Chapter X: Book IV: Treacheries (2)

At last the crisis came--through George, the youngest, least-considered son at Odiam. He had always been a weakling, as if Naomi had passed into his body her own passionate distaste for life. Also, as is common with epileptic children, his intellect was not very bright. It had been the habit to spare him, even Reuben had done so within reason. But he should not really have worked at all, or only in strict moderation--certainly he should not have been sent out that October evening to dig up the bracken roots on the new land. Tilly expostulated--"Anyhow he didn't ought to work alone "--but Reuben was angry with the boy, whom he had caught loafing once or twice that day, and roughly packed him off.

He himself went over to Moor's Cottage about a load of trifolium, and returning in the darkness by Cheat Land was persuaded to stay to supper. That was one of the nights when he did not like Alice Jury--he sometimes went through the experience of disliking her, which was an adventure in itself, so wild and surprising was it, so bewildering to remember afterwards. She seemed a little colourless--she was generally so vivid that he noticed and resented all the more those times when her shoulders drooped against her chair, and her little face looked strangely wistful instead of eager. It seemed as if on these occasions Alice were actually pleading with him. She lost that antagonism which was the salt of their relations, instead of fighting she pleaded. Pleaded for what? He dared not ask that question, in case the answer should show him some strange new Canaan which was not his promised land. So he came away muttering--"only a liddle stick of a woman. I like gurt women--I like 'em rosy, I like 'em full-breasted.... She'd never do fur me."

He tramped home through the darkness. A storm was rising, shaking the fir-plumes of Boarzell against a scudding background of clouds and stars. The hedges whispered, the dead leaves rustled, the woods sighed. Every now and then a bellow would come from the Moor, as the sou'wester roared up in a gust, then a low sobbing followed it into silence.

On the doorstep Reuben was greeted by Tilly--where was George? He had not been in to supper.

"Have you looked in the new field?"

"Yes--Benjamin went round. But he äun't there."

"Well, I döan't know where he is."

"Reckon he's fallen down in a fit somewhere and died."

Tilly was not looking at all like Naomi to-night.

"Nonsense," said Reuben, resenting her manner.

"It äun't nonsense. I always know when his fits are coming on because he's tired and can't work präaperly. He was like that to-day. And you--you drove him out."

Reuben had never been spoken to like this by his daughter. He turned on her angrily, then suddenly changed his mind. For the first time he really saw what a fine girl she was--all that Alice was not.

"We'll go and look for him," he said--"send out the boys."

All that night they hunted for George on Boarzell. It was pitch dark. Soon great layers of cloud were sagging over the stars, and Boarzell's firs were lost in the blackness behind them. Reuben, his sons, Beatup, Piper, Handshut, Boorman, fought the dark with lanterns as one might fight Behemoth with pin-pricks. They scattered over the Moor, searching the thorn-clumps and gorse-thickets. It was pretty certain that he was not on the new ground by Flightshot. Richard said openly that he did not believe in the fit and that George had run away, and--less openly--that it was a good job too. The other boys, however, did not think that he had enough sense to run away, and agreed that his condition all day had foretold an attack.

Reuben himself believed in the fit, and a real anxiety tortured him as he thrust his lantern into the gaping caverns of bushes. He had by his thoughtless and excessive zeal allowed Boarzell to rob him of another man. Of course, it did not follow that George was dead, but unless they found him soon it was quite likely that he would not survive exposure on such a night. If so, Reuben had only himself to thank for it. He should have listened to his daughter, and either let George off his work or made him work near home. He did not pretend to himself that he loved this weakling son, or that his death would cause his fatherhood much grief, but he found himself with increasing definiteness brought up against the conviction that Boarzell was beating him, wringing its own out of him by slow, inexorable means, paying him back a hundredfold for every acre he took or furrow he planted.

