Amos’s half-brothers, Luke and Mark, were thickly built and high-featured; gross, silent men with an eye to the bed and the board.
When all were seated two shadows darkened the sharp, cold light pouring in through the door. They were no more than a growing imminence of humanity, but the porridge boiled over again.
Amos Starkadder and his eldest son, Reuben, came into the kitchen.
Amos, who was even larger and more of a wreck than Micah, silently put his pruning-snoot and reaping-hook in a corner by the fender, while Reuben put the scranlet with which he had been ploughing down beside them.
The two men took their places in silence, and after Amos had muttered a long and fervent grace, the meal was eaten in silence. Seth sat moodily tying and untying a green scarf round the magnificent throat he had inherited from Judith; he did not touch his porridge, and Judith only made a pretence of eating hers, playing with her spoon, patting the porridge up and down and idly building castles with the burnt bits. Her eyes burned under their penthouses, sometimes straying towards Seth as he sat sprawling in the lusty pride of casual manhood, with a good many buttons and tapes undone. Then those same eyes, dark as prisoned king-cobras, would slide round until they rested upon the bitter white head and raddled red neck of Amos, her husband, and then, like praying mantises, they would retreat between their lids. Secrecy pouted her full mouth.
Suddenly Amos, looking up from his food, asked abruptly:
‘Where’s Elfine?’
‘She is not up yet. I did not wake her. She hinders more than she helps o’ mornings,’ replied Judith.
Amos grunted.
‘’Tes a godless habit to lie abed of a working day, and the reeking red pits of the Lord’s eternal wrathy fires lie in wait for them as do so. Ay’ – his blazing blue eyes swivelled round and rested upon Seth, who was stealthily looking at a packet of Parisian art pictures under the table – ‘ay, and for those who break the seventh commandment, too. And for those’ – the eye rested on Reuben, who was hopefully studying his parent’s apoplectic countenance – ‘for those as waits for dead men’s shoes.’
‘Nay, Amos, lad—’ remonstrated Micah, heavily.
‘Hold your peace,’ thundered Amos; and Micah, though a fierce tremor rushed through his mighty form, held it.
When the meal was done the hands trooped out to get on with the day’s work of harvesting the swedes. This harvest was now in full swing; it took a long time and was very difficult to do. The Starkadders, too, rose and went out into the thin rain which had begun to fall. They were engaged in digging a well beside the dairy; it had been started a year ago, but it was taking a long time to do because things kept on going wrong. Once – a terrible day, when Nature seemed to hold her breath, and release it again in a furious gale of wind – Harkaway had fallen into it. Once Urk had pushed Caraway down it. Still, it was nearly finished; and everybody felt that it would not be long now.
In the middle of the morning a wire came from London announcing that the expected visitor would arrive by the six o’clock train.
Judith received it alone. Long after she had read it she stood motionless, the rain driving through the open door against her crimson shawl. Then slowly, with dragging steps, she mounted the staircase which led to the upper part of the house. Over her shoulder she said to old Adam, who had come into the room to do the washing up:
‘Robert Poste’s child will be here by the six o’clock train at Beershorn. You must leave to meet it at five. I am going up to tell Mrs Starkadder that she is coming today.’
Adam did not reply. And Seth, sitting by the fire, was growing tired of looking at his postcards, which were a three-year-old gift from the vicar’s son, with whom he occasionally went poaching. He knew them all by now. Meriam, the hired girl, would not be in until after dinner. When she came, she would avoid his eyes, and tremble and weep.
He laughed insolently, triumphantly. Undoing another button of his shirt he lounged out across the yard to the shed where Big Business, the bull, was imprisoned in darkness.
Laughing softly, Seth struck the door of the shed.
And as though answering the deep call of male to male, the bull uttered a loud, tortured bellow that rose undefeated through the dead sky that brooded above the farm.
Seth undid yet another button, and lounged away.
