Carnival Part 72

"Oh, get in beside me," Jenny cried.

And whatever else was mad and bad, there would always be that little sister.

Chapter x.x.xVIII: _The Alien Corn_

Bochyn was built to escape as easily as possible the many storms of the desolate country that surrounded it. The windows in the front of the house looked out between two groves of straight Cornish elms over a moist valley to a range of low hills, whose checkered green and brown surface in the perpetual changes of light and atmosphere took on the variety and translucence of water or precious stones; and not merely their peripheral tints, but even their very contours seemed during the courses of the sun and moon hourly to s.h.i.+ft. Behind the house was the town-place, a squelchy courtyard hemmed in by stables and full of casual domestic animals. From here a muddy lane led up to the fields on the slopes above, slopes considerably more lofty than those visible from the front windows and ending in a bleak plateau of heather and gorse that formed the immediate approach to the high black cliffs of many miles of coast. The house itself was a long two-storied building, flanked by low gray stone hedges feathered with tamarisks and fuchsias. The garden, owing princ.i.p.ally to the care of Granfa Champion, had an unusual number of flowers. Even now in November the dahlias were not over, and against the walls of the house pink, ivy-leaved geraniums and China roses were in full bloom. The garden itself ended indeterminately, with no perceptible line of severance, in the moors or watery meads always vividly colored, and in summer creaming with meadow-sweet. At the bottom of the garden was a rustic gazebo, from which it was possible to follow the course of the stream up the valley between cultivated slopes that gave way to stretches of gorse and bracken, until the valley swept round out of sight in thick coverts of dwarfed oaks. Westward in the other direction the stream, flowing straighter and straighter as it neared the sea, lost itself in a brown waste of sand, while the range whose undulations it had followed sank abruptly to a marsh. This flatness made the contrary slope, which jutted forward so as to hide the actual breaking of the waves, appear portentously high. Indeed, the cliffs on that side soon reached three hundred feet and on account of their sudden elevation looked much higher. The stream spread out in wide shallows to its outlet, trickling somewhat ineffectively in watery furrows through the sand.

On the farther side of the brown waste, where not even rushes would grow, so complete and perpetual was the devastation of the gales, a line of towans followed the curve of the coast, a desolate tract, gray-green from the rushes planted to bind the s.h.i.+fting surface, and preserving in its endless peaks and ridges the last fantastic glissades and diversely elevated cones into which the wind had carved and gathered and swept the sand. Mostly, these towans presented to the beach a low line of serrated cliffs perhaps forty feet high; but from time to time they would break away to gullies full of fine drifted sand, whose small cavities h.o.a.rded snail-sh.e.l.ls wind-dried to an ethereal lightness, and rabbit-bones bleached and honeycombed by weather. After a storm the gullies gave an impression of virgin territory, because the sand lay in drifts like newly fallen snow on which footprints were desecration. The beach itself was at low water a very wide and flat and completely desolate expanse, s.h.i.+ning near the sea's edge with whatever gold or silver was in the air, shot with crimson bars at sunset, crinkled by the wind to a vast replica of one of its own sh.e.l.ls, ribbed and ploughed by tempests. The daily advance or retreat of extreme high water was marked by devious lines of purple muvices, by claws of seaweed and the stain of dry spume. Beyond the limit of the spring tides the sand swept up in drifts against the low cliffs that crumbled like biscuit before an attempted ascent.

