Chapter VII: Adam Wild

Spring in Cherrydale!

Which is as though one would say, “Spring! in heaven.”

Blackbird flutes busy in the silver coldness of mornings that come “at seven”; larks rising from grey fields sparkling under the sunrise with a million beads of dew--larks rising for their brief glory, dropping defeated, rising again for a few seconds longer. Lambs dancing and worrying without end at the teats of their mothers, who can scarce crop the short, sweet grass for them; brooks tumbling head over heels through vivid sluices in the hills; a light breaking out on the face of those little hills, where the young green blades relentlessly elbow the old grey blades, crying out for room, yet more room, eager to come up and breathe the air. The bareness of the country breaks into a few friendly trees at Cherrydale, so that the carrier, standing up on his cart as he drives lazily along under them, is forced to “duck” a little, and even then gets a baptism of cold moisture dropped upon him from those dew-drooping beeches. Cherryblossom in the orchards, blobbed with the same cold moisture, shakes brilliant, pendulous tears into the emerald of the grass below, with the swinging up and down of a speckled thrush, singing, singing, without the slightest idea of why he sings, only knowing that he _must_. Green fire in the bushes. Blue pools in the sky. Never had Spring danced so suddenly with her sunlantern upon the little grey village.

Every day brought crowds of birds back.

The April sun felt like May’s.

A pair of martins were half way through the building of a home, against the very hinges of Susan Thorpe’s bedroom lattice. She did not dare to open it for fear of their ruin. Which her mother said was nonsense, that windows had to be cleaned. But Jabez, sparse of words, backed up his tender-hearted daughter.

Mrs. Thorpe was spring-cleaning. She generally started with Susan’s bedroom, and ended with the stones round the family grave, getting them decent against the Charity. There was the same bustle going on in every one of the houses in the village, the farms on the hillsides. Was it not Cherrydale Tide? In some mysterious way there was a link between the Tide that brought fat ladies and lion-tamers and the cleaning of those little houses.

Jabez Thorpe had been out two hours, early as it was, stopping wall-gaps, repairing fences, and shouting at Ned Thorn, his labourer, who was slow of understanding. The two men sat now at the long table Susan scrubbed with fine sand every week. They were engaged on the serious work of dispatching pink ham, white and golden eggs, and sippets of bread toasted in the fat, whilst between the mouthfuls they mumbled out a discussion of whether or not a cow should have her dew-lap pierced for a cold.

Susan was kneading snowy dough in a brown dish set on a wooden stool by the shining fireside. Suddenly, the cur on the hearthrug started up, growling uncertainly.

“Who’s that?” came Mrs. Thorpe’s voice from the scullery, where she was green-washing.

“It’ll be Wild,” mumbled Jabez. “Saw him reading a pink bill in Betty Harker’s window. He said he were bringing thee some mushrooms he’d gotten. For me--they’re a bit strong, horse-mushrooms.”

Susan stared.

Her father’s tone was nettlesome.

“Well, I makes a practice o’ refusin’ nowt but blows,” came Mrs. Thorpe’s voice.

The tone of it told Jabez not to be a fool--at least to be as little of a fool as he could.

For as the dawn had crept up he had told his wife that if Wild started coming there again he should want to know what he meant, and should tell him he wasn’t going to have his lass upset by any man, or he’d take it out of his skin. Which only proves that Jabez had walked cow-byres so long that he had got into a very simple way of looking at things.

When Adam stepped into the cleanly prosperity of the Thorpes’ farm-kitchen he felt a peculiar atmosphere so soon as he set his foot over the brass threshold.

He nodded a nod that included every one in the kitchen, and sat down on the wooden bench under the deep-silled window where Susan’s blue and white hyacinths were coming up.

“Tha’rt nearly a stranger, Adam,” said Mrs. Thorpe, coming in from the scullery, the red of her cheeks, the green of the greenwash, Jabez’s orange muffler on her head to save her hair, giving her a variegated appearance.

“Nay--” expostulated Adam.

Susan went on kneading, after that one look of welcome in which her cheeks had grown less pale.

Adam took from his pocket a bag of mushrooms, whose fresh scent strove with that of hot coffee on the hob.

“By! But they’re grand uns,” commented Jabez.

