Читать книгу Doomsday (Historical Novel) - Warwick Deeping - Страница 25

For Arnold Furze, life, that spring, renewed all its strangeness and its mystery. It began with the singing of birds in the greyness of the dawn, a chant such as it seemed to him he had never heard before, the whole earth waking suddenly into exultation. Pipings in the orchard and in the hedgerows. But there were other volumes of song, a massed chorus that came from Gore Wood, and another and fainter thrilling that trembled across the meadows from Rushy. A blackbird in the "Doomsday" orchard led off the chant each morning, and a thrush ended it, piping "Awake—awake" to the blossom that slumbered. Furze never drew a curtain, for daylight found him stirring, and in the long light evenings he was about till dusk sent him to bed. The rising sun looked in at the orchard window, and lit up the rosy lips of the apple blossom, and turned the young green of the pear leaves to gold. Masses of white cloud floated brilliantly above the dim blue woods. And on rainy mornings even the rain sang a song to him. Murmuring upon the great, spreading roof of the cow-house, it joined its soft moist music to the purr of the milk into the milking pail.

About half-past five was his usual hour for rising, but this spring he rose at five, adding those extra minutes to the day's labour of mystery. Those still and secret hours of the dawn, with the yellow sunlight stealing through, and dew everywhere, and the stillness and the solitude, how he loved them. Each dawn came with a sense of adventure. He would put a match to some kindling and hang the kettle over it, and go out and up the lane as far as Six Firs, Bobbo at his heels—and as grey as the dew-covered grass. He would climb the mound, and stand for a moment looking towards the little red and white and green and brown houses. Cinderella Town! They were asleep down there. They had nothing to get them out of bed, no clamorous crops, and no cows with swelling udders, and all the essential urgency of the soil. But she—she would be up earlier than most of them, mysteriously busy about mysteriously simple things, lighting fires and sweeping rooms. The distant contemplation of her labours fascinated him, for they were coming to have a personal meaning for him, a glamour, a tenderness. The man in him reached out to the imagined woman in her. He saw her at "Doomsday," moving about the house, more happily busy perhaps than she could be down yonder.

Wandering back with his face to the dawn he would see his old house as a symbol, raising its chimneys above the young green of the larches. The flames of the wood fire would be licking the black kettle. That early cup of tea and slice of bread and butter had the flavour of a sacrament. Then followed his half-hour of service. Chicken coops had been banished from Mrs. Damaris' garden; he had scythed the grass, and collected some flagstones and made a path, and now he was at work digging a border under the grey wall and two beds—one on either side of the path. He had begged, bought, or scrounged plants, sweet-williams, Canterbury bells, white pinks, snapdragons. He was sowing annuals, larkspur, correopsis, candytuft, marigold, flax, Virginia stock, mignonette, nasturtiums. My Lady's garden should be dressed and perfumed after all these years. Flowers for Cinderella.

For she had taken his primroses.

His large simplicity moved to the new measure. Never had he felt so strong or so tireless, and yet he seemed to have more time to think and to feel. The days had lost all sense of effort. Driving the milk cans to Melhurst station, or harrowing his wheat, or rolling the meadows, or milking, or hoeing his bean field, he felt life moving easily, like a young man well mounted setting out upon an adventure. His love for the old place increased. He would wander out in the dusk, with the birds singing their vespers, and the woods growing a greyish blue, and a faint mist spreading over the Long Meadow. Perhaps he would wander in among the oaks of Gore Wood, where the young oak foliage was the colour of gold above the pale faces of the last primroses. Wild hyacinths were beginning to make a blueness there.

Why should he not ask her to come and see them?

Yes, he wanted her to see it all, to be able to spread it before her in its beauty as he saw it, the fading gorse and the yellow broom of the Wilderness, and the young bracken like shepherds' crooks, and the golden spikes of the beeches bursting with an incredible greenness, and his orchard in bloom, and those emerald larches, and Rushy Pool with a few kingcups still left, and his meadows, and his sleek violet-eyed cattle. Surely she would love it all as he did, and feel the beauty and the goodness and the cleanness of this English land. Devoutly dreaming, he believed that she would.

"Mary Viner, Mary Viner."

The thrush who perched on the old cedar sang her name. He saw the face in the milk, her lips in the budding apple blossom, her eyes in the brown water.

But chiefly now he loved to loiter in Mrs. Damaris' garden under the window of the white parlour, for it was here that his man's thoughts took shape. He would stand with his back against the stone wall, and watch the light die out of the sky, and the stars prick the increasing blackness. Here was grass for her feet, and flowers for her hands. Next spring it should be a mass of hyacinths and tulips. Music in colour—a Schubert's song.