This sea solitude reduced all living things to a strange equality of importance. Twittering sea-swallows whose feet printed the sand with desultory and fugitive intagliation, sea-parrots flying in profile against the sky up and down over the water, porpoises rolling out in the bay, sand-hoppers dancing to any disturbance, human beings--all became equally minute and immaterial. Inland the towans tumbled in endless irregularities of outline about a solitude equally complete. The vegetation scarcely marked the changing seasons, save where in winter the moss was a livelier golden-green, or where, beside spurges and sea-holly and yellow horned poppies, stone-crops were reddened by August suns. At wide intervals, where soil had formed over the sand, there was a close fine gra.s.s starred in spring with infinitesmal squills and forget-me-nots. But mostly the glaucous rushes, neither definitely blue nor green nor gray, occupied the landscape. Close at hand they were vitreous in color and texture, but at a distance and in the ma.s.s they seemed to have the velvety bloom of a green almond or grape. Life of a kind was always present in the scud of rabbits, in the song of larks and click of stonechats, in the dipping steel-blue flight of the wheatear and ruffled chestnut feathers of the whinchat. Yet as the explorer stumbled in and out of the burrows, forcing a p.r.i.c.kly advance through the sharp rushes and often plunging ankle deep in drifts of sand, life was more apparent in the towans themselves than in the presence of the birds and beasts haunting their solitude. The sand was veritably alive in its power to extract from the atmosphere every color and quality.

Sometimes it was golden, sometimes almost snow-white. Near sunset mauve and rose and salmon-pink trembled in waves upon its surface, and as it caught fire to welcome day, so it was eager to absorb night. Moonlight there was dazzling when, in a cold world, it was possible to count the snail-sh.e.l.ls like pearls and watch the sand trickle from rabbit-skulls like powdered silver.

Perhaps Jenny had never looked so well placed as when, with May beside her in a drift of sand, she rested against the flat fawns and creams and distant blues and grays of the background. Years ago when she danced beneath the plane tree, her scarlet dress by long use had taken on the soft texture of a pastel. Now she herself was a pastel, indescribably appropriate to the setting, with her rose-leaf cheeks buried in the high collar of a lavender-colored frieze coat, with her yellow curls and deep blue eyes, deeper with the loss of their merriment. Her hands, too, were very white in the clear sea air. May sitting beside her looked dark as a pine tree against an April larch. If Jenny was coral, May was ivory.

Here they sat while the sea wind lisped over the sand. Jenny marked the beauty of the country the more carefully because she disliked so intensely the country people. Every day the sisters went for long walks, and when May was tired she would sit on the beach, while Jenny wandered on by the waves' edge.

November went by with silver skies and silver sunsets, with clouds of deepest indigo and pallid effulgences of sun streaming through traveling squalls. Days of swirling rain came in with December, when Jenny would have to sit in the long room, listening to the hiss of the wind-whipped elms, watching the geranium petals lie sodden all about the paths, and the gulls, blown inland, scattered on the hillsides like paper. The nights were terrible with their hollow moanings and flappings, with the whistle and pipe of the chimneys, with cras.h.i.+ng of unclosed doors, with rattled lattices and scud and scream and shriek and hum and roar of the wild December storms. Every morning would break to huge shapes of rain swept up the valley, one after another until the gales of dawn died away to a steady drench of water. Then Jenny would sit in the hot room, where the slab glowed quietly into the mustiness, and idly turn the damp-stained pages of year-old periodicals, of mildewed calendars, even of hymn-books. At last she would sally forth desperately, and after a long battle with wind or gurgling walk through mud and wet, she would return to a smell of pasties and saffron cake and sometimes the cleaner pungency of marinated pilchards.

Some time before Christmas the gales dropped; the wind veered releasing the sun, and for a fortnight there was fleckless winter weather. These were glorious mornings to wander down through the west garden past the escallonias aromatic in the sunlight, past the mauve and blue and purple veronicas, out over the watery meadows and up the hill-sides, where the gorse was almond-scented about midday in the best of the sun. Here for a week she and May roamed delightfully, until they found themselves in a field of bullocks and, greatly terrified, went back to the seash.o.r.e.