His tone, however, lacked some warmth Adam had always been accustomed to.

“Get a dish for ’em, Susan,” said Mrs. Thorpe, giving him a look.

Susan at once ceased kneading, pulled wisps of dough from her fingers, rosy with the task. Adam watched her with meditative pleasure, her quiet movements, the readiness to smile, the trim figure in its June-blue bodice, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

After toppling the mushrooms into the dish she went back to her kneading. But he caught her look on his face, once--a look of pleasure, shy pleasure that he had come again. Whilst her loyalty, her industry, her cheerful content, shone out in contrast against that town-girl whose memoried face yet disturbed him.

There was silence for a little while, after Mrs. Thorpe’s thanks.

“Heard from Uncle Nat?” queried Adam, shifting his foot.

“We’re getting his room ready,” said Mrs. Thorpe.

Another silence fell.

“How’s them bits o’ bacon o’ thine going on?” asked Jabez, obeying a prompting look of his wife’s as she helped him to more pink ham.

“Six of ’em are about at the last gasp,” said Adam without emphasis. But the muscles of his neck twitched.

“They are--Hanover!” ejaculated Jabez, altering his first thought, on Susan’s behalf.

He looked at Adam, his expression losing that cold something he had first greeted him with. Six fine bits o’ bacon dying two weeks before ready for market. That touched the vials of his sympathy.

“Tha turns luck back, Wild,” he said at length, gloomily, and attacked his ham.

“Seems so,” agreed Adam, smilingly.

Jabez looked at him with the admiration of a man who has only known prosperity. Whatever Wild felt he never whined. He worked.

“Well----” said Mrs. Thorpe, sorrowfully.

“Fever,” said Adam, shortly. “Going to report.”

“Make him a cup o’ coffee, Susan,” urged Susan’s mother. Her motherliness enfolded Adam.

“I’ve only just had my breakfast, aunt,” he said. He always called Mrs. Thorpe “aunt” when the memory of how she had held his mother up to meet death crossed his mind.

Susan slashed the dough across smartly with her knife, covered it with a cloth white as new-fallen snow, and set it gently on top of the steel-topped fender.

She was ideal.

He acknowledged it to himself much as he noted the points of a beast before buying it. But, distraught as he was with the approaching loss of the pigs, he wondered if she would ever be quite so fat as her mother.

“Don’t trouble, Susan,” said Adam, as she set the kettle on the rackan-hook.

“It’s singing,” she told him, pleasantly.

It was.

“I’ll go along wi’ thee an’ have a look at ’em, lad,” said Jabez.

Adam nodded acceptance of his company.

Whilst Adam wondered if Jabez had been a little riled on account of his not getting a sitting of eggs from him this year, as Susan brewed the coffee in a fat, brown jug, he sounded him on the subject. No, Jabez had not cared about that.

“How’s that little cauf?” queried Jabez.

“She’s a grand little calf,” said Adam.

“She is that,” said Jabez.

The gawky man lit up in a wonderful way.

Adam nodded.

“Believe me or believe me not,” said Mrs. Thorpe, “Jabe came home fair ill as he hadn’t bought that cauf hissel’.”

Jabez nodded to say she wasn’t far out of it.

“A bonnie thing,” he said, with almost poetic feeling. “A rare bonnie, livesome little beast. Didn’t I say so?”

The Thorpes had this comical way of asking for each other’s backing on most unimportant points, whilst they ganged their ain gait on the big ones.

“Tha did, Jabe,” assented Mrs. Thorpe. “Ay, he did, Adam.”

Adam nodded to show that he did not doubt their united testimony.

A burst of sun filled the kitchen, showing up its super-cleanliness.

Adam laughed.

“He needn’t wish he’d bought her,” he said.

Susan Thorpe looked across at the young man with swift-leaping sympathy at worse trouble up at Sagg Farm.

Then, as she saw Adam looking at her intently, she coloured and became over-busy with her loaf-tins, her little hand bobbing in and out of them with the greasy cloth at a great rate.

“Tha doesn’t mean to say th’ cauf is deein’ an’ a’?” said Jabez, incredulously. He had to get out of his chair and stand up in the fullness of his feelings.