He had become separated from the other searchers, and was alone on the west side of the Moor. The wind barked and howled, hurling itself upon him as he stood, beating his face with hail, which hissed into the dead tangles of the heather, while the stripped thorns yapped and rattled, and the bushes roared. So great was the tumult that he seemed to fall into it like a stone into a wave--it passed over him, round him, seemed even to pass under him, he was hardly conscious of the solid ground. The blackness was impenetrable, save where his lantern stained it with a yellow smudge. He shouted, but his voice perished in the din--it seemed as if his whole man, sight, voice, hearing, and sensation, was blurring into the storm, as if Boarzell had swamped him at last, made him merely one of its hundred voices, mocking the manhood which had tried so much against its earth.

The wind seemed to be laughing at him, as it bellowed up in gusts, struck him, sprayed him, roughed his hair out madly, smacked his cheeks, drove the rain into his skin, and then rumbled away with a hundred chatterings and sighings. It seemed to be telling him that as his breath was to this wind so was he himself to Boarzell. The wind was the voice of the Moor, and it told him that in fighting Boarzell, he did not fight the mere earth, an agglomeration of lime and clay which he could trample and compel, but all the powers behind it. In arming himself against Boarzell he armed himself against the whole of nature's huge resources, the winds, the storms, the droughts, the early and the latter rain, the poisons in plants, and the death in stones, the lusts which spilling over from the beasts into the heart of man slay him from within himself. He had armed himself against all these, and once again the old words sang in his head--"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?"

He had shrunk into the rattling shelter of some thorn-bushes. They scraped their boughs like grotesque violins, and every other moment they would sweep down over him and shut him into a cavern of snapping twigs. He was soaked to the skin and his teeth chattered. He lay close to the earth, seeking shelter even from the skeleton heather which writhed woody stems all round him. He cursed. Must he spend the night here, lost and grovelling, to listen while Boarzell screeched its triumph over his cold, drenched body....

"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

"His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.

"The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold; the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.

"He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

"Sharp stones are under him...."

A crash of thunder and a spit of lightning tore open the sky, and for a moment Reuben saw the slope of the Moor livid in the flash, and the crest of firs standing against the split and tumbling clouds. The air rang, screamed, hissed, rushed, and rumbled. Reuben, hardly knowing what he did, had sprung to his feet.

"I'll have wheat growing here in a twelvemonth!" he shouted.

§ 12.

The dawn broke over Boarzell like a reconciliation. The clamouring voices of wind and trees were still, and only a low sobbing came now and then from the woods. In the sky pale streamers of rose barred and striped a spreading violet. One or two clouds flew low, and slowly pilled themselves, scattering into the fields. On every blade of grass and twig of thorn, on every leaf and spine, glimmered pearls of rain, washing the air with a faint scent of stagnant water, perfuming it with the steams of sodden grass.

Reuben crept out of his thorn cavern and looked down the slope. At the bottom by Socknersh one or two lanterns moved through the dusk. He stiffly threw up his arm and tried to shout. His throat felt cramped and swollen, and it was not till after one or two attempts that a sound pitifully like a bleat came out of it. A voice answered him from the hollow, and then he saw that they were carrying something. He limped painfully down to them. Richard, Boorman, and Handshut carried a hurdle between them, and on the hurdle lay a draggled boy, whose clenched hand clutched a tuft of earth and grass as a victim might clutch a handful of his murderer's hair.

"Is he dead?" asked Reuben.

"Yes, mäaster," said Boorman.

Richard's mouth twisted in contemptuous silence--Handshut being young and silly was crying.

"He wurn't on the new land," continued Boorman, "he'd fallen into the ditch by Socknersh palings--that's why we cudn't find un. Reckon as he'd felt the fitses coming on un, and tried to git höame, pore souly."

"When did you find him?"

"Half an hour agone. He'd bin dead for hours, mäaster. He must have choked in the ditch--see, his mouth is full of mud."

