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  ‘I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I felt myself — do not misunderstand me — suddenly and poignantly conscious of her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.’

  I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened.

  ‘You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another. I knew, I knew,’ said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, ‘that here stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common, she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her future.’

  As he spoke I thought that, by the look on his face, he was again receiving what he described as an impression so powerful as to amount to an emotion. And he communicated this emotion to me, so that I felt his prophecy to be a true one, and that his story would henceforward cease to be a mere story and would become a simple unwinding off the spool of inevitable truth.

  He went on,

  ‘Our silence of course couldn’t endure for ever. The girl herself seemed conscious of this, for a smile, not unfriendly, came to her lips, and she said quite simply,—

  ‘ “How you startled me! Good-morning.”

  ‘ “I am very sorry,” I said. “Can’t I make up for it by carrying those buckets for you?”

  ‘ “Oh, they’re nothing with the yoke,” she answered.

  ‘Here old Amos came round the corner, walking clumsily on the cobbles with his hob-nailed boots. He looked surprised to find me standing with the dairymaid, a little group of two.

  ‘ “Morning!” he cried very heartily to me. “You’re out betimes. Fine day, sir, fine day, fine day. Well, my girl, done with the cows?”

  ‘ “I’m on my way to the dairy, dad,” she said.

  ‘I asked if I might come with her.

  ‘ “Ay, go with Ruth,” said Amos, “she’ll show you round,” and he went off, evidently glad to have shifted the responsibility of my morning’s entertainment.

  ‘Ruth refused to let me carry the buckets, and by the time we reached the dairy – one of the pleasantest places I ever was in, clean and bright as a yacht – their weight had brought a warm flush of colour to her cheeks. Great flat pans of milk stood on gray slate slabs, covered over with filmy butter-muslin; in one corner was fixed a sink, and in another corner a machine which I learnt was called the separator.

  ‘ “Father’s very proud of this,” said my companion, “none of the other farms round here have got one.”

  ‘I sat on the central table watching her as she moved about her business; she didn’t take very much notice of me, and I was at liberty to observe her, noting her practised efficiency in handling the pans and cans of milk; noting, too, her dark, un-English beauty, un-English not so much, as you might think, owing to the swarthiness of her complexion, as to something subtly tender in the curve of her features and the swell of her forearm. She hummed to herself as she worked. I asked her whether the evening did not find her weary.

  ‘ “One’s glad to get to bed,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, adding, “but it’s all right unless one’s queer.”

  ‘ “Can’t you take a day off, being on your father’s farm?”

  ‘ “Beasts have to be fed, queer or no queer,” she replied.

  ‘The milk was now ready in shining cans, and going to the door she shouted,—

  ‘ “Sid!”

  ‘A voice calling in answer was followed by one of the sons. Neither brother nor sister spoke, while the young man trundled away the cans successively; I heard them bumping on the cobbles, and bumping more loudly as, presumably, he lifted them into a cart. Ruth had turned to wiping up the dairy.

  ‘ “Where is he going with the cans?” I asked.

  ‘ “Milk round,” she answered laconically.

  ‘That was the first time I saw her,’ he added. ‘The second time was in full midday, and she was gleaning in a stubble-field; yes; her name was Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field, throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when, laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and skilfully into a sheaf. The occupation seemed wholly suitable. Although her head was not covered by a coloured handkerchief, but hidden by a linen sunbonnet, she reminded me of the peasant-women labouring in the fields of other lands than ours. I do not know whether, in the light of my present wisdom, I exaggerate the impression of those early days. I think that perhaps at first, imbued as I was with the idea of the completely English character of my surroundings, I remained insensible to the flaw which presently became so self-evident in the harmony of my preconceived picture.

  ‘Tiny things occurred, which I noted at the time and cast aside on the scrapheap of my observation, and which later I retrieved and strung together in their coherent order. As who should come upon the pieces of a child’s puzzle strewn here and there upon his path.

  ‘Ruth, my instructress and companion, I saw going about her work without haste, almost without interest. She was kind to the animals in her care after an indifferent, sleepy fashion, more from habit and upbringing than from a natural benevolence. She brought no enthusiasm to any of her undertakings. Her tasks were performed conscientiously, but by rote. Yet one day, when the sheep-dog happened to be in her path, I saw her kick out at it in the belly with sudden and unbridled vehemence.

  ‘I was first really startled by the appearance of Rawdon Westmacott. In the big, shadowy, draughty barn I was cutting chaff for the horses, while Ruth sat near by on a truss of straw, trying to mend a bridle-strap with string. I had then been at Pennistans’ about a week. The wide doors of the barn were open, letting in a great square of dustmoted sunlight, and in this square a score of Leghorn hens and cockerels moved picking at the scattered chaff, daintily prinking on their spindly feet, snowy white and coral crested. A shadow fell across the floor. Ruth and I raised our heads. A young man leant against the side of the door, a tall young man in riding breeches, with a dull red stock twisted round his throat, smacking at his leathern gaiters with a riding whip he held in his hand. The rein was over his arm, and his horse, lowering his head, snuffed breezily at the chaff blown out into the yard.

