The Romantic Part 4

She wondered what the farm would be like without him. Would it be what it was last autumn and winter and in the spring before he came? But she had been happy all that time without him, even in the hard, frost-biting winter. When you had gone through that you knew the worst of Barrow Farm.

It made your face coa.r.s.e, though.

Joan of Arc was a peasant. No wonder she was beginning to look like her.

If John went--

"John, shall you stay on here?"

"I don't know. I shall stick to farming if that's what you mean. Though it isn't what I wanted."

"What did you want?"

"To go into the Army."

"Why didn't you then?"

"They wouldn't have me. There's something wrong with my eyes.... So the land's got me instead."

"Me too. We ought to have been doing this all our lives."

"We'll jolly well have to. We shall never be any good indoors again."

"Has old Burton said anything?"

"I'm getting on. I can drive as straight a furrow as any man in Gloucesters.h.i.+re. I've told my father that. He detests me; but he'd say you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you _must_ farm. He turned all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business. He liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under his engines. He'd simply love to see me here standing up to my knees in wet cow-dung."

"He won't mind your leaving him?"

"Not if I make a good thing out of this. Anyhow he knows he can't keep me off it. If I can't fight I'll farm. It's in my blood and nerves and memory. He sits there selling motor cars, but his people were fighting men. They fought to get land; they fought to keep it. My mother's people, the Rodens, were yeoman farmers. That's why my furrow's so straight."

"And that's why you came here?"

"No. That isn't why."

"Aren't you glad you came? Did you ever feel anything like the peace of it?"

"It's not the peace of it I want, Charlotte,--Jeanne, I mean. It's the fight. Fighting with things that would kill you if you didn't.

Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you. Ploughing, Charlotte--Jeanne. Feeling the thrust and the drive through, and the thing listing over on the slope. Seeing the steel blade s.h.i.+ne, and the long wounds coming in rows, hundreds of wounds, wet and s.h.i.+ning."

"What makes you think of wounds?"

"I don't know. I see it like that. Cutting through."

"I don't see it like that one bit. The earth's so kind, so beautiful. And the hills--look at them, the clean, quiet backs, smoothed with light. You could stroke them. And the fields, those lovely coloured fans opening and shutting."

"They're lovely because of what's been done to them. If those hills had been left to themselves there'd have been nothing on them but trees.

Think of the big fight with the trees, the hacking through, the cutting.

The trunks staggering and falling. You'd begin with a little hole in the forest like that gap in the belt on the sky-line, and you'd go on hacking and cutting. You'd go on.... If you didn't those d.a.m.ned trees would come up round you and jam you between their trunks and crush you to red pulp.... Supposing this belt of beeches drew in and got tighter and tighter--No. There's nothing really kind and beautiful on this earth.

Except your face. And even your face--"

"My face?--"

"_Could_ be cruel. But it never will be. Something's happened to it. Some cruelty. Some d.a.m.nable cruelty."

"What makes you think so?"

"Every kind and beautiful thing on earth, Jeanne, has been made so by some cruelty."

"That's all rot. Utter rot. You don't know what you're talking about.... It's milking time. There's Gwinnie semaphoring. Do you know old Burton's going to keep us on? He'll pay us wages from this quarter. He says we were worth our keep from the third day."

"Do you want to stay on here?"

"Rather."

"Very well then, so do I. That settles it."

"Get up," she said, "and come along. Gwinnie's frantic."

He sat up, bowed forwards, his hands hanging loose over his knees.

She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender back dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of her breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her lips parting.

He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her weight against his weight, tugging.

He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her pull. As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing forgotten, her right hand.

Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable--the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft behind it--she lay thinking.

Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.

"If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie"--She knew what Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another.

Thinking was the antidote to caring. If she had let her mind play freely over Gibson Herbert in the beginning--But Gibson stopped her thinking, and John Conway made her think. That was the difference.

There was nothing about John that was like Gibson. Not a look, not a gesture, not the least thought in his mind. His mind was like his body, clean and cold and beautiful. Set on fire only by dreams; loving you in a dream, a dream that burned him up and left him cold to you.

Cold and clean.

There were things she laid up against him, the poor dear; a secret h.o.a.rd of grievances now clear to her in the darkness; she found herself turning them over and over, as if positively her mind owed his romantic apathy a grudge. Little things she remembered. Three things.

Yesterday in the hayfield, John pitching hay on to the cart, and she standing on the top of the load, flattening down the piles as he swung them up. Gwinnie came with a big fork, sw.a.n.king, for fun, trying to pitch a whole hayc.o.c.k. In the dark of the room she could see Gwinnie's little body straining back from the waist, her legs stiffening, her face pink and swollen; and John's face looking at Gwinnie.

She shouted down at him, "Why can't you _take_ the d.a.m.ned thing? She'll break her back with it." And he shouted up, "That's her look-out." (But he took it.) He didn't like Gwinnie.

That time. And the time Cowslip calved, the darling choosing the one night old Burton was away and Jim down with flu. She had to hold the lantern. Straw littered in the half-lighted shed. Cowslip swinging her bald-faced head round to you, her humble, sorrowful eyes imploring, between her groans and the convulsive heavings of her flanks. A noise between a groan and a bellow, a supreme convulsion. The dark wall, the white funnel of light from the lantern, and John's face in the flash....

But he had been sorry for Cowslip. Going out with the lantern afterwards she had found him in the yard, by the wall, bent double, s.h.i.+vering and retching. And she had sung out to him "Buck up, John. She's licked it clean. It's the dearest little calf you ever saw."

Pity. Pity could drag your face tight and hard, like Burton's when his mare, Jenny, died of colic.