Reuben drew back with a shiver. He limped behind the little procession towards Odiam, slouching for the first time in his life. In spite of his conquests he and Boarzell still were quits, still had to prove which was the better man. George, lying there muddy, white, and crumpled, was a sign that the Moor had its victories, in spite of the spreading corn.

He looked down at George--the boy's face had an unhuman chalky appearance under the mudstains; on the forehead a vein had swollen up in black knots, others showed pale, almost aqueous, through the stretched skin. After all, George was the weakest, the best-spared of his children. This thought comforted and stiffened him a little, and he went into the house with something of his old uprightness.

The other children were in the kitchen. They had seen their dead brother from the window, and stood mute and tearless as he was carried into the room. Reuben gave orders for him to be taken upstairs and the doctor to be sent for. No one else spoke. Tilly's breast heaved stormily, and he did not like the dull blaze in her eyes. Strange to say, of his whole family, excepting Pete, she was the only one of whom he was not faintly contemptuous. She had spirit, that girl--he prophesied that she would turn out a shrew.

For the very reason that he could not despise her, he took upon himself to bully her now.

"Get me some tea," he said roughly, "I'm cold."

§ 13.

Though there had been no open rupture, from that day forward Odiam was divided into two camps. On one side were Reuben and Pete, on the other, Tilly and Richard. Benjamin and Caro were neutrals; they were indifferent to vital issues, one engrossed in snatching holidays, the other in hankering after she did not quite know what. Pete had always been a good son, hard-working and enthusiastic, not exactly a comrade, but none the less an ally, always to be depended on and now and then taken into confidence. He seemed to accept his father's attitude towards George's death and to resent Richard's and Tilly's. That spring he beat Squinty Bream at Robertsbridge Fair, and gave half the purse to Reuben to buy a chaff-cutter.

Of the enemy Tilly was the most effective--Reuben did not quite know how to deal with her. His inability to despise her told heavily against him. Richard, on the other hand, he despised from the depths of his heart. The boy was insufferable, for he still had his old knack of saving his skin. It was nearly always impossible to pick any definite faults in his work--it was wonderful how he managed to combine unwillingness with efficiency. He also had an irritating habit of speaking correct English, and of alluding to facts and events of which Reuben had never heard in such a manner as to make it impossible for him not to show his ignorance.

Reuben never lost a chance of baiting him, he jibed at his squeamishness and fine manners, at his polite way of eating and the trouble he took to clean his nails; he despised him all the more for occasionally getting the better of him, verbally at any rate, in these encounters. One night at supper Reuben, having actually succeeded in finding this sneering son at fault, abused him roundly for the shocking condition of the ewes' fleeces. Richard had the bad sense to quote Shakespeare, whereat Reuben told him that if he could not speak English he could leave the room. Richard replied that he would be very pleased to do so, as certain people's table-manners made supper rather an ordeal. Reuben helped him out with a kick most vulgarly placed.

The next day Backfield was due at an auction at Northiam, but before leaving he ordered Richard to clean out the pig-sties. It was not, properly speaking, his work at all, but Reuben hoped it would make him sick, or that he would refuse to obey and thus warrant his father knocking him down.

"Certainly," said Richard without a tremor.

"Oh, thank you," said Reuben, bowing in mock politeness, and trying to copy his clipped English.

Ten minutes later he rode off, and the family separated to their tasks, or to such evasions of them as were possible in the master's absence.

Tilly cleared the table and began to prepare the dinner. She had promised the boys a bag pudding, and must start it early. She had not been cooking more than half an hour when the door opened, and Richard came in, dressed in a neat black suit with a stiff Gladstone collar. His hair was nicely brushed, and he carried a pair of gloves and a little valise.

"Oh!" cried Tilly.

"I'm off," said Richard shortly, banging down his valise on the table.

"Off!--where?"

"To London."

Tilly gaped at him.

"I'm sick of all this, I'm sick of the old man and his beastliness. Miss Bardon is lending me money to go to London University, and perhaps I shall read for the Bar."