*
Adam Lambsbreath, alone in the kitchen, stood looking down unseeingly at the dirtied plates which it was his task to wash, for the hired girl, Meriam, would not be here until after dinner, and when she came she would be all but useless. Her hour was near at hand, as all Howling knew. Was it not February, and the earth a-teem with newing life? A grin twisted Adam’s writhen lips. He gathered up the plates one by one and carried them out to the pump, which stood in a corner of the kitchen, above a stone sink. Her hour was nigh. And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down at Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.
‘Ay, dog’s-fennel or beard’s-crow, by their fruits they shall be betrayed,’ muttered Adam, shooting a stream of cold water over the coagulated plates. ‘Come cloud, come sun, ’tes aye so.’
While he was listlessly dabbing at the crusted edges of the porridge-plates with a thorn twig, a soft step descended the stairs outside the door which closed off the staircase from the kitchen. Someone paused on the threshold.
The step was light as thistledown. If Adam had not had the rush of the running water in his ears too loudly for him to be able to hear any other noise, he might have thought this delicate, hesitant step was the beating of his own blood.
But, suddenly, something like a kingfisher streaked across the kitchen in a glimmer of green skirts and flying gold hair, and the chime of a laugh was followed a second later by the slam of the gate leading through the starveling garden out on to the Downs.
Adam flung round violently on hearing the sound, dropping his thorn twig and breaking two plates.
‘Elfine … my liddle bird,’ he whispered, starting towards the open door.
A brittle silence mocked his whisper; through it wound the rank odours of rattan and barn.
‘My pharisee … my cowdling …’ he whispered, piteously. His eyes had again that look as of waste grey pools, sightless primaeval wastes reflecting the wan evening sky in some lonely marsh, as they wandered about the kitchen.
His hands fell slackly against his sides, and he dropped another plate. It broke.
He sighed, and began to move slowly towards the open door, his task forgotten. His eyes were fixed upon the cowshed.
‘Ay, the beasts …’ he muttered, dully; ‘the dumb beasts never fail a man. They know. Ay, I’d ’a’ done better to cowdle our Feckless in my bosom than liddle Elfine. Ay, wild as a marshtigget in May, ’tes. And a will never listen to a word from annyone. Well, so t’must be. Sour or sweet, by barn or bye, so ’twill go. Ah, but if he’ – the blind grey pools grew suddenly terrible, as though a storm were blowing in across the marsh from the Atlantic wastes – ‘if he but harms a hair o’ her liddle goldy head I’ll kill un.’
So muttering, he crossed the yard and entered the cowshed, where he untied the beasts from their hoot-pieces and drove them across the yard, down the muddy rutted lane that led to Nettle Flitch Field. He was enmeshed in his grief. He did not notice that Graceless’s leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.
Left alone, the kitchen fire went out.
CHAPTER IV
The timeless leaden day merged imperceptibly towards eve. After the rude midday meal Adam was bid by Judith to put Viper, the vicious gelding, between the shafts of the buggy and to drive backwards and forwards to Howling six times to revive his knowledge of the art of managing a horse. His attempt to stave off this event by having a fit during the rude meal was unfortunately robbed of its full effect by the collapse of Meriam, the hired girl, while in the act of passing a dish of green
s to Seth.
Her hour had come upon her rather sooner than was anticipated, and in the ensuing scene Adam’s fit, which he had staged in the cowshed out of regard for his personal comfort and safety, passed almost unnoticed except as a sort of Greek chorus to the main drama.
Adam was therefore left without any excuse, and spent the afternoon driving backwards and forwards between Howling and the farm, much to the indignation of the Starkadders, who could see him from their position at the side of the well they were supposed to be getting on with; they thought he was an idle old man, and said as much.