Then, perhaps, he would go in and feel a little chilled by the empty and barren house. No fit place for her yet, but if her heart was as his he felt that he could pull the welkin down to hang it on the walls for her. Hangings of blue and of gold.

Meanwhile he would light the lamp, and sit down at the rough table with the account book and a pencil and some odd pieces of paper, and make calculations and scribble little sums. His figures were like himself, large and simple and steadfast. He would run his hand over his wavy brown head. Supposing he did without the corn-crusher and the new wagon and harness in the autumn? The reaper he must have. The farm was showing a profit; he had money at the bank; he felt sure that his strong hands could drag more money ont of the soil. Yes, supposing he furnished a bedroom, the parlour, the sitting-room and the kitchen, not flimsily, no, but with gear fit for her? By God—of course it could be done. The soil had been swallowing everything; it was fat and lusty; let the house have its turn.

Arnold was a man of method—even as a lover, and part of his success as a farmer was due to his methodical intelligence. He kept accurate accounts, a diary, and a day book in which he entered up the work for the week in front of him, and the keeping of these books was an act of heroism, as any man who has to strive with the soil will tell you. To feel dog-tired and sleepy, and yet to make yourself sit down and scribble! That is where will-force comes in, and Furze had been taught that half the farming of England is laborious and haphazard, without that last flip of intelligence which knows where the muck goes, or how the money comes, and has it down on paper.

He did his scribbling last thing at night, after half an hour at his piano, sitting in socks, breeches and shirt, his feet tucked back under his chair, both arms spread on the table. He hated this scribbling but he made himself do it, and many had been the times when he had blessed himself for doing it. It was a check on himself, and a check on Will Blossom, for however good a man's body is—his brain may be a sheep's, and such was Will's.

But now Furze would pause and dream a little. He might win a partner. And perhaps she would sit at a table and write for him while he dictated the day's doings. A wife was interested—surely?

"You are tired, Arnold. Sit and smoke and talk, and I'll write."

Yes, he would love her for that, and perhaps she would love doing it.

The routine of his life began to be altered in a dozen significant ways. His camp-bed had ascended into one of the bedrooms; the kitchen became a kitchen, and the living-room something of what it should be. Logs ceased to be piled in a corner; the work-bench was transferred to an out-house. The home-made table had its legs planed and stained, and its top covered with a blue and white cloth. Sarah Blossom gave the house two days a week instead of one, and she—being a woman—had eyes in her head and a tongue.

"Muster Furze be sweet on someone."

Yes, because a man does not become suddenly fussy about his house, and rise to table cloths and electroplated spoons and forks without an adequate reason. And that garden, and those flowers! Mrs. Blossom was a little, thin, rat-trap of a woman with a bluish tip to her long nose, and straight, mouse-coloured hair dragged back very tight off her forehead. She was a careful woman, close, with shiny and clutching red hands. Furze had always noticed her hands. He disliked the idea of them touching his food.

Mrs. Blossom talked. In such little, mean lives as hers talking becomes a vice, a vocal drunkenness or incontinence. She got her excitement out of talking. Yes, Furze was wearing two shirts a week instead of one; changed his working shirt after milking-time. And three soft collars a week instead of one and a half. And he had a new pair of brown shoes, and he shaved himself every day. And he had planed those table legs and stained them! Hee, hee, hee!

Mrs. Blossom had an irreverent mind. Those table legs seemed to her a great jest. She would go off into thin laugher that was rather like a sheep's bleating, and press her red hands to her breastless bosom, and screw her head on one side.

"Don't know who 'tis—but there's a gel—somewhere."

She was always cross-questioning Will.

"Ain't you seen a gel—any time?"

Will hadn't. Domestic life had tended to make him more and more like a blue-eyed bull, surly and sluggish, and breaking out occasionally into exasperated bellowings. He was a good fellow, but in the bull-ring of marriage his wife's tongue maddened him.

"Guess it be one of the gels at Cinder Town."

She was so eager to get her nasty little blue-tipped nose into the mystery of Arnold Furze's transfiguration that she would go wandering down the lane of an evening, ostensibly to gather rabbit food. The Blossom cottage stood on the road to Rotherbridge. When met and spoken to butter would not melt in her mouth, but remained there to turn rancid.

"Evening, Mrs. Blossom."

"Good evening to you, sir."

She had caught him in the lane, wearing a clean collar, and with something bulging in his pocket, and going towards the main road. She had an apron full of green herbage. She idled after him far enough to see that he went down to the Sandihurst Estate. There were happenings in the air. Will had had orders to have the blue wagon and the greys ready early to-morrow morning. There was to be a sale at Melhurst. Mrs. Blossom had seen the auctioneer's placard posted on the back of Mr. Burnham's cow-shed.