"The Bar," repeated Tilly vaguely.

"Yes, I've learned a heap of Latin and other things during the last five years, and two or three years at the University ought to be all I want. Miss Bardon's taught me--I owe everything to her."

"I must say as how you've kept it dark."

She knew of his friendship with Anne Bardon, but had never expected it to bear such generous fruit.

"Well, it would never have done if the old man had got to know of it. Good heavens, Tilly! How can you live on with that old brute?"

"Maybe I shan't much longer," said Tilly, looking down at her rolling-pin.

Richard stared at her for a moment--"I'm glad to hear it. But the others--oh, my dear girl, this is damnable!"

Tilly sighed.

"The law ought to suppress such men--it ought to be a criminal offence to revert to type--the primordial gorilla."

"But fäather's a clever man--Albert always used to say so."

"Yes, in a cunning, brutish sort of way--like a gorilla when he's set his heart on a particular cocoanut. Boarzell's his cocoanut, and he's done some smart things to get it--and in one way at least he's above the gorilla, for he can enslave other people of superior intelligence to sweat under his orders for what they care nothing about."

"We're all very unlucky," said Tilly, "to have been born his children. But one by one we're gitting free. There'll soon be only Pete and Jemmy and Caro left."

"And I hope to God they'll have the wit to follow the rest of us. I'd like to see that old slave-driver left quite alone. Heavens! I could have strangled him yesterday--I should have, if I hadn't had this to look forward to."

"Where are you going to stay in London?"

"Miss Bardon's taken some rooms for me in Montague Street."

"She's good to you, Richard."

"She's an angel "--he lifted his eyes, and his mouth became almost worshipful--"she's an angel, who's raised me out of hell. I shall never be able to repay her, but she doesn't expect it. All she wants is my success."

"I wish Caro or Jemmy cud meet someone like her. I döan't think as Pete minds."

"No, he's quite the young gorilla. Now I must be off, Tilly. I'll write to you."

"Oh, wöan't fäather be in a taking!"

"I reckon--I expect he will. But don't you mind him, little sister. He isn't worth it."

He stooped and kissed her.

"Good-bye. Say it to the others for me."

"Good-bye--good luck to you."

... And he was gone--walking past the window in a top-hat.

§ 14.

It would be mere politeness to describe as a "taking" Reuben's condition when he heard Richard had gone. He was in a stamping, bellowing, bloodshot rage. He sent for various members of his family, questioned them, stormed at them, sent them away, then sent for them again. He boxed Caro's ears because she cried--hitherto he had kept his hands off the girls. As for Tilly, he would have liked to have whipped her--he felt sure that somehow it was all her doing--but the more furious he grew, the more he felt himself abashed by her manner, at once so soft and so determined, and he dared do no more than throw his boots at her.

After a night of cursings and trampings in his room, he took the fermenting dregs of his wrath to Cheat Land. It was queer that he should go for sympathy to Alice Jury, who was chief in the enemy's camp. But though he knew she would not take his part, she would not be like the others, leering and cackling. She would give him something vital, even if it was only a vital opposition. That was all the difference between her and everyone else--she opposed him not because she was flabby or uninterested or enterpriseless, but because she really hated what he strove for. She was his one strong candid enemy, so he went to her as his only friend.

She was shocked at his white twitching face and bloodshot eyes; for the first time since she had known him, Reuben came to her bereft of that triumphant manhood which had made him so splendid to watch in his struggles.

"The hound!" he cried, striking his fists together, "the miserable, cowardy hound!--gone and left me--gone to be a gentleman, the lousy pig. Oh, Lard, I wish as I had him in these hands o' mine!--I'd mäake a gentleman of him!"

Alice, as he expected, had caustic for him rather than balm.

"Once again," she said slowly, "I ask you--is it worth while?"

"Wot's worth while?"