"Handsome weather," old Mrs. Trewh.e.l.la would say, watching them set out for their long walks, and, after blinking once or twice at the sun, thumping back to the kitchen, back to household superintendence and the preparation of heavy meals for the farm workers. Jenny was not inclined to talk much with them. They lived a life so remote from hers that not even the bridge of common laughter could span the gulf. d.i.c.ky Rosewarne, for all his good looks, was detestably cruel with his gins and snares and cunning pursuit of goldfinches and, worse, his fish-hooks baited for wild duck. Yet he was kind enough to the great cart-horses, conversing with them all work-time in a guttural language they seemed perfectly to comprehend. Bessie Trevorrow, the dairymaid, was even less approachable than d.i.c.ky. She had the shyness of a wild thing, and would fly past Jenny, gazing in the opposite direction. Once or twice, under the pressure of proximity, they embarked upon a conversation; but Jenny found it difficult to talk well with a woman who answered her in ambiguous phrases of agreement or vague queries. Old Man Veal Jenny disliked since on one occasion she observed him bobbing up and down behind a hedge to watch her. Thomas was her favorite among the hands. He had grown used to bringing her curiosities newly found, and others chosen from a collection that extended back to his earliest youth. These he would present for her inspection, as a dog lays a stick at his mistress's feet. Jenny, although she was profoundly uninterested by the cannon-ball he had found wedged between two rocks, by the George III halfpenny turned up by the plough, by his strings of corks and bundles of torn nets, was nevertheless touched by his offer to strike a "lemon"

for her under a jam-jar in the spring. Nor did she listen distastefully to the long sing-song tales with which he entertained May.

The fine weather lasted right up to Christmas Day. Violets bloomed against the white stones that edged the garden paths. Wallflowers wore their brown velvet in sheltered corners and, best of all, bushes of Brompton stocks in a sweetness of pink and gray scented the rich Cornish winter. Jenny and May would wander up and down the garden with Granfa, while the old man would tell in his high chant tales as long as Thomas's of by-gone Australian adventures, tales ripened in the warmth of spent suns.h.i.+ne, and sometimes stories of his own youth in Trewinnard with memories of maids' eyes and lads' laughter. Then in January came storm on storm, dark storms that thundered up the valley, dragging night in their wake. Lambing went on out in the blackness, a dreadful experience, Jenny thought, when Zachary came in at all hours, sometimes stained with blood in the lantern light. Jenny was scarcely aware of her husband in the daytime. The volubility which had distinguished his conversation in London was not apparent here. Indeed, he scarcely spoke except in monosyllables, and spent all his time working grimly on the farm. He did not seem to notice Jenny, and never inquired into her manner of pa.s.sing the day. She was his, safe and sound in Cornwall, a handsome property like a head of fine stock. He had desired her deeply and had gained his desire. Now, slim and rosy, she was still desirable; but, as Jenny herself half recognized, too securely fastened, too easily attainable for any misgiving. She certainly had no wish for a closer intimacy, and was very thankful for the apparent indifference which he felt towards her. She would have been horrified, had he suggested sharing her walks with May, had he wanted to escort them over Trewinnard Sands, or worst of all, had he invited her to sit beside him on his Sunday drives to preach at distant chapels. He did not even bother her to come and hear him preach in Trewinnard Free Church. Yet as the weeks went by, Jenny came to think that he regarded her more than she thought at first. He often seemed to know where she had been without being informed. When she complained about Old Man Veal's spying on her, Zachary laughed oddly, not much annoyed presumably by his servant's indiscretion. Jenny tried sometimes to imagine what Trewinnard would have been like without her sister. The fancy made her shudder. With May, however, it was like a rather long, pleasantly dull holiday.

February brought fair days, scattered s.h.i.+ning celandines like pieces of gold over the garden beds, set the stiff upright daffodil buds drooping and was all too soon driven out by the bleakest March that was ever known, a fierce, detestable month of withering east winds, of starved primroses, and dauntless thrushes singing to their nests in the shaken laurustinus. Jenny began to hate the country itself now, when all she could see of it was savage and forbidding as the people it bred.

In the middle of this gray and blasted month, Jenny became aware that she was going to have a baby. This discovery moved her princ.i.p.ally by a sudden revival of self-consciousness so acute that she could scarcely compel herself to break the news even to May. It seemed such an absurd fact when she looked across the table at Zachary somberly munching his pasty. She could hardly bear to sit at meals, dreading every whisper and m.u.f.fled giggle from the lower end of the table. Although the baby would not arrive till September, and although she tried to persuade herself that it was impossible for anyone to discern her condition, her own knowledge of it dismayed her.

