South Riding (62 page)

“What’s all this?”

“In a few months those paddocks will be valuable building sites and you’ll make enough on the sale to pay interest on your mortgage for a couple of years at least, I shouldn’t wonder.”

They had come to the stack-yard gate. Huggins hoped that Carne would invite him back to the house for dinner. He was hungry. He knew of the hospitality of Maythorpe. After all, he had come to do Carne a service. The least the farmer could do was to invite him to a meal.

But Carne stopped, leaning back against the gate post, his hands in his breeches’ pockets, and stared insolently at the preacher.

“What’s your game? Why d’you come to me like this?”

Huggins smiled.

“I want to see this housing scheme go through. I know slums. I was born in one. So was Snaith. We’re out to abolish ’em. But we know your influence on the council. We don’t want to fight you. We’d rather you came in with us.”

Snaith’s name was a talisman. It stiffened the ground under Huggins’ feet.

“Come in with you on what?”

“Well, obviously land values are going up all round there. At least they will, when once the site of the new scheme is publicly known. You remember what happened at Clixon. As a matter of fact, two or three of us have an acre or two here and there round the wastes now. It’s worth nothing now, but just wait a month or two.”

“I see. I see.” Carne nodded. “Some of you have been buying up land so that you can sell it to the council if that site is chosen?”

“That’s the idea. More or less.”

“And you want me to do the same?”

“Want you? I want nothing. I’m just telling you for your own good.”

“And all I have to do is to call off my opposition to the town planning scheme?”

“That’s as you choose. But unless the scheme goes through, you get nothing from your land.”

“I see.”

It was dinner-time. The men were coming down to the Hinds’ House for their midday meal. They had loosened out their horses from plough and harrow and rode sideways, the hanging harness clinking. Two by two the great beasts slouched down to the pond to drink. Carne leaned back against the gate and watched them. The riders greeted him as they passed, taking their place in a procession as rigid and formal as that of a diplomatic dinner. They called “Morning, Maister,” touched caps and forelocks, and he saluted each with his friendly smile.

He’ll never part from all this without a fight, thought Huggins. I’ve got him just at the right moment. The Lord sent me.

The horses plunged into the muddy water and bent their necks. Some waded deep to their bellies, running their twitching nostrils above the rippling surface. They drank with a gurgling and sucking sound, throwing back their heads with a rattling of chain and collar. The water tossed from their velvet muzzles. The first couple lurched up from the pond, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. Their great hoofs clopped, their accoutrements clinked, as they rolled down to the stables.

A gaggle of geese strutted along behind them, stretching white necks, squalling belligerently, glaring at Carne and Huggins with scornful, yellow-rimmed eyes. At last Carne spoke.

“You’re suggesting that I should join your gang and help you to make a fortune out of cheating the council by buying up the Wastes before you decide to build there—eh?”

That was hardly how Huggins would have put it. He began to say so, mildly. A sheep dog bounded lightly across the yard and began to caress Carne’s hand.

“Do you see that horse pond?” asked Carne.

“Yes—what of it?”

“Once, when a cheating liar of a dealer came here with as dirty a proposition as yours, I chucked him in,” said the farmer. “What about it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? Then I’ll tell you. You and your Snaith and Tadman and the rest of you are a lot of swindling, gambling thieves. It’s you that make local government a dirty game. And I’m not just telling you. I shall tell the council; I shall tell the papers. And if you want to turn me off the council to save your skins—just try it.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Carne,” began the preacher.

But Carne had seen his shepherd across the yard, and hailed him.

“Did you say you’d got a pair of black twins already?” he shouted.

“I have. You owe me half a crown, sir. You bet I wouldn’t have ’em before Easter.”

“Come on, then. Let’s see ’em.”

And, without a further glance at the baffled preacher, farmer and shepherd went into the fold yard. The eight foot wooden doors swung behind them with a crash. Huggins was left outside, hungry, humiliated, furious.

I’ll make him pay for this. Thieves? We’re not thieves. The fool, the pig-headed fool! I’ll ring up Snaith to-night. All right, Mr. Squire Carne of Maythorpe! Wait till the March elections. You won’t have a walk-over this time. By God, you won’t!