"You know. I asked you that question the first or second time I saw you. No one had ever asked it you before, and you would have liked to beat me."

"I shud like to beat you now--talking of wot you know naun about."

"I daresay--but I'm not your son or your daughter or your wife----"

"I never beat my wife."

"Chivalrous, humane man!--well, anyhow I'm not anyone you can beat, so I dare ask--is it worth while?"

"And I ask wot d'you mean by 'worth while'?"

"You know that it's Boarzell and your farm which have lost you your boys."

"I know nothing of the sort."

"Well, would Robert have stolen money, or Albert disgraced your name, to get free, if you and your farm hadn't made them slaves? If you hadn't been a heartless slave-driver would George have died the other night alone on the Moor?--or would Richard have taken advantage of a neighbour's charity to escape from you? Don't you see that your ambition has driven you to make slaves of your children?"

"Well, they wöan't wark fur me of their free will. Lard knows I've tried to interest 'em...."

"But how can you expect them to be interested? Your ambition means nothing to them."

"It ought to--Odiam's their home jest as it's mine."

"But don't you see that you've forced them to give up all the sweet things of life for it?--Robert his love, and Albert his poetry, and Richard his education."

"Well, I gave up all the sweet things of life, as you call 'em--and why shudn't they?"

"Because you gave those things up of your free will--they were made to give them up by force. You've no right to starve and deny other people as you have to starve and deny yourself."

"I döan't see that. Wot I can do, they can."

"But--as experience has taught you--they won't. You can see now what your slave-driving's brought you to--you've lost your slaves."

"Well, and I reckon they wurn't much loss, nuther"--the caustic was healing after all--"Robert wur a fool wot didn't know how to steal a ten-pound note, Albert wur always mooning and wasting his time, and George wur a pore thing not worth his keep. As for Richard--that Richard--who wants a stuck-up, dentical, high-nosed, genteel swell about the pläace? I reckon as I'm well shut of the whole four of 'em. They wurn't worth the food they ate, surelye!"

"That's what strikes me as so pathetic."

"Wot?"

"That you should be able to comfort yourself with the thought that they weren't worth much to you as a farmer. What were they worth to you as a father?"

"Naun."

"Quite so--and that's what makes me pity you," and suddenly her eyes kindled, blazed, as with her spirit itself for fuel--"I pity you, I pity you--poor, poor man!"

"Adone do wud that--though you sound more as if you wur in a black temper wud me than as if you pitied me."

"I am angry with you just because I pity you. It's a shame that I should have to pity you--you're such a splendid man. It ought to be impossible to pity you, but I do--I pity you from my soul. Think what you're missing. Think what your children might have been to you. How you might have loved that dear stupid Robert--how proud you might have been of Albert, and of Richard leaving you for a professional career ... and poor little George, just because he was weak and unlike the rest, he might have been more to you than them all. Then there's your brother Harry----"

"Come, come--stick to the truth. I äun't to blame for Harry."

"But can't you see that he's the chief part of the tragedy you're bringing on yourself and everyone?--He's the type, he's the chorus, the commentary on every act. Reuben, can't you see--oh, why won't you see?--he's you, yourself, as you really are!"

"Nonsense!--döan't be a fool, my gal."

"Yes--you--blind, crazy with your ambition, repulsive and alone in it. Don't you see?"

He smiled grimly--"I döan't."

"No--you don't see this hideous thing that's pursuing you, that's stripping you of all that ought to be yours, that's making you miss a hundred beautiful things, that's driving you past all your joys--this Boarzell...."

"--äun't driving me, anyhow. I'm fighting it."

"No," said Alice. "It's I who am fighting Boarzell."

§ 15.

Early the next year, Tilly married Realf of Grandturzel.

