Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 9

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Rain fell towards dawn, and then passed, so Jenny’s longed-for picnic happened after all, though the true urgent need for it was gone, since her lover had “spoken.” It was just a family affair—no one but her mother, her brother, Humphrey and herself, for her father could not be persuaded to miss even one day at the works. They drove up on the Moors above Eden-in-Cleveland, where the heather spread in coloured miles to Whitby, a huge purple pink expanse, over which the cloud-shadows moved solemnly towards the sea. Stark out of the purple miles rose a conical hill known as Freeboro’. Humphrey guessed it to be an ancient burial place, but it was evidently no more than a landmark to the company that camped at its foot, in the midst of a luxurious litter.

The servants spread a meal that in the South would have been considered adequate for a dinner-party, except that it was served with tea. Mrs Bastow sat beaming on the good food and on her daughter’s happiness. She had not said much to Humphrey—she was shy with him, even a little afraid, and she was wondering if she still ought to call him Sir Humphrey, even though he was engaged to Jenny—but she plied him with food, sure token of her love, and in the language of a heaped plate told him of her joy.

Timothy, too, had said little, and in his case Mallard was not quite sure of what he thought. He liked the boy, but could not feel at his ease with him—differences in outlook and education seemed to loom more largely between him and this product of the Friends’ School and Oxford than between him and the frankly parish-taught father and mother.

Jenny looked radiant. She had recovered from the agitations of the night, and put on new confidence with the green coat and skirt, which clipped her gentle figure most becomingly. A little sailor hat met the tilt of her adorable nose—Humphrey reflected with pleasure that she had the sense of clothes; remote from the fashionable world in all but wealth, she contrived to look the perfect belle of 1896, almost as turned out in Bond Street. Even Isabel was not more rightly gowned. He pictured her at the head of his table at the Herringdales, all creamy and fussy and dainty according to the best modern standards. Darling! He had done well.

When luncheon was over, he coaxed her away, and they wandered along a little brown path till they found themselves on the other side of the Freeboro’, out of sight. They sat down in the heather, and he kissed her gently, as was meet. When his face was very close to hers he could see tiny freckles on her nose and cheeks, under the skin. They sat for a while with fingers enlaced, watching the shadows run out to sea. The sea lay framed in a flat green gulf of land, wide fields, trim and laid out as a chess board, edging the Yorkshire coast. One could see the distance only in patches—every here and there drifted a grey cloud of smoke. The smoke of the Bastow furnaces at Carlingrove hung above their chimneys like a big flat mushroom, shutting out the sea beyond, while further west hung the pall of the Great Smoke itself—Middlesbrough and all the fuming travail of the Tees marshes, a land of everlasting fog.

As he watched it all, this landscape of field and smoke, moor and sea, he wondered what she would think of Heathfield, of the long road that sweeps from Woods Corner to Cross-in-Hand, and all the little shaggy fields and farms.

“It’ll be different, you know,” he told her, “all much more small and crowded. And our roads are nearly all sunk deep, for they’re so very old that they’ve been trodden down almost into ditches. Our fields are very old too, with old tangled hedges. I do hope you’ll like our country.”

“Of course I shall love it,” she whispered. But in his heart he felt that she would not care much. Why should she? Women seldom care truly for the land. Scenery—views—picturesque buildings, that’s all they ask. The earth-in-herself has no meaning for them. They have never known the tragic Mother—Demeter, whose sorrows are under her feet.