O
N
M
ARCH
6th Castle died; on March 8th he was buried. That was only right and proper, and he had a handsome funeral. What was less seemly was that on this day also the elections were held for the county council.

Hicks and Pudsey argued over this in the stable early on that dark spring dawn. They had gone there with the wagoner and third lad at five o’clock to groom the horses for the funeral procession. Four big bays in a clean-scrubbed wagon were to bear Castle’s body to the churchyard.

“Well, it’s my idea we should have put off funeral till tomorrow,” Hick said.

“Wouldn’t do. He’s a fat man. He’d stink,” objected Pudsey.

“Not in his coffin. There’s many wait three days and longer. What about those bodies brought up from the south by train?”

“I remember in France there was a shell hole full of dead Jerries . . .” began the wagoner. But they hushed him up. His war-time recollections were apt to turn the third lad’s stomach, and they did not want any accidents.

“I’ll tell you this,” Hicks declared. “It was damned dirty work putting up that fellow to oppose Carne anyhow. Who
is
this Dollan anyway?”

“Why, he’s yon chap in the bungalow along Cold Harbour Road—retired solicitor.”

“We all know
that.
What I want to know is who
is
he? Why is he here? Who’s been getting at him?”

“They say he’s a friend of Alderman Anthony Snaith,” muttered the wagoner. He was polishing the vast flank of the shire horse till it shone like mahogany. The men had fixed lanterns to the hay racks. The yellow lights left the rest of the long stable in warm velvet darkness; beyond the shadows, the other horses stirred and coughed, or kicked against the wooden partitions, rattling the ropes of their halters through iron rings.

“Come over, lass,” called third lad, hissing cheerfully. This early morning vigil, this funeral, this revealing political conversation by his elders, added enormously to his sense of sophistication. He’d have something to tell them when he next went to North Wirral. You mightn’t get much money at Maythorpe, but by God, you did see life—the foreman dying on Tuesday, the master fighting an election on the Thursday, and a great funeral with cold dinner in the Hall kitchen.

All over the village great yellow posters announced on walls and hoardings:

“Vote for Dollan, the Progressive Candidate.

Don’t let Reactionaries starve your County.”

Carne had refused to put up posters. He could not believe that any of his neighbours would vote for his opponent. He had held his one meeting as usual in the village. The third lad had attended it. He thought Carne a fine chap.

“You all know me. You know you can trust me. You knew my father before me,” Carne had said, with that touch of awkwardness which passes in England for sincerity. “We’ve been through some bad times together. We all hope for better times. But we know that there’s nothing to hope from crookedness and cheating. Up till now we’ve kept county politics clean. We mean to keep ’em so. If you send me back I’ll do my best to stop any dirty games that men may play here.”

The schoolroom had been only half full. Every one knew Carne. They knew too that he was in a bad way. Maythorpe Hall bore its own evidence of poverty. Perhaps it might be as well to try someone else. This fellow Dollan was a newcomer, but he was a South Riding man all right. Retired from Kingsport. A free spender. Grand gardener too. He’d done marvels at the bungalow called “Threeways.” And a Wesleyan. That was something. Most villagers of Maythorpe were also Wesleyans.

The third lad had been along to Mr. Dollan’s meetings too. They were much more lively. Mr. Dollan talked grandly about local government, about the people’s Rights and real Democracy. It appeared from his speeches that the landowners had ground the faces of the poor for their own advantages. The unrepaired cottages, the inadequate water supply, the disgrace of rural slums like the Shacks—(Why a disgrace? thought the third lad)—were due to the iron hand of obstruction.

“Well, it’s your own fault,” shouted the lively Mr. Dollan. “If you want that sort of thing, you can have it. Do you like having open drains outside your front doors and earth closets stinking under your bedroom windows? Do you like having a school that’s not fit for a pigsty, and risking diphtheria and scarlet fever and typhoid for the kiddies? All right. All right. I’m not stopping you. Go ahead. Vote for your local landowners. I shall be only too pleased not to have to spend petrol in going to Flintonbridge on
your
business.”

