South Riding (22 page)

Sarah stood up in her car, its engine still softly throbbing, and saw, even as she rose, the first of the “hounds” come laughing and panting and calling across the field. They were shepherded by golden-haired Miss Masters, pretty as a picture in her scarlet beret. The girls were happy. Their cheeks shone bright as apples, their eyes sparkled, their breath steamed as though they were little engines puffing and churning through the snow.

When they saw Sarah they crowded round her car, grinning and merry.

“Have you seen the hares, Miss Burton?”

“If I had, I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Miss Ritchie’s behind with the other lot, Miss Burton.”

“Oh, we’re the first! We are the first, aren’t we?”

“I’ll wait for Miss Ritchie. Off with you!”

They cheered her as they plunged off down the slope. It pleased her. Self-confident as she was, her popularity reassured her. She watched the brown, tumbling bodies of the girls as they raced down the slope, falling into drifts, scrambling out again, shaking themselves like puppies, lean, fat, stolid, swift, galloping away far below her, over snow-covered sand. Their voices were carried back to her on the strong north wind.

“Do you know that you are trespassing?”

She spun round at the question, to face a big dark man on a big dark horse, towering above her from a bank of snow.

So startled was she that for a moment she could say nothing, aware only of the tossing black neck of the horse, flecked by white foam, its white, rolling eyeballs, its black, gleaming, powerful flanks, and the dark eyes challenging her from the white face of the rider. It was as though some romantic sinister aspect of the snow-scene had taken heroic shape.

She gasped and stared. Then her temperamental resilience reasserted itself.

“
Am
I trespassing? The gates were open, and I thought that this was the usual road to the cliffs.”

“It’s not you so much,” he admitted. “It’s those girls, breaking down fences, scaring what ewes are left alive.”

Into Sarah’s irreverent and well-educated mind flashed the memory of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. She watched the impatient movement of the great horse.

“I’m sorry you feel upset,” she said demurely. “But we can’t have done much damage, have we?”

“I don’t know what you call damage. There’s a gate left open in the forty acre.” He pointed.

“But we didn’t come that way.”

“My neighbour, Turnbull, has lost close on forty sheep, and he can’t afford it. My tenant on this farm has lost a cow in calf. God knows what this has done to the winter wheat. There’s a shepherd been lost two days at Ledsea Buttock. I suppose we shall turn him up somewhere after the thaw sets in. He’s a married man with three children. They’re skinning sheep as they dig them out along Cold Harbour—squashed flat some of them are with the weight that’s been on them and the force of the driven snow. The place is like a shambles. And this is the time you choose to let your young women
career
over the farms. As though it was
fun
, this snow.”

Fun was just what she had thought it. What she did think it. She was furious with him for spoiling her lovely carnival and furious with herself for her failure of imagination. She should have understood what this must mean to farmers.

Self-accusation did not come easily to her.

“I take all responsibility,” she said proudly. “If any damage has been done, we will of course pay compensation.”

But the stragglers were approaching, shepherded by Miss Ritchie. They trotted more solemnly, sparing their breath. Among them Midge, light and elvish in her brown tunic, ran nimbly.

She saw the horseman before she recognised her head mistress.

“Why, Daddy!” she shrilled, and came panting and waving to him across the snow.

Sarah saw the harsh face above her illumined by the smile which had won his wife, chained Mrs. Beddows, and given Carne of Maythorpe a reputation for popularity. It was, she decided afterwards, only a physical accident, a trick of bone and muscle, a flash of white teeth, a widening of long-lashed eyes; but it had its effect.

“Why, it’s Miss Burton!” cried Midge, pulling up short. “Oh, Daddy. You know Miss Burton, don’t you? This is my father, Mr. Carne, Miss Burton,” she added in her grown-up Miss Carne-of-Maythorpe manner.

“How do you do, Mr. Carne?” said Sarah politely. “We met once before, I think—at a Governors’ Meeting.”