Reuben received the blow in silence--it stunned him. He did not go over to Cheat Land--something, he scarcely knew what, kept him away. In the long yellow twilights he wandered on Boarzell. The rain-smelling March wind scudded over the grass, over the wet furrows of his cornfields, over the humming tops of the firs that, with the gorse splashed round their trunks, marked the crest of the Moor and of his ambition. Would they ever be his, those firs? Would he ever tear up that gorse and fling it on the bonfire, as he had torn up the gorse on the lower slopes and burned it with roars and cracklings and smoke that streamed over the Moor to Totease? Perhaps Realf would have the firs and the gorse, and pile that gorgeous bonfire. Tilly would put him up to her father's game--Reuben's imagination again failed to conceive the man who did not want Boarzell--she would betray Odiam's ambitions, and babble its most vital secrets. Tilly, Reuben told Boarzell, was a bitch.

It became now all the more necessary to smash Realf. He could no longer be content with keeping just ahead of him; he must establish a sort of two-power standard, and crush his rival to the earth. That was not a good summer for expansion--a drought baked up the greater part of Sussex, and there was an insect plague in the hops--nevertheless, Reuben bought thirty-five acres of Boarzell, on the east slope, by the road. He was tormented by a fear that Realf would buy the land if he did not, and, moreover, during May two boards had appeared advertising it as "an eligible building site"; which was possibly bluff, possibly unusual cunning on the part of Flightshot, made resourceful by its straits.

He no longer had any direct intercourse with the Bardons. Their latest impropriety had put them beyond even the favour of a casual nod. If they chose to break up his family they must take the consequences. He only wished he could break up their estate, sell their rat-holed old Manor over their heads, and leave them unprotected by landed property to the sure workings of their own incompetence.

He did not fail to show his neighbours how he despised Flightshot, and the more humorously inclined among them were never tired of asking how soon it would be before Richard married Anne.

"Your family seems to be in a marrying way jest now, Mus' Backfield--there's your daughter made an unaccountable fine match, and it's only nat'ral as young Richard shud want to do as well fur himself."

Reuben treated these irreverences with scorn. Nothing would make him abate a jot of his dignity. On the contrary, his manner and his presence became more and more commanding. He drove a splendid blood mare in his gig, smoked cigars instead of pipes, and wore stand-up collars about four inches high--when he was not working, for it had not struck him that it was undignified to work, and he still worked harder on his farm than the worst-paid pig-boy.

He was more stoutly resolved than ever that the mob of small farmers and incompetents should not gape at his misfortunes. So he hid under a highly repulsive combination of callousness and swagger his grief for his sons' defection, his rage and shame at Tilly's marriage, and his growing anxiety about Odiam. That summer had been terrible--a long drought had been followed too late by thundery rains. His harvest had been parched and scrappy, most of the roots shedding their seed before reaping; the green-fly had spoiled several acres of hops, which otherwise would have been the one bright patch in the season; his apples and pears had been eaten by wasps; and then a few untimely showers had beaten down two fields of barley yet unreaped and his only decent crop of aftermath hay.

If Grandturzel had fared as badly he could have borne it, but Grandturzel, though scarred, came out of the summer less battered than he. Realf's oats, being in a more sheltered position, did no private threshing of their own; his hops for the most part escaped the blight, and though he lost a good deal on his plums, his apples were harvested at a record, and brought him in nearly ten pounds an acre. On both farms the milk had done badly, but as Realf's dairy business was not so extensive as Backfield's, he was better able to stand its partial collapse.

Reuben felt that Tilly was at the bottom of his rival's success. She was practical and saving, the very virtues which Realf lacked and the want of which might have wrecked him. She doubtless was responsible for the good condition of his orchards and the immunity of his hops; she had probably told her husband of that insect-spray of her father's--which had failed him that summer, being too much diluted by the fool who mixed it, but had proved a miracle of devastation in other years.