“Right as rain,” said Adam, slowly, “for all Bob an’ I can see, but--she’s droppin’ her cud in the bush. We opened her mouth, as far as we could, but----”

“Tryin’ to look in a cow’s mouth,” said Jabez, dryly, “is like trying to see what a woman has in her mind.”

“Anybody ’d think to hear thee talk----” began Mrs. Thorpe, indignantly.

“Nay, lass,” said her spouse. “Adam knows me.”

He winked at the young man.

Then both the Thorpes stood gazing at the tower of ill-luck who had likewise risen from his seat.

“Droppin’ her cud, is she?” queried Jabez, out of his brown study.

“It’s enough to make anybody believe in witchcraft,” said his spouse.

“Just harken these women!” gruntled Jabez.

“Say what tha likes, Jabe,” she persisted. “There may be such things. I remember my grandmother being loused, an’ a cleaner woman never lived. But she shut ’em wi’ a boilin’ o’ pig’s blood an’ earth fro’ a churchyard for I remember her stirrin’ it round wi’ th’ porrich stick----”

“A damned queer thing,” said Jabez, “this droppin’ her cud. It beats me. Well, I’ll just get my coyt on.”

He went off, leaving Mrs. Thorpe still describing to Adam the lousing of her grandmother’s sheets.

Then Ned the labourer ambled off with a side-wink that might mean anything or nothing.

Mrs. Thorpe suddenly discovered that at the snail-gallop speed she was working she wouldn’t have got through her cleaning by next Tide, never speak of this.

“The coffee’s ready now, Adam,” said Susan.

She was poking the fire up as she spoke.

The rosy light on her country fairness strengthened that likeness Adam had noticed in her to a daisy. She was a pink daisy, now.

They were alone together, netted somehow in the quiet brightness of the kitchen.

He remembered that he had come to ask her to go with him to Cherrydale Tide--almost, but not quite a proposal; anyway, a prudent proposal that left an easy way out for either party. Things were coming to a crisis at Sagg Farm. The yellow-faced man was shouting out for the quarter’s interest on the mortgage. After all, Susan was not a Gorgon, but one of the bonniest lasses in the village.

“I’ve sugared it, Adam,” she said of the coffee.

Over the edge of his pot his eyes met Susan’s.

They were scanning him with a look of that shy pleasure that had greeted his long absence from their house.

He did not question any longer Uncle Nat’s having spoken the whole truth when he told of Susan Thorpe being over head and ears in love with him. The tender picture of her praying for his wheat, came into his memory.

Susan’s last loaf-tin was greased and set on the oven-top. She seemed at a loss for something to do, and inadvertently stepped upon the dog.

He decided to plunge--even as his right hand scrumpled into a hard ball, inside his pocket, that pink bill whereon was set down, “large as life,” as Granny Harker had said, the letters of the name of the only girl who had ever made him act like a born idiot.

“Soprano: Miss Cherry of Narrowfields.”

He was scrumpling it all up and knew it, as he looked at Susan and finally said, “Would you like to go to the Tide, Susan?”

For a moment, in the shock of the surprise, he began to think Uncle Nat had been wrong, after all. Susan’s eyes looked aghast at what was next-door to a proposal, then she blushed crimson, and said hesitatingly, “I--don’t--know. I----” The eyes turned on him suddenly sparkled in a way he had not thought Susan’s eyes could sparkle. For one little flash they looked like another pair of girl’s eyes, on account of that sparkly quiver.

“Sarah and Bob are goin’,” said Adam.

For as Susan had hesitated he had thought of that paper at home from the yellow-faced man--the date coming nearer, nearer, with every dawn.

Then indeed Susan’s eyes lit up with that sparkle that makes the eyes of all girls look curiously alike.

She drew a quick breath of delight.

“Oh--yes, I should love it,” she said.

She was red and white, and that unquiet look in her eyes made her a little unsusanish.

He set it down to the excitement of being going to the Tide, with--himself. And--he hoped Bob would not mind going along with them, since that took the edge off Susan’s shyness.

“You should see Bob bring ‘Punch’ out when he swings the big hammer,” he said, trying to put her at her ease. She was going. She had promised. He mentally snapped his fingers at the yellow-faced man.

“Mr. Wild looks strong,” said Susan, in a low voice.