“W
ORKS
O
RDERED BY THE
C
OUNTY
L
AND
A
GENT

“The sub-committee have approved and confirmed action of the County Land Agent in ordering the following works to be carried out at the Small Holdings named below, which works had not been previously authorised:—

COLD HARBOUR ESTATE
(Mrs. Brimsley, tenant)
Repairs to stable roof £3:2:4.”

Extract from Report of Small Holdings and Allotments Sub-Committee of Agricultural Committee. March, 1933.

M
RS
. B
EDDOWS
equipped herself for action, moving about the ugly square bedroom that was overcrowded with mahogany furniture. Solid comfort, she thought, turning from the double bed canopied with rosy chintz to the wardrobe that was large as a coach and smelled of cedarwood. Solid comfort, that was what she had given Jim.

She wore her brown cloth dress, because it was short and the roads at Cold Harbour would be muddy. She put on her fur coat because it was warm and the weather was fearful. Although the thaw had set in snow still smothered the hedges and lined the drains. She found her best brown hat, velvet, with a feather curled around it, and chose newish gloves and sprinkled the silk “front” of her gown with scent. Carne was taking her to the meeting in the Sunbeam car hired from Tom Sawdon.

The Cold Harbour colonists had invited him to be guest of honour at their Club this evening, and asked Mrs. Beddows— an honorary member since its foundation—to take the chair for him.

She consented, for she had business of her own there—the inclusion of the Colony in a subscription scheme for supplying nurses to South Riding cottagers. Also any expedition with Carne was a delight.

She had scorned his dog-cart.

“I may have as neat an ankle as any in the South Riding,” she had told him. “But when you get to my time of life you’ll think twice before scrambling into that trap of yours like a monkey up a puzzle tree.”

But she was proud to have him hire a car for her. He could afford this small extravagance, though commonly she grudged every payment that he must make as though his depleted resources were her own.

She was contented and gay and eager. This was her night out; she would enjoy herself.

She paused to look at her reflection in the long mirror before she turned the gas down, and recognised with a shock the woman of seventy-two. When she tossed the scent on to her brown frock she had felt not a day older than thirty-five. She sighed, restored to the sad realism of common sense, and went downstairs to find Carne already in her dining-room, straddled before the fire, his overcoat thrown on to the table.

Deflated as she was by the knowledge of time’s victory, she could not quite control the lift of her heart as he came forward to greet her, to ask if she would be warm enough, if she had everything—gloves, scarves, notes, rugs enough. She knew that such solicitude was not born in him. Muriel had taught him. His whole life and nature had been reshaped by his marriage. He moved through the world now, the ghost of Muriel’s lover. “If I were a younger woman, I should hate her,” thought Emma Beddows.

They went out to the car together, and she let him tuck the rug round her and put a cushion behind her back. She greeted Tom Sawdon approvingly. He was smart in his chauffeur’s uniform, a fine fellow, a great acquisition to the district. They swung together through the cold February night, mainly silent, and when they talked, only discussed affairs of the Colony and the Council.

Cold Harbour Colony owed its existence to a nineteenth century philanthropist, Sir Rupert Calderdyke, who believed in making two acres grow where one had been before. He had set thorn fences in the mud of the Leame Estuary, against which receding tides piled clay and drift-wood that slowly from week to week grew from piles to banks, from banks to shallow islands, from islands to outworks of the coast itself then, mile by mile, into level arable land, lightish towards the river where the tides drained off the clay, and heavy as pudding farther in. Sir Rupert raised dykes, dug drains, built heavy double cottages in pseudo-gothic style marked with their varying dates, 1845 to 1889, then died full of plans and debts, leaving to his heirs his many problems.

Those problems increased. The land was isolated and uneven, the buildings too elaborate, the drains and dykes expensive to maintain; but in 1919 an adventurous county council took over the whole estate as part of an abortive scheme of reconstruction, bought the dark, gabled cottages as homes for heroes, and the reclaimed acres as holdings for ex-service men.

