The Freelands | Page 4

a blue-checked cotton shirt, flapped
against belted corduroys that were somewhat the color of his square,
pale-brown face and dusty hair. His eyes were sad, with the swimming
yet fixed stare of epileptics; his mouth heavy-lipped, so that, but for the
yearning eyes, the face would have been almost brutal. He looked as if
he suffered from silence. The elm-trees bordering the field, though only
just in leaf, showed dark against a white sky. A light wind blew,

carrying already a scent from the earth and growth pushing up, for the
year was early. The green Malvern hills rose in the west; and not far
away, shrouded by trees, a long country house of weathered brick faced
to the south. Save for the man sowing, and some rooks crossing from
elm to elm, no life was visible in all the green land. And it was
quiet--with a strange, a brooding tranquillity. The fields and hills
seemed to mock the scars of road and ditch and furrow scraped on them,
to mock at barriers of hedge and wall--between the green land and
white sky was a conspiracy to disregard those small activities. So
lonely was it, so plunged in a ground-bass of silence; so much too big
and permanent for any figure of man.
Across and across the brown loam the laborer doggedly finished out his
task; scattered the few last seeds into a corner, and stood still. Thrushes
and blackbirds were just beginning that even-song whose blitheness, as
nothing else on earth, seems to promise youth forever to the land. He
picked up his coat, slung it on, and, heaving a straw bag over his
shoulder, walked out on to the grass- bordered road between the elms.
"Tryst! Bob Tryst!"
At the gate of a creepered cottage amongst fruit-trees, high above the
road, a youth with black hair and pale-brown face stood beside a girl
with frizzy brown hair and cheeks like poppies.
"Have you had that notice?"
The laborer answered slowly:
"Yes, Mr. Derek. If she don't go, I've got to."
"What a d--d shame!"
The laborer moved his head, as though he would have spoken, but no
words came.
"Don't do anything, Bob. We'll see about that."
"Evenin', Mr. Derek. Evenin', Miss Sheila," and the laborer moved on.
The two at the wicket gate also turned away. A black-haired woman
dressed in blue came to the wicket gate in their place. There seemed no
purpose in her standing there; it was perhaps an evening custom, some
ceremony such as Moslems observe at the muezzin-call. And any one
who saw her would have wondered what on earth she might be seeing,
gazing out with her dark glowing eyes above the white, grass-bordered
roads stretching empty this way and that between the elm-trees and
green fields; while the blackbirds and thrushes shouted out their hearts,

calling all to witness how hopeful and