He wanted to smash Tilly even more than he wanted to smash Realf. He had seen her twice since her marriage--meeting her once in Rye, and once on Boarzell--and each sight had worked him into a greater rage. Her little figure had strengthened and filled out, her demure self-confidence had increased, her prettiness was even more adorable now that the rose had deepened on her cheeks and her gowns strained over her breast; she was enough to fill any man with wrath at the joke of things. Tilly ought to be receiving the wages of her treachery in weariness and anxiety, fading colour and withering flesh--and here she was all fat and rosy and happy, well-fed and well-beloved. He hated her and called her a harlot--because she had betrayed Odiam for hire and trafficked in its shame.

§ 16.

He had been forced to engage a woman to help Caro in the house, and also a shepherd for Richard's work. His family had been whittled down to almost nothing. Only Caro, Pete, and Jemmy were left out of his eight splendid boys and girls. Caro, Pete, Jemmy, and hideous, mumbling Harry--he surveyed the four of them with contemptuous scowls. Pete was the only one who was worth anything--Caro and Jemmy would turn against him if they had the slightest chance and forsake him with the rest. As for Harry, he was a grotesque, an image, a hideous fum--"Reuben himself as he really was." He! He!

The weeks wore on and it dawned on him that he must pull himself together for a fresh campaign. He must have more warriors--he could not fight Boarzell with only traitors and hirelings. He must marry again.

It was some time since the abstract idea of marriage had begun to please him, but lately the abstract of marriage had always led to the concrete of Alice Jury, so he had driven it from his thoughts. Now, more and more clearly, he saw that he must marry. He wanted a woman and he wanted children, so he must marry. But he must not marry Alice.

Of late he had resumed his visits to Cheat Land, discontinued for a while at Tilly's marriage. The attraction of Alice Jury was as strong, unfathomable, and unaccountable as ever. Since the stormy interview after Richard's desertion they had not discussed his ambitions for Odiam and Boarzell, but that meeting was none the less stamped on Reuben's memory with a gloomy significance. It was not that Alice's arguments had affected him at all--she had not penetrated to the springs of his enterprise, she had not touched or conjured the hidden part of him in which his ambition's roots were twined round all that was vital and sacred in the man. But somehow she had expressed her own attitude with an almost sinister clearness--"It's I who am fighting Boarzell." What should she fight it for?--imagine that she fought it, rather, for a woman could not really fight Boarzell. She was fighting it for him. She wanted him.

He knew that Alice wanted him, and he knew that he wanted Alice. He did not know why he wanted Alice any more than he knew why Alice wanted him. "Wot is she?--a liddle stick of a creature. And I like big women."

There was something in the depths of him that cried for her, something which had never moved or cried in him before. In spite of her lack of beauty and beguilement, in spite of her hostility to all his darling schemes, there was something in him to which Alice actually and utterly belonged. He did not understand it, he could not analyse it, he scarcely indeed realised it--all he felt was the huge upheaval, the conflict that it brought, all the shouting and the struggling of the desperate and motiveless craving that he felt for her--a hunger in him calling through days and nights, in spite of her insignificance, her aloofness, her silences, her antagonism.

"I reckon as how I must be in love."

That was the conclusion he came to after much heavy pondering. He had never been truly in love before. He had wanted women for various reasons, either for their charm and beauty, or because, as in Naomi's case, of their practical use to him. Alice had no beauty, and a charm too subtle for him to realise, though as a matter of fact the whole man was plastic to it--as for practical usefulness, she was poor, delicate, unaccustomed to country life, and hostile to all his most vital ambitions. She would not bring him wealth or credit, she was not likely to bear him healthy children--and yet he loved her.

Sometimes, roaming through murky dusks, he realised in the dim occasional flashes which illuminate the non-thinking man, that he was up against the turning-point of his fight with Boarzell. If he married Alice it would be the token of what had always seemed more unimaginable than his defeat--his voluntary surrender. Sometimes he told himself fiercely that he could fight Boarzell with Alice hanging, so to speak, over his arm; but in his heart he knew that he could not. He could not have both Alice and Boarzell.