But it was one thing to beat swords into ploughshares, another to provide the three horses required to pull them through the heavy clay. Few colonists had had previous agricultural experience. The agents sent to supervise their efforts were unpopular with the local farmers, and by the spring of 1933 poverty and despair had weeded out all except the bravest, the most sanguine or the most efficient. A source of financial loss to the Ministry of Agriculture, of controversy to the Council, of ridicule to their neighbours and bewilderment to themselves, the survivors hung on tenaciously, some of them even learning to love the wide Dutch landscape, haunted by larks and sea-birds, roofed by immense pavilions of windy cloud; the miles of brownish-purple shining mud, pocked and hummocked by water and fringed by heath-like herbs; the indented banks where the high tides sucked and gurgled; the great ships gliding up to Kingsport, seen from low-lying windows as though they moved across the fields; the brave infrequent flowers, the reluctant springs, the loneliness, the silence, the slow inevitable rhythm of the tides.

“Was it Heyer who wrote to you?” asked Mrs. Beddows after a longish silence.

“Yes.”

“He’s a fine fellow. That Recreation Club was really his idea. Shouldn’t wonder if there’s a bit of breeding somewhere about there.”

“Butcher’s son near Ripon,” said the practical Carne.

“Ah,” Mrs. Beddows was romantic. “You never know. He’s got initiative. Queer that he never married.”

“He lives next door to Widow Brimsley. Says she does him very well.”

“Still—a good-looking man like that. Not that there’s any reason why he should marry.” Mrs. Beddows laughed at herself. “I always want to pair them all off—two by two—like the animals in Noah’s Ark. I remember Heyer once said, ‘They say I’m good company to myself.’”

“He wants us to go and have a cup of tea with him after the meeting. Do you mind?”

Mind? Prolonging her evening with Carne? She even preferred visiting with him Bill Heyer’s cheerful cottage to the gloomy haunted stateliness of Maythorpe Hall.

“I’ve been there before,” she said. “He keeps it perfectly. I believe he takes his disablement as a game. He enjoys finding out just what he can do—and showing it off.”

They were in perfect harmony. If Carne was grave, she knew him to feel as much at peace as his tormented spirit could ever let him be. He liked the colonists; he was glad to serve them. “And he’s at ease with me. He trusts me. He’s glad I’m here,” Mrs. Beddows told herself. She glowed with the satisfaction of that knowledge.

The car stopped outside the recreation hut. Bill Heyer came forward to greet them. Inside the rough wooden building a score or so of men and women huddled on benches round a black smoking stove. Oil lamps hung from the rafters. A Union Jack spread across the platform table, and paper festoons, wilted relics of Christmas festivities, slung from wall to wall, made the only colour. The women wore shapeless cloth coats with rabbit fur collars and deflated hats. The men wore their workaday clothes. But they clumped with heavy boots on the floor as Heyer escorted the visitors up the room.

They all liked Carne—a sportsman, a gentleman and a practical farmer, but it was Mrs. Beddows who lit the candles on the Christmas tree. She tripped up the room, throwing open her fur coat, scattering the luxury of expensive perfume (sent by Chloe, who knew her mother’s tastes), distributing smiles like prizes. She recognised every one. She had greetings; she had jokes. She refused to mount the platform.

“Now,” she said, “I’m going to suggest that instead of moving forward, like Mr. Heyer here says you ought to do, you all go and get as close to the stove as possible, and Mr. Carne and I will come and join you. It’s not as though this was a formal meeting. Anything- Mr. Carne and I have to say can be said as well sitting as standing, can’t it?”

They clapped her.

Her presence had the effect of turning a formal meeting into a party. Carne was an indifferent speaker; slow and awkward. “The wind has time to change between every sentence,” they said of him; but he could answer questions and give advice which they respected. Before five minutes had passed he knew that the real object of the colonists was to secure his support over two matters: the more rapid repairing of buildings for which the council was responsible, and opposition to the preposed new road from Skerrow to Kiplington.