ’eaven knows, and we keep ’ealthy enough on it.’
‘I have not met my aunt yet,’ said Flora.
Mrs Beetle replied sombrely that Flora ’adn’t missed much, and they said no more on the matter. For Flora was not the type of person who questions servants.
And even if she had been, it was plain to her that Mrs Beetle was not the type of person who gives away secrets. Flora gathered that she did not altogether disapprove of old Mrs Starkadder. She had been heard to say that at least there was one of ’em at Cold Comfort as knew her own mind, even if she ’ad seen something narsty in the woodshed when she was two. Flora had no idea what this last sentence could possibly mean. Possibly it was a local idiom for going cuckoo.
In any case she could not demand to see her aunt if her aunt did not want to see her; and surely if she had wanted to see her, she would have commanded that Flora be brought into the Presence. Perhaps old Mrs Starkadder knew that Flora was out to tidy up the farm, and intended to adopt a policy of passive resistance? In which case an attempt must sooner or later be made to invade the enemy’s fort. But that could wait.
Meanwhile, there was Amos.
She learnt from Adam that he preached twice a week to the Church of the Quivering Brethren, a religious sect which had its headquarters in Beershorn. It occurred to her that she might ask to accompany him there one evening, and begin working on him during the long drive down to the town.
Accordingly, when Thursday evening came during her second week at the farm, she approached her cousin as he entered the kitchen after tea (for he would never partake of that meal, which he thought finicking) and said resolutely:
‘Are you going down into Beershorn to preach to the Brethren tonight?’
Amos looked at her, as though seeing her for the first, or perhaps the second, time. ***His huge body, rude as a windtortured thorn, was printed darkly against the thin mild flame of the declining winter sun that throbbed like a sallow lemon on the westering lip of Mockuncle Hill, and sent its pale, sharp rays into the kitchen through the open door. The brittle air, on which the fans of the trees were etched like ageing skeletons, seemed thronged by the bright, invisible ghosts of a million dead summers. The cold beat in glassy waves against the eyelids of anybody who happened to be out in it. High up, a few chalky clouds doubtfully wavered in the pale sky that curved over against the rim of the Downs like a vast inverted pot-dechambre. Huddled in the hollow like an exhausted brute, the frosted roofs of Howling, crisp and purple as broccoli leaves, were like b
easts about to spring.
‘Ay,’ said Amos, at last. He was encased in black fustian which made his legs and arms look like drainpipes, and he wore a hard little felt hat. Flora supposed that some people would say that he walked in a lurid, smoky hell of his own religious torment. In any case, he was a rude old man.
‘They’ll all burn in Hell,’ added Amos, in a satisfied voice, ‘an’ I mun surelie tell them so.’
‘Well, may I come too?’
He did not seem surprised. Indeed, she caught in his eye a triumphant light, as though he had long been expecting her to see the error of her ways and come to him and the Brethren for spiritual comfort.
‘Ay … ye can come … ye poor miserable creepin’ sinner. Maybe ye think ye’ll escape hell fire if ye come along o’ me, and bow down and quiver. But I’m tellin’ ye no. ’Tes too late. Ye’ll burn wi’ the rest. There’ll be time to say what yer sins have been, but there’ll be no time for more.’
‘Do I have to say them out loud?’ asked Flora, in some trepidation. It occurred to her that she had heard of a similar custom from friends of hers who were being educated at that great centre of religious life, Oxford.
‘Ay, but not tonight. Nay, there’ll be too many sayin’ their sins aloud tonight; there’ll be no time for the Lord to listen to a new sheep like you. And maybe the spirit won’t move ye.’
Flora was pretty sure it would not; so she went upstairs to put on her hat and coat.
She did wonder what the Brethren would look like. In novels, persons who turned to religion to obtain the colour and excitement which everyday life did not give them were all grey and thwarted. Probably the Brethren would be all grey and thwarted … though it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.
The yard was painted in sharp layers of gold light and towering shadows, by the rays of the new-lit mog’s-lanthorn (this was used especially for carrying round the chicken-house at night to see if there were any stray cats after the hens: hence the name).