Yet, in spite of all this, one day at Cheat Land he nearly fell at her feet and asked her to be his ruin.

It was a March twilight, cold and rustling, and tart with the scents of newly turned furrows. Reuben sat with Alice in the kitchen, and every now and then Jury's wretched house-place would shake as the young gale swept up rainless from the east and poured itself into cracks and chimneys. Alice was sewing as usual--it struck Reuben that she was very quick and useful with her fingers, whatever might be her drawbacks in other ways. Sometimes she had offered to read poetry to him, and had once bored him horribly with In Memoriam, but as he had taken no trouble to hide his feelings she had to his great relief announced her intention of casting no more pearls before swine.

She was silent, and the firelight playing in her soft, lively eyes gave her a kind of mystery which for the first time allowed Reuben a glimpse into the sources of her attraction. She was utterly unlike anything there was or had been in his life, the only thing he knew that did not smell of earth. The pity of it was that he loved that strong-smelling earth so much.

"Alice," he said suddenly--"Do you think as how you could ever care about Boarzell?"

"No, I'm quite sure I couldn't."

"Not ever?"

"Never."

"Why?"

"Because I hate it. It's spoiling your life. It's making a beast and a maniac of you. You think of nothing--absolutely nothing--but a miserable rubbish-heap that most people would be throwing their old kettles on."

"That's just the point, my gal. Where most föalkses 'ud be throwing old kettles, I shall be growing wheat."

"And what good will that do you?"

"Good!--when I've two hundred acres sown with grain!"

"Yes, grain that's fertilised with the rotting remains of all that ought to have made your life good and sweet."

"You wöan't understand. There's naun in the world means anything to me but my farm. Oh, Alice, if you could only see things wud my eyes and stand beside me instead of agäunst me."

"Then there would be no more friendship between us. What unites us is the fact that we are fighting each other."

"Döan't talk rubbidge, liddle gal. It's because I see, all the fight there is in you that I'd sooner you fought for me than agäunst me. Couldn't you try, Alice?"

His voice had sunk very low, almost to sweetness. A soft flurry of pink went over her face, and her eyelids drooped. Then suddenly she braced herself, pulled herself taut, grew combative again, though her voice shook.

"No, Reuben, I could never do anything but fight your schemes. I think you are wasting and spoiling your life, and there's no use expecting me to stand by you."

He now realised the full extent of his peril, because for the first time he saw her position unmasked. She would never beguile him with the thought that she could help him in his life's desire; she would not alter the essential flavour of their relationship to suit his taste--rather she would force him to swallow it, she would subdue by strength and not by stealth, and fight him to the end.

He must escape, for if he surrendered now the battle was over, and he would have betrayed Boarzell the loved to something he loved less--loved less, he knew it, though he wavered.

He rose to his feet. The kitchen was dark, with eddying sweeps of shadow in the corners which the firelight caressed--while a single star put faint ghostly romance into the window.

"I--I must be gitting back home."

Alice rose too, and for a moment he was surprised that she did not try to keep him; instead, she said:

"It's late."

He moved a step or two towards the door, and suddenly she added in a low broken voice:

"But not too late."

The floor seemed to rise towards him, and the star in the window to dance down into Castweasel woods and up again.

Alice stood in the middle of the room, her face bloomed with dusk and firelight, her hands stretched out towards him....

There was silence, in which a coal fell. She still stood with her arms outstretched; he knew that she was calling him--as no woman had ever called him--with all that of herself which was in his heart, part of his own being.

"Reuben."

"Alice."

He came a few steps back into the room....

It was those few steps which lost him to her, for they brought him within sight of Boarzell--framed in the window, where Castweasel woods had been. It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay, Boarzell--strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle. And Alice?... He gave her a look, and left her.

"I once töald a boy of mine," he said to himself as he crossed the Moor, "that the sooner he found he could do wudout love the better.... Well, I reckon I'm not going to be any weaker than my words."