If Adam had not been so jubilant on having got one across the yellow-faced man he would have heard, perhaps, the uncertain, almost tremulous way in which Susan said the name of the brother who never crossed the Thorpe doorstep--or any other doorstep for that matter, save that big house of the moors, swept clean by the wet winds.

“Strong as an ox,” said Adam.

Silence fell again, through which, slightly embarrassed, he felt her studying his face again. She was both shy and not shy. He couldn’t quite weigh Susan up.

“Well--we’ll wait for you by Betty Harker’s. No later than seven, Saturday,” he said, finishing up his coffee.

He straightened his shoulders in the peculiar way the Wilds had--as if shaking off any tendency to lean long before it made itself felt. Susan noticed again the shadowy likeness to the boy with whom she had once tended sheep on Whitemoor, the boy who had grown into a moor-mad man who could see nothing but dogs, hares, grouse, and who merely said as he met her in the lanes, “Hello, Susan,” and passed on, quite forgetful of that time when she promised to marry him, a maiden of eight, answering a man of ten, and--one of the ewes got drowned under their dreamy guard, and Bob was afraid of his father, and they buried it under the red moor soil, and said they had never seen it, so that it was always a great mystery.

He caught the full glance of her eyes as he settled down from that shaking of himself.

Whatever doubts he had had that Uncle Nat was mistaken he had none now. Whilst he could not dream that Susan was seeing herself and Bob, sitting on a stone wall, promising never, never to tell what became of the old ewe, and solemnly wetting their first fingers with their tongues, and drawing them across their throats, saying weirdly, “Is that wet? Is it dry?” according to the most solemn covenant of the northern child.

“Ready, Adam,” said Jabez from the doorway, as though he had been waiting an hour.

All through this embarrassed conversation which had endeavoured to be quite natural, they had been able to hear Jabez shouting at Ned across the space of a field, and calling him different names for fool.

“O--” said Adam, meeting Jabez’s eye, “I’ve been asking Susan to go along wi’ me to the Tide, and she wonders if you and her mother object.”

“An’ with Sarah--and--Mr. Wild,” said Susan.

Her efforts not to blush were unavailing.

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” said her parent.

His old grin had come back.

The barrier between him and Wild was quite gone.

And--Adam tumbled.

Jabez was thinking that perhaps the lad had allowed himself to get sensitive about his ill-luck, that that was the reason he had shunned the farm for some time. Had he known that this was what was driving Adam towards Susan----! Susan Thorpe was the apple of the gawky man’s eye.

“No--a,” he said, standing with his back to the fire, “I’ve no objections. Lass, what says ta?”

Whereupon Mrs. Thorpe came in.

“Can you spare Susan a night off to go to the Tide with me and Bob and Sarah?” asked Adam.

He felt that he had almost committed himself, now.

But he was still relieved to think that Bob going left him a creep hole if--if he could save Sagg Farm some other way.

“Lad,” said Mrs. Thorpe, laying her hand on his shoulder. “We can allus do without that as we can’t get, in this world.”

There the matter ended.

“Come on, lad,” said Jabez impatiently, after ten minutes, wherein Mrs. Thorpe had returned to the lousing of her grandmother’s sheets, and the visit to the wiseman, “let’s be goin’. These women! They’d talk till the cows came up.”

They passed out into the fresh joy of a spring morning. Between the first field and that hill whereon stood Sagg Farm, they heard half a dozen larks sing. They likewise passed never a wall or fence but had a pink bill advertising the Charity upon it. This, they agreed, was Granny Harker’s trumpeting of the _début_ of her grand-daughter. At the police-station with its creeper greening over the porch-door, they reported the indisposition of the pigs, and the constable said he would send the “Board” along.

Jabez stayed quite a time at Sagg Farm, for so busy a man. His opinion on the pigs coincided with Adam’s. Adam, aided by Thorpe, made a strenuous endeavour to examine the calf’s mouth. All to no purpose.

“I should tow on wi’ her a bit, Wild,” advised Jabez, regarding the animal mournfully. Its evolution from a plump, frisky thing into this sad, thin animal was enough to clinch Mrs. Thorpe’s saying that it might be witchcraft. They tracked her wanderings that morning by the cud she had dropped.