‘How shall I know the maidy?’ pleaded Adam of Judith, as they stood together while he lit the lanthorn hanging on the side of the buggy. Its dim flame flowered up slowly under the vast, uncaring bowl of the darkening sky, and hung heavily, like a brooding corpse-light, in the windless dusk. ‘Robert Poste was aye like a bullock: a great moitherin’ man, aye playin’ wi’ batses and ballses. Do ’ee think his maid will be like him?’
‘There are not so many passengers as all that at Beershorn,’ replied Judith, impatiently. ‘Wait until everybody has left the station. Robert Poste’s child will be the last; she will wait to see if there is anyone to meet her. Be off wi’ you,’ and she struck the gelding upon his hocks.
The great beast bounded forward into the gloom before Adam could check him. They were gone. Darkness fell, a clouded bell of dark glass, eclipsing the soggy landscape.
*
By the time the buggy reached Beershorn, which was a good seven miles from Howling, Adam had forgotten what he was going there for. The reins lay between his knotted fingers, and his face, unseeing, was lifted to the dark sky. ***From the stubborn interwoven strata of his sub-conscious, thought seeped up into his dim conscious; not as an integral part of that consciousness, but more as an impalpable emanation, a crepuscular addition, from the unsleeping life in the restless trees and fields surrounding him. The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think. But Adam’s deafness and blindness came from within, as well as without; earthy calm seeped up from his sub-conscious and met descending calm in his conscious. Twice the buggy was pulled out of hedges by a passing farm-hand, and once narrowly shaved the vicar, driving home from tea at the Hall.
‘Where are you, my birdling?’ Adam’s blind lips asked the unanswering darkness and the loutish shapes of the unbudded trees. ‘Did I cowdle thee as a mommet for this?’
He knew that Elfine was out on the Downs, striding on her unsteady colt’s legs towards the Hall and the bright, sardonic hands of Richard Hawk-Monitor. Adam’s mind played uneasily, in bewildered pain, with the vision of his nurseling between those casual fingers …
But the buggy reached Beershorn at last, and safely: there was only one road, and that led to the station.
Adam pulled Viper up on his haunches just as the great gelding was about to canter through the entrance to the booking-hall, and knotted the reins on the rennet-post near the horse-trough.
Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough. Humanity left him abruptly.
For some time he brooded, but time conveyed to him nothing of itself. It spun endlessly upon a bright point in space, repeating the names of Elfine and Richard Hawk-Monitor. If time passed (and presumably it did, for a train came in, and its passengers got out, and were driven away) there was no time for Adam.
He was at last roused by an obscure agitation which seemed to be taking place on the floor of the buggy.
The straw which had lain upon the floor for the past twenty-five years was being energetically kicked out into the road by a small foot shod in a stout but shapely shoe. The light of the lantern showed nothing above this save a slender ankle and a green skirt, considerably agitated by the movements of the leg which it covered.
A voice from the darkness above his head was remarking, ‘How revolting!’
‘Eh … eh,’ muttered Adam, peering blindly up into the vague air beyond the lantern’s rays. ‘Nay, niver do that, soul. That straw was good enough for Miss Judith’s wedding-trip to Brighton, and it must serve. Straw or chaff, leaf or fruit, we mun’ all come to’t.’
‘Not while I can prevent myself,’ the voice assured him. ‘And I can believe most things about Sussex and Cold Comfort, but not that Cousin Judith ever went to Brighton. Now, shall we be getting along, if you have finished brooding? My trunk is coming up to the farm by the carrier’s van tomorrow. Not’ (the voice went on, with a certain tartness), ‘that you would be likely to care if it stayed down here until it seeded.’
‘Robert Poste’s child,’ murmured Adam, staring up at the face he could now dimly see beyond the circle of lantern light. ‘Eh, but I was sent here to meet ’ee, and I niver saw ’ee.’
‘I know,’ said Flora.
‘Child, child—’ began Adam, his voice rising to a wail.
But Flora thought otherwise. She checked him by asking him if he would prefer her to drive Viper, and this so affronted his male pride that he unhitched the reins from the rennet-post and the buggy drove off without any more delay.