  ‘ “You’re back, then?” said Ruth.

  ‘ “Ay,” said the young man, looking suspiciously at me, and I caught the slightest jerk of the head and interrogative crinkle of the forehead by which he required an explanation.

  ‘ “This is my cousin, Rawdon Westmacott, Mr Malory,” Ruth said.

  ‘The young man flicked his whip up to his cap, and then dismissed me from his interest.

  ‘ “Coming out, Ruth?” he asked.

  ‘She pouted her indecision.

  ‘ “You shall have a ride,” he suggested.

  ‘ “No, thanks.”

  ‘ “Well, walk a bit of the way home with me, anyhow.”

  ‘ “I don’t know that I’m so very keen.”

  ‘ “Oh, come on, Ruthie, after I’ve ridden straight over here to see you; thrown my bag into the house, and come st
raight away to you, without a look into one single thing at home.”

  ‘ “It’d be better for things if you did look into them a bit more, Rawdon.”

  ‘Overcome by the perversity of women, he said again,—

  ‘ “Come on, Ruthie.”

  ‘She rose slowly, and, untying the apron of sacking which she wore over her skirt, she stepped out into the sunshine. For a flash I saw them standing there together, and I saw Rawdon Westmacott as he ever after appeared to me: a Bedouin in corduroy, with a thin, fierce face, the grace of an antelope, and the wildness of a hawk; a creature captured either in the desert or from the woods. Strange product for the English countryside! Then they were gone, and the horse, turning, followed the tug on the rein.

  ‘I date from that moment my awakening to a state of affairs less simple than I had imagined. I saw Ruth again with Westmacott, and learnt with a little shock that here was not merely an idle, rural, or cousinly flirtation. The man’s blood was crazy for her.

  ‘And so I became aware of the existence of some element I could not reconcile with my surroundings, some unseen presence which would jerk me away abruptly to the sensation that I was in the midst of a foreign encampment; was it Biblical? was it Arab? troubled was I and puzzled; I tried to dismiss the fancy, but it returned; I even appealed to various of the Pennistans for enlightenment, but they stared at me blankly.

  ‘Yes, I tried to dismiss it, and to brush aside the haze of mystery as one brushes aside the smoke of a cigarette. And I could not succeed. How trivial, how easily ignored are facts, when one’s quarrel is with the enigma of force at the heart of things! It isn’t often in this civilised life of ours that one comes into contact with it; one’s business lies mostly with men and women whose whole system of philosophy is inimical to natural, inconvenient impulse. It obeys us as a rule, like a tame lion doing its tricks for the lion-tamer. A terrifying thought truly, that we are shut up for life in a cage with a wild beast that may at any moment throw off its docility to leap upon us! We taunt it, we provoke it, we tweak its tail, we take every advantage of its forbearance; then when the day comes for it to turn on us, we cry out, and try to get away into a corner. At least let us do it the honour to recognise its roar of warning, as I did then, though I was as surprised and disquieted as I dare say you would have been, at meeting a living lion in the woods of Kent.

  ‘I could compare it to many other things, but principally I think I felt it as a ghost that peeped out at me from over innocent shoulders. Am I mixing my metaphors? You see, it was so vague, so elusive, that it seemed to combine all the bogeys of one’s childhood. Something we don’t understand; that is what frightens us, from the child alone in the dark to the old man picking at the sheets on his deathbed. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. Certainly my apprehension was a very indefinite one, at most it was a dim vision of possibilities unnamed, it wasn’t even a sense of the imminence of crisis, much less the imminence of tragedy. And yet . . . I don’t know. I still believe that tragedy was there somewhere, perhaps only on the horizon, and that the merest chance alone served to avert it. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely averted. One never knows; one only sees with one’s clumsy eyes. One sees the dead body, but never the dead soul. The whole story is, to me, unsatisfactory; I often wonder whether there is a conclusion somewhere, that either I have missed, or that hasn’t yet been published by the greatest of story-tellers.

  ‘Anyway, all this is too fanciful, and I have inadvertently wandered into an inner circle of speculation, I mean soul-speculation, when I really meant to be concerned with the outer circle only.