When Jabez had gone, Adam set to work, cleaning out and whitening shippens, barns, hen-cotes, in a very determination to beat Destiny at her own game, by work. At intervals he broke off, to go and survey the pigs mournfully, and fret at the tardiness of the “Board” in coming to inspect them.

At dinner-time he went inside the house, where Sarah was “thrang” spring-cleaning. Old Wild was out drinking. He always went at it like a madman as the anniversary of his wife’s death approached.

His empty chair waited him in vain, at table.

Bob came in whistling, a young hare held head downwards and Rag trying to reach it, to his amusement and Rag’s quivering excitement. It might have weighed three-quarters of a pound. Bob flung it on the table as his share in the morning’s work. He had gone out early, leaving the milking to Sarah.

The joy of life inspired by the rolling glory of Whitemoor breathed out of the young man. He had silver catkins in his coat, which he flung off to the whistled tune of “John Peel,” sitting down to eat the great dinner Sarah had made.

Sarah looked from one brother to the other in her quiet, troubled way. Bob didn’t do right. But he was six years younger than Adam and unlike Adam he had not upon him “the weight of seven kingdoms.” Sagg Farm would be Adam’s legally, when old Wild died, as it was his virtually, by right of work. Alike in form and feature, there was that unlikeness about the brothers which weaves dissimilarity into faces cast in the same mould. Adam took after the mother who would not lie down to meet death--but must be held up.

He said nothing verbally. But the cloud on his brow was at length perceived by Bob.

“What’s th’ good of worrying?” he asked, boyishly. “Next year at this time somebody else will be trying to find out if the water supply is wrong here, Adam. Sagg Farm is as good as gone. After all, it’s a sort of cowardice to go on fighting when the waves are over you. A sport will give in--and laugh.”

Adam answered nothing.

His eyes had darkened in his grim, young face.

But after a time, in which he had fought down his impatience at this inertia, he remarked shortly, “There’s that bull wants ringing.”

They went out together.

Whatever their differences they always went out like this, good friends at heart.

Sarah set in to get the pictures up, the varnishing of the old chairs done. She had barely started when her father came in. He collapsed upon the settle; sank into slumber--and Sarah went through his pockets. He had let fall strange hints lately.

All that she found was what looked like washing-soda, crystals, wrapped in paper. After smelling them she tossed them in the fire. Suspiciously watchful as she was she would have been horrified had she known they were poison crystals.

From outside came the roaring of the bull, being “rung.”

When Bob started to work he could work with any man.

All day they expected the Board of Agriculture.

It came after sundown, in the form of a young man in goloshes and kid gloves. The pigs were dead by this time. Adam had carried them out on the hillside, ready for investigations. The young man, taking off his kid-gloves, had them cut open from throat to stomach. He tested their hearts, and the bags that enfolded them, and Adam surprised him by knowing almost as much as he did.

Almost!

Not quite.

“It is a great pity you did not think to bleed them,” said the young man, “for they would then have been quite fit for food. It was not fever, but an epidemic that taints the blood.”

Adam smiled ironically.

When he went into the house he found his father drinking whiskey again, in the barn-like kitchen where the lamp and the flickering candles only served to blacken the shadows and the corners.

“We’ll ha’ to bury ’em, Bob,” said Adam, practically.

Bob went readily enough.

The sun was going down post haste behind the hill.

They had just buried the third when old Wild came out. He cried over the little pigs, stated that it ought to be him, not the pigs, they were burying, protested against their being buried without ritual, and, half a noggin bottle of raw whisky in hand, began to sing (he had been a soldier in his youth):

“We buried him darkly at dead o’ th’ night,
The sods with our bay-o-nets turnin’,
By the te-de-de moonbeam’s glimmering light,
And the lantern dimly burnin’.”

Which sent Bob into hearty laughter.

But--Adam was too much disturbed by the loss of the pigs, and about the calf he had given twenty pounds for only a month ago, dropping its cud. He went in to read over the typewritten letter from the man whose fingers were closing round--Adam’s soul--Sagg Farm, his _grande passion_. Many a man has a more ignoble one than this grand passion of Adam’s. But it might be truthfully written of the young farmer that his worship of the place where his forbears had lived and toiled so long was becoming a mote in his eye. It was deadening his conscience to all else but ancestor-worship--perverting all the tenderness the average human being has in him to give out to human beings into tenderness towards what, after all, was only stone, mortar, and black beams, and the soil of one particular hillside.

