Читать книгу The Golden Arrow - Mary Webb - Страница 12

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As the grandfather clock struck five with a chary expenditure of energy, wheezing before each stroke, Mrs. Arden opened the upper flap of the door, ‘shoo’d’ the fowls, and looked to see whether it was the man or the woman who stood outside the ornate cardboard ‘weather-house.’

‘A caselty day, father!’ she called up; ‘the ’ooman’s out.’

Soon they had breakfast and set out with baskets and large sun-bonnets. John had gone with Joe to help in the hay, for it was carrying day and the winrows must all be spread to dry after the storm, then raked afresh.

John’s own hay was not yet cut. The little crofts, perched so high in the cold air and the clouds, ripened late.

Sometimes it was September before the hay was safely carried; for it had to be done between storms, and storms were many. John cut it with a scythe. Spare and tall in the clear purple morning he would go up and down with vigorous, rhythmic movements, gravely followed by Rover; and a shadow-man, a shadow-dog went after them, dark and vast on the green field. Then Mrs. Arden and Deborah came and tossed the grass with a merry talking.

On the day when it was ready to be ‘lugged’ Joe came home early. A twill sheet on two poles, reminiscent of ambulance stretchers, was piled up with hay, and carried by Joe and John as carefully as if it were really an invalid.

But if rain-clouds blew up—as they generally did—the dignified march changed to a mad rush; Rover, protestingly exchanging his stroll for a trot, was half-buried in falling hay; and, as Mrs. Arden said, it was ‘one pikel-full for the rick and ten for the mixen, and such a mingicumumbus as never was.’ They all regarded ‘lugging the hay’ as a game of hazard played against the forces of nature, and they played with spirit.

Deborah carried dinner in a basket, and Mrs. Arden brandished the inevitable kettle; for the best picking ground was a mile away, and they would spend their noon-spell by the Little Wood.

‘Real picker’s weather it is,’ said Mrs. Arden. ‘Now we’ve got a start of the rest, let’s see if we can get a tuthree quarts afore we have our vittels.’

She bobbed along rosily and somewhat breathlessly, because she talked incessantly, between the two enigmas who vouchsafed few remarks. Her intuition had partially unravelled both enigmas, and she made the mistake of most people with intuition—she pulled so hard at her thread that she broke it.

‘Well, Deb!’ she said, after some talk of yesterday’s chapel-going; ‘I wonder when Mr. Right’s coming along for you, and I wonder what he’ll be like—light-haired for sure, folks allus like their opposites.’

Deborah had decided during the night that she would be an old maid. To blush as she had done in chapel was, she thought, ‘ondecent.’ If she blushed like that during a handshake, what would it be in courting? Also with Lily tossing beside her in the narrow bed—her cropped yellow head overwhelmingly reminiscent of another—Deborah was sure she ‘couldn’t abear’ marriage.

‘Dear to goodness!’ she said to herself; ‘how girls can go in for it all beats me, so it does.’

She looked down at Mrs. Arden with some dignity and some confusion.

‘I’ll bide along of you and father and Joe,’ she said loftily; ‘I dunna like the men.’

‘Hoity-toity! But Joe’ll not bide with us long. No danger!’ Mrs. Arden turned her artillery on to Lily with somewhat obvious mechanism.

‘He’ll be wanting them fowls’ feathers I’ve saved—plenty of them there are, too, enough to make a nice fat double feather-bed.’

Both girls looked haughtily into the distance.

‘P’raps he’ll marry Lucy Thruckton,’ Lily said patronizingly; ‘she’d suit him right well, both being rather full in habit.’

‘Lily Huntbatch!’ Mrs. Arden spoke with asperity, dropping her tact for frank curiosity. ‘You’m keeping a very still tongue in your head about your doings last night—a very still tongue, you be!’ She waited, but Lily said nothing.

‘And it looks queer for a girl to come riding along of our Joe in the black of night with a good whome and a middling good father yonder, and me thinking it was the Dark Riders.’

Silence. Mrs. Arden’s charitable feelings had worn a little thin, as such feelings will when the recipient seems not only ungrateful, but unconscious of them. If Lily had thrown herself on Mrs. Arden’s mercy last night, and told her that she and Joe had ‘gone too far,’ Mrs. Arden would have loved her—fought the world for her. But this cold righteousness was irritating.

‘It’s no good mumchancing like that, Lily!’ she continued. ‘You may as well out with it soon as late. As for Joe—he’ll look higher than Lucy Thruckton, I’se warrant; and maybe higher than some others that’d make pretty bad wives for all their yellow hair—leaving six quarts of milk to go sour!’

At this point Lily’s bonnet blew off and she stood revealed.

Mrs. Arden gasped. Lily began to cry. Deborah—who had loyally promised not to breathe a word of it—whispered:

‘How could it have come about?’

‘There, there!’ crooned the kind old weather-vane, ‘dunna take on! It’ll soon grow. But however did you come to do it?’