  ‘I could lay my hand on nothing more definite than the appearance, certainly unusual, of Ruth or of Westmacott; other trifles were so absurd that I scorned to dwell on them in my mind, the red braces of Amos and that faint scent of roasting chestnuts in the kitchen under the hands of Amos’s grandmother. Whenever I went into the kitchen I met that scent, and heard the indefinite mumble of the old woman’s toothless mouth, and the smell of the chestnuts floated out, too, into the narrow entrance-passage and up the steep stairs which led to the rooms above. I associate it always now with a narrow passage, rather dark; sloping ceilings; and rooms where the pictures could be hung on the south wall only, because of the crookedness of the house. In the parlour, which balanced the kitchen, but was never used, was an old-fashioned oil-painting of a soldier with whiskers and a tightly-buttoned uniform, and this painting swung out from the north wall and a space of perhaps six inches between the wall and the bottom of the frame.’

  Chapter Two

  On the morrow we again took our pipes to the clump of pines, and Malory began, in his drowsy, meditative voice, to tell his story from where he had left off.

  ‘I hope you are by now as curious as I was to discover the secret of the Pennistan quality. The family were evidently unconscious that there was any secret to discover. They thought no more of themselves than they did of their blue surrounding hills, though in relation to the weather they considered their blue hills a good deal, and Amos taught me one evening that too great a clearness was not to be desired; the row of poplars over towards Penshurst should be slightly obscured, misty; and if it was so, and if the haze hung over Crowborough Beacon, I might safely leave the yearling calves out in the field all night. I should look also for a heavy dew upon the ground, which would predict a fine day besides bringing out the mushrooms.

  ‘We were standing in the crossroads, where the white finger-post said, “Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,” and Amos had corrected my pronunciation from Lee to Lye, and from Cowden to Cowden. I know no greater joy than returning to the heart of a beloved country by road, and seeing the names on the finger-posts change from the unfamiliar to the familiar, passing through stages of acquaintance to friendship, and from friendship into intimacy. Half the secret of love lies in intimacy, whereby love gains in tenderness what it loses in mystery, and is not the poorer by the bargain.

  ‘Mrs Pennistan came out to join us, and I took the opportunity of asking her whether I might use a certain cupboard for my clothes, as I was pressed for room. She replied,—

  ‘ “Granny had that cupboard, but she’s surely past using it now, so anything of hers you find in it, hang out over the banister, and I’ll pack it away in a box.”

  ‘Out of this little material circumstance I obtained my explanation; I went in, leaving husband and wife strolling in the road, for it was Sunday evening, and on their Sunday evening they clung to their hour of leisure. I went in, past the chestnuts, up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs I opened the cupboard door, and explored with my hand to discover whether the recess was empty. It was not, so I fetched my candle in its blue tin candlestick, and lifted out the garments one by one; they were three in number.

  ‘I carried them carefully into my room, with no intention of examining them, but as I laid them on the bed their texture and fashion arrested me. A smell came from them, faded and far away. I held them up one by one: a heavily fringed shawl of Spanish make, a black shirt with many flounces, a tiny satin bodice that would barely, I thought, fit a child. As I unrolled this last, something fell from it: a pair of old, pink shoes, tiny shoes, heelless shoes, — the shoes of a ballet dancer.

  ‘As I turned over these relics I heard some one moving in the passage below, and going to the top of the stairs I called to Ruth. She came up, then seeing the shoes in my hands she gave an exclamation of surprise.

  ‘ “Are these yours?” I asked.

  ‘ “Mine! no; why, look here,” and she held a shoe against her foot, which, although small, outstripped the shoe in width and length. “They’re granny’s, I reckon,” she added.

  ‘Then she took up the bodice and examined it critically.

  ‘ “It’s a bit rotten, of course,” she remarked, pulling cautiously at the stuff, “but where’d you buy satin now to last as well as that? and bought abroad, too.”

 
‘The subtlest inflection of resentment was in her tone.

  ‘ “Here, give them to me,” she said. “Granny can’t want these old rags messing up the house. There’s little enough cupboard room anyhow. I’ll put the shawl away up in the attic, for there’s wear in it yet, but the rest can go on the midden.”

  ‘I detained her.

  ‘ “Tell me first, how comes your grandmother to have these things?”

  ‘She was surprised at my ignorance.

  ‘ “To start with, she’s father’s grandmother, not mine. She’s so old, I forget her mostly . . . She’s ninety-six, ninety-seven come Christmas. We’re wondering if she’ll last to a hundred.”

  ‘How callous she was! Triply callous, I thought, because of her own youth, because of her great-grandmother’s extreme age, and because of the natural philosophic indifference of her class towards life and death.

  ‘ “She was a dancer, once, you know,” she went on. “Used to dance on the stage, and my great-grandfather found her there, and married her. What a tiny little thing she must have been, just look at this,” and she held the little bodice across her own breast with a gay laugh, like a child trying to put on the clothes of its biggest doll.

  ‘Then she held the skirt against her slender hips to show me how short it was, and pointed her foot in an instinctive dance position.

  ‘She was holding up the bodice by tucking it under her chin. I looked at her, and she blushed, and convinced me that no woman ever stands altogether innocent of coquetry before any man.

  ‘ “Tell me more about your grandmother,” I said.