So far had his mania seized him, so dammed had become his human tenderness towards others of his kind, that he could not perceive any other reason for Susan’s acceptance of his invitation to the Fair than love for himself. That there was any meanness in marrying her for that pot of brass that would save Sagg Farm did not occur to him any more than it occurs to a savage to worship more than one god. In short, Adam was well on the road to one form of savagery when Polly Cherry came into his ken. His moloch was Sagg Farm. Sarah killing herself under his eyes, without his seeing it, his bitter thoughts of his joy-loving brother, his colossal condemnation of his father--all tending to isolate him from his kind, whilst he worshipped every cobble in the old farmyard, every beast that cropped the pastures, every cloud that piled snowily against that green hill, in that lonely, feline love of place that has built up finished things for generations to enjoy. Flesh and blood had come to combat that spell of stick and stone--flesh and blood of the lightest-hearted flapper whoever looked sideways from under her hat. That he cremated the pink bill he had ruined whilst he asked Susan to go to the Fair, only shows how far the spell was working, even as he went forwards with his project of marrying Susan.

He went that night to play Ludo with the Thorpes.

Uncle Nat had arrived--and Susan was knitting him a new pair of socks. Mrs. Thorpe took a hen-pie out of the oven for supper.

He got back to Sagg Farm quite late.

As he went up the hillside he noticed that resemblance it always took in the darkness--to a great head, with two eyes of flame and a mouth filled with fire, too. He carried with him the memory of something altered in Susan from his seeing her earlier in the day, a new shyness, coupled with something almost vivacious, for her. Her laughter was a pleasant thing. Whilst from the others at the farm--from Uncle Nat, down to Ned the labourer, there had been a knowing sympathy.

Late as it was he went into the barn with a lantern, where they had left out one of the pigs. It was characteristic of the man that he turned even his financial loss into a mental gain. He was studying anatomy whilst the others slept--whilst the village slept. Sarah was asleep, still waiting to pour out his tea for him, when he went in. He looked at her sleeping countenance. It worried him, subconsciously. He shook her gently.

“I’m--not asleep, Adam,” protested the woman prematurely bent through struggling along with him, to save Sagg Farm, sleeping six hours, toiling like a man--almost looking like a man, save for her soft eyes. Her kinship to the blurred beauty of Polly Cherry flashed across his mind again. The rough redness of her hands annoyed him, accusingly. Did she need to let her hands get like that?

“Go to bed, Sarah,” he said, as she sat up, blinking at the clock. “I’ll pour my tea out.”

She stared.

He spoke as he might have done to a tired child.

“I am--a bit tired,” she acknowledged.

Whilst she looked at him in undisguised wonder.

She was taking her candle to go upstairs when the ceiling shook above them.

“Father’s fallen out of bed,” she said.

Adam went leisurely upstairs.

He came down a few minutes later, and went to the peg that held his cap. Bob was coming downstairs, too, and entered the kitchen as Adam turned round on the mat and said to Sarah, “Fetching a doctor. Old man’s tried to poison himself. Don’t touch him--or we’ll get into trouble.”

The door closed behind him.

Bob, white as death, observed to Sarah, “Anyhow, it’ll be diluted with lots of whisky. Maybe that’ll save him.”

Sarah nodded.

The slow tears of a repressed nature stood in her eyes, drying before they could fall.

“If the old man could have had a fresh start--where mother hadn’t died,” said Bob, “I don’t think he’d have gone to pieces like this. It’s been torture to the poor old chap to live on here. _Seven years._”

“Our Adam hasn’t bin there--yet,” she said, in extenuation. She referred to the ways in which the sons of men love the daughters of Eve.

“It’d do him good,” said Bob, who hadn’t been there either, for that matter.

They went up to look at their father, careful not to touch him. Sarah sat and rocked herself on the edge of the bed, making never a sound. Weak as water--yet more human, more worthy of love, than the Adam who had said irritably: “We might get into trouble.”

“I’m--g-goin’ d-down!” said the tender-hearted Bob. He was crying.