Gone to Earth | Page 9

all their
wealth for.
The other inhabitant of Undern, Andrew, revolved in his own orbit, and
was entirely unknown to his master. He cut the yews--the peacocks and
the clipped round trees and the ones like tables--twice a year. He was
creating a swan. He had spent twenty years on it, and hoped to
complete it in a few more, when the twigs that were to be the beak had
grown sufficiently. It never occurred to him that the place was not his,
that he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn
work; in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself;
and in the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew
somnolent. He sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he
seldom scrubbed, and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and
chopped meat) and slept the afternoons away in the ceaseless drone of
flies.

When Reddin called him he rarely answered, and only deigned to go to
him when he felt sure that his order was going to be reasonable.
Everything he said was non-committal, every movement was
expostulatory. Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he
always had such meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor.
Monasticism had found, in a countryside teeming with sex, one silent
but rabid disciple. If Vessons ever felt the irony of his own presence in
a breeding stable, he never said so. He went about his work with tight
disapproving lips, as if he thought that Nature owed him a debt of
gratitude for his tolerance of her ways. Ruminative and critical, he went
to and fro in the darkly lovely domain, with pig buckets or ash buckets
or barrows full of manure. The lines of his face were always etched in
dirt, and he always had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister. He
was a lonely soul, as he once said himself when unusually mellow at
the Hunter's Arms; he was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.'
He preferred it to the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin
because they never spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite
indifferent to Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.
But to Undern itself he was not indifferent. Ties deep as the tangled
roots of the bindweed, strong as the great hawsers of the beeches that
reached below the mud of Undern Pool, held him to it, the bondslave of
a beauty he could not understand, a terror he could not express. When
he trudged the muddy paths, 'setting taters' or earthing up; when he
scythed the lawn, looking, with a rose in his hat, weirder and more
ridiculous than ever; and when he shook the apples down with a kind of
sour humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having
apples!'--at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind
force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was
stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the beetle,
he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the protoplasm of a poet.
Chapter 4
Vessons took up the pose of one seeing a new patient.

'This young lady's lost her way,' Reddin remarked.
'She 'as, God's truth! But you'll find it forra I make no doubt, sir.
"There's a way"' (he looked ironically at the poultry-basket behind the
trap, from which peered anxious, beaky faces)--'"a way as no fowl
knoweth, the way of a man with a maid."'
'Fetch the brood mares in from the lower pasture. They should have
been in this hour.'
'And late love's worse than lad's love, so they do say,' concluded
Vessons.
'There's nothing of love between us,' Reddin snapped.
'I dunna wonder at it!' Andrew cast an appraising look at his master's
flushed face and at Hazel's tousled hair, and withdrew.
Hazel went into the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the
brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs,
all more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had
just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano.
Hazel did not notice the grey dust and the hearth full of matches and
cigarette ends. She only saw what seemed to her fabulous splendour. A
foxhound rose from the moth-eaten leopard-skin by the hearth as they
came in. Hazel stiffened.
'I canna-d-abear the hound-dogs,' she said. 'Nasty snabbing things.'
'Best dogs going.'
'No, they kills the poor foxes.'
'Vermin.'
Hazel's face became tense. She clenched her hands and advanced a
determined chin.

'Keep yer tongue off our Foxy, or I unna stay!' she said.
'Who's Foxy?'
'My little small cub as I took and reared.'