Lily wailed.

‘It won’t grow for years and years! I’ve got to choose between being married looking like a ninepin in a veil, or waiting till I’m even older than Deb.’ The taunt was lost on Deborah, because of her last night’s resolve; but Mrs. Arden crimsoned with anger.

‘You ungrateful chit!’ she cried roundly. ‘Five and twenty’s young enough for anybody—dear me, it is. A woman’s bones aren’t set proper afore that. It’s mean little brats of chillun yours ’ll be if you wed this side of twenty-five! But you canna,’ she added, with a smack of the lips. ‘Your hair won’t be growed. As you said, you’ll look like a ninepin.’

The humour of this suddenly struck her. She doubled into helpless laughter, slapping herself unmercifully as she always did.

‘Mother, poor Lil’s very miserable; I think you met give her a bit of comfort.’

Deborah was mildly reproving; she felt sorry for Lily. From her aloof height—she was at present icily self-fortified against sex—Lily’s obvious sex-enchainment was a most pitiful thing. On account of it she forgave all Lily’s little poisoned darts with large tolerance.

‘Well, I’m sorry if I was nasty,’ said Mrs. Arden huffily. ‘But to say such things to Deb—and she Joe’s sister! And to be so high and mighty with Joe, and never to give me a word in answer! And you don’t know your luck in getting Joe—a good lad as ever stepped. All I can say is, as when your time comes, Lily (as come it will, ninepin or not), and you’re crying and sobbing (as you will, for you cry for nought), you’ll be glad enough of me then, and of Joe too.’

‘I shan’t. I shall hate Joe.’ Lily was furious. ‘But it won’t never be,’ she added hastily.

‘Well, time ’ll show,’ said Mrs. Arden placably, feeling that she had time, nature and Joe on her side. ‘And now if we’re going to get them old berries, we’d best get ’em.’

They had reached the highest level. The budding heather was round them like a dull crimson sea, encroached upon by patches of vivid wimberries flecked with leaves of ladybird red. In the lustrous air all colours were intensified, and far things came close.

The Devil’s Chair loomed over them—for all the distance between—like a fist flourished in the face. It was dark as purple nightshade. The cobalt shadows of clouds swept across the hills in stealthy majesty. From here there was no view of plain or valley, the plateau stretched so far on every side that it shut out everything but the distant hills. A whimbrel cried overhead, shaking its sweet, long-drawn whistle into silver drops, like quicksilver thrown on marble. The ponies drowsed in the swamps. Nothing stirred. They picked for two hours, absorbed and perspiring. Then Mrs. Arden, who had been covertly watching Lily as she ate handful after handful, remarked with caustic humour —

‘You won’t take many berries back for Joe’s pie if you pick all the while into Eve’s basket!’

The two young women were shocked. Like most country girls they were prudish, somewhat in the manner of mediæval nuns, with a very clear knowledge of life as it is and a sense that only isolation and extreme care can save them from the mêlée. Mrs. Arden’s frequent allusions to her ‘stummick’ always made Deborah blush. And once at a cattle fair, when her mother had knowingly punched a cow in the ribs and announced with bonhomie to the owner: ‘She won’t be long!’ Deborah had been overwhelmed with shame.

‘Well, it must have gone twelve, I want my dinner,’ said Mrs. Arden. So they lit the fire and filled the kettle from a wood-spring where rare ferns touched it daintily with supple fingers. They sat down in the short shadow.

‘There’s Mrs. Hotchkiss coming from Mellicot,’ said Mrs. Arden suddenly. ‘Laws! Those boys do grow. And there’s Mrs. Palfrey. Fancy bringing that mite, Willie! It seems only a day since I was going to and agen with him, and him nigh dead of croup. And there’s Lucy Thruckton, coming like a sleepy bumblebee from Wood’s End way,’ she announced after a period of munching. She sprang up alertly. ‘Well! thank God for my good dinner, and I’m not going to let that fat Lucy get all the berries,’ she said, ‘so I’m off again.’

The two girls stayed in the shade, chatting in a desultory way. The pickers wandered to and fro, lost in distance, appearing out of hollows, passing round the white signpost like dancers in some strange ritual. They stooped for the small, purple fruit, wrapped in purple shadow themselves. Little box-carts, trundled by urchins, began to fill with berries, heaped in miniature replica of the hills. Shadows began to climb from the cwms, and clouds came faster. The signpost—so lonely in its ring of worn turf—looked, with its outspread arms against the dim reaches of heather, like a crucifix under the troubled sky. It stood with forlorn gallantry between the coming storm and its prey. It would be lashed by rain all night; lightning would play round it. The pickers, as with some mysterious sense of kinship, circled about it—so disconsolately consoling it seemed, so like their own destinies. Deborah, looking at it, thought of what her father had said about ‘forkit lightning!’ She wondered if she would ever be lonesome as it was, set up for a sign, a mark for the storm, pointing vaguely—whither?