Flora sat with her fur jacket drawn close round her throat against the chill air, nursing her small case containing her nightgown and toilet articles upon her knees. She had not been able to resist the impulse to slip into this small case, at the last moment, her dearly-loved copy of the Pensées of the Abbé Fausse-Maigre; her other books would come up in her trunk tomorrow, but she had felt that she would find it easier to meet the Starkadders in a proper and civilized frame of mind if she had her copy of the Pensées (surely the wisest book ever compiled for the guidance of a truly civilized person) close at hand.
The Abbé’s other and greater work, ‘The Higher Common Sense’, which had won for him a Doctorate of the University of Paris at the age of twenty-five, was in her trunk.
She thought of the Pensées as the buggy left the lights of Beershorn behind and began to mount the road which led to the invisible Downs. Her spirits were somewhat discomposed. She was chilly, and felt soiled (though indeed she did not look it) by the rigours of her journey. The prospect of what she would find at Cold Comfort was not calculated to cheer her spirits. She thought of the Abbé’s warning: ‘Never confront an enemy at the end of a journey, unless it happens to be his journey’, and was not consoled.
Adam did not say a word to her during the drive. But that was all right, because she did not want him to; he could be coped with later. The drive did not last so long as she had feared, because Viper seemed to be a pretty good horse and went at a smart pace (Flora supposed that the Starkadders had not owned him for long), and in less than an hour the lights of a village appeared in the distance.
‘Is that Howling?’ asked Flora.
‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’
There did not seem to be anything more to say. She fell into a slightly more comfortable muse, wondering what her rights were, those rights which her Cousin Judith had mentioned in her letter, and who had sent the postcard with the reference to a generation of vipers, and what was the wrong done by Judith’s man to her father, Robert Poste?
The buggy now began to climb a hill, leaving Howling behind.
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’
And in another five minutes Viper stopped, of his own will, at a gate which Flora could just see in the obscurity. Adam struck him with the whip. He did not move.
‘I think we must be there,’
observed Flora.
‘Nay, niver say that.’
‘But I do say it. Look – if you drive on we shall go slam into a hedge.’
‘’Tes all one, Robert Poste’s child.’
‘It may be all right for you, and all one, but it isn’t to me. I shall get down.’
So she did; and found her way slowly, through darkness only lit by faint winter starlight, along a villainous muddy path between hedges, which was too narrow for the buggy to enter.
Adam followed her, carrying the lantern, and leaving Viper at the gate.
The buildings of the farm, a shade darker than the sky, could now be distinguished in the gloom, a little distance on, and as Flora and Adam were slowly approaching them, a door suddenly opened and a beam of light shone out. Adam gave a joyful cry.
‘’Tes the cowshed! ’Tes our Feckless openin’ the door fer me!’ And Flora saw that it was indeed; the door of the shed, which was lit by a lantern, was being anxiously pushed open by the nose of a gaunt cow.
This was not promising.
But immediately a deep voice was heard: ‘Is that you, Adam?’ and a woman came out of the cowshed, carrying the lantern, which she lifted high above her head to look at the travellers. Flora dimly discerned an unnecessarily red and voluminous shawl on her shoulders, and a tumbling mass of hair.
‘Oh, how do you do?’ she called. ‘You must be my Cousin Judith. I’m so glad to see you. How nice of you to come out in all this cold. Terribly nice of you to have me, too. Isn’t it curious we should never have met before?’
She put out her hand, but it was not taken at once. The lantern was lifted higher while Judith steadily looked into her face, in silence. The seconds passed. Flora wondered if her lipstick were the wrong shade. It then occurred to her that there was a less frivolous cause for the silence which had fallen, and for the steady regard with which her cousin confronted her. So, Flora mused, must Columbus have felt when the poor Indian fixed his solemn, unwavering gaze upon the great sailor’s face. For the first time a Starkadder looked upon a civilized being.