"But it'll be nice to have a baby," said May.

"What, in this unnatural house? I _don't_ think. Oh, May, whatever shall I do? Can't I go away to have it?"

"Why don't you ask him?" suggested May.

"Don't be silly, how can I tell _him_ anything about it?"

"He's got to know some time," May pointed out.

"Yes, but not yet. And then you can tell the old woman and she can tell him, and I'll hide myself up in the bedroom for a week. Fancy all the servants knowing. What a dreadful thing! Besides, it hurts."

"Well, it's no use for you to worry about that part of it now," said May. "I call it silly."

"I hope it'll be a boy," said Jenny. "I love boys. I think they're such rogues."

"I'd rather it was a girl," said May.

"Perhaps it don't matter which after all," Jenny decided. "A boy would be nicest, though, if you loved the man. Because you'd see him all over again. Perhaps I'd rather have a girl. I expect she'd be more like me.

Poor kid!" she added to herself, meditating.

During April the subject was put on one side by mutual consent. There was no immediate necessity for bother; but Jenny's self-consciousness made her unwilling to wander any more over the towans, for all that the weather was very blue and white, and the sheltered sand-drifts pleasantly warm in the spring sun. Jenny, however, felt that every rush-crowned ridge concealed an inquisitive head. She knew already how curious the country people were, and that Old Man Veal was no exception.

Once she had walked through Trewinnard Churchtown near dusk, and had been horribly aware of bobbing faces behind every curtained window, faces that bobbed and peered and followed every movement and gesture of her person.

Therefore May and Jenny determined to withdraw all opportunity from inquisitiveness by exploring the high cliffs behind Bochyn. They climbed up a steep road washed very bare by the sea wind, but pleasant enough with its turfed hedges fluttering with the cowslips that flourished in a narrow streak of limestone. At the top the road ran near the cliff's edge through gorse and heather and moorland scrub. They found a spot where the cliff sloped less precipitous in a green declivity right down to the sea. This slope was gay with sea-pinks and fragrant with white sea-campion. Primroses patterned the turf, and already ferns were uncrumpling their fronds. Below them the sea was spread like a peac.o.c.k's tail in every l.u.s.trous shade of blue and green. Half-way down they threw themselves full length on the resilient cus.h.i.+ons of gra.s.s and, bathed in suns.h.i.+ne, listened to the perpetual screaming of the gulls and boom of the waves in caverns round the coast.

"Not so dusty after all," said Jenny contentedly. "It's nice. I like it here."

"Isn't it lovely and warm?" said May.

So they buzzed idly on with their sunlit gossip and drowsy commentaries, until a bank of clouds overtook the sun and the water became leaden.

Jenny s.h.i.+vered.

"Somebody sitting on my grave," she said. "But it's nice here. Nicer than anywhere we've walked, I think."

Chapter x.x.xIX: _Intermezzo_

Circ.u.mstances made it necessary that before the end of the month May should inform old Mrs. Trewh.e.l.la of Jenny's expected baby.

"What did she say?" Jenny inquired when the interview was over.

"She said she thought as much."

"What a liberty. Why? n.o.body could tell to look at me. Or I hope not."

"Yes, but her!" commented May. "She's done nothing all her life only make it her business to know. They're all like that down here. I noticed that very soon about country people."

"What else did she say?" Jenny went on with for her unusual persistence.

She was not yet able to get rid of the idea that there was something remarkable in Jenny Pearl going to have a baby. Not even the universal atmosphere of fecundity which pervaded the farm could make this fact a whit more ordinary.

"She didn't say much else," related May, not rising to the solemnity of the announcement, the revolutionary and shattering reality of it.

"But she's going to tell him?" Jenny asked.

"That made her laugh."

"What did?"

"Her having to tell him."

"Why?" demanded Jenny indignantly.

"Well, you know they're funny down here. I tell you they don't think nothing about having a baby. No more than picking a bunch of roses, you might say."