“What I say is, it’s just like Snaith’s dirty game to send a man here when he knows Carne’s down on his luck.”

“All the same, I wish Maister’d put up a few posters,” interpolated Pudsey. “Over in’t village they like a bit of paper.”

“What good did paper ever do any one?”

“Nay; I know nowt about that, but I’ll tell you one thing,” said the beast man. “My lass Peg’s walking out with Nat Brimsley. An’ Mrs. Brimsley’s the sort of mother-in-law would put grey whiskers on a cat. But they say she’s sweet on old Holly of the Shacks, an’ if new Housing Estate’s built near Kingsport, he’ll get a job and maybe a house there an’ she’ll wed him. So’s my lass can have Nat, and go to Cold Harbour.”

“What’s that to do with it?” demanded Hicks.

“Why, just this. Carne’s out to stop ’em building, isn’t he? And if he stops ’em building, there’s no new home for Mrs. B. She won’t go to Shacks. And if she doesn’t get off with Holly, our home’s no place for me with Peg stuck as a mule and Nat round every night mucking up kitchen till there’s no place to sit for them canoodling.”

This was too long a string of cause and effect for Hicks. All that he knew was that Carne was badly treated. Snaith was a snake in the grass, and Pudsey a fool and a drunkard and his girl no better than she ought to be. Death and contention overshadowed Hicks. A dumb misery of premonition oppressed him.

The dark stable smelled of straw and dust and horses and old leather harness. The third lad was brightening the brass ornaments for the breast bands and the collars, perched on the corn bin, spitting into the brass polish. The sour smell of blacking added its pungent flavour to the atmosphere. They were good smells. Hicks, bereaved of his own hunters, desolate and anxious, found solace in the farm stables that he had once despised. But Castle’s death disturbed him, reminding him of the transitory nature of all human greatness. Brief life is here our portion.

Maythorpe had stood as firm as the plains and wolds of the South Riding. Cubbing, hunting, horse shows and point-to-points had been as much part of the perennial season as seed time and harvest. And now the hunters were sold, and Castle dead, a mortgage was on the farm, and an upstart opposed Carne in his own village.

The stable door creaked. Morning had come and the other lads were busy. It was time to set down the polished leather bands, the chains, the brushes, and go home for breakfast. Pudsey must water and feed his stock; from the cow shed came the steady spin of milk into the buckets.

Cocks crew from the cart shed. Fowls roosted in the low rafters, scattering their droppings over the great newly painted wagon which was to be Castle’s bier.

Hicks left the dark stable for the grey stackyard. A chill wind nipped his face. It might be fine, but it was bloody cold still. In the dim light he saw figures moving, shepherd, up all night with his lambs, coming out of the fold yard, his dog like a shadow leaping and cringing round him; Dolly Castle mincing from the cow shed with the fresh milk for breakfast, the second lad after her, anxious to carry her bucket for a kind word as fee; another figure, taller than the rest, Carne, wakeful and uneasy, coming to see if the wagon was ready.

They stopped in the lee of a tall threshed oat-stack.

“Well, Hicks?”

“Aye, we’re about through.”

“Good.”

In the meagre light Carne looked older, haggard. He had taken Castle’s death badly. The groom watched him.

They said down in the village that he was taking more whisky than was good for him. Wasn’t it enough to make any man want to drink?

It was of Carne that Hicks was thinking as he walked behind the wagon later that morning.

The Church of Holy Trinity, Maythorpe, stood nearly a mile southward from Maythorpe Hall. The squat grey tower was Norman, but the rest of the building was an architectural medley, fruit of various periods and diverse seasons of devotion. A fringe of tall black trees encircled the graveyard, chestnuts and sycamores and elms. To their topmost boughs still clung the ragged ruins of last year’s rookery. The rooks had nested high—sign of a fine summer, and that promise of good weather had been fulfilled. They were beginning to build again high in the trees, but the year was still cold. The hedges were covered with tight reddish buds. In the undergrowth of the ditches along the road purple dead-nettle, the silver-haired rosettes of giant thistles and green foliage of hedge-parsley announced the spring, yet a harsh wind whipped the mourners as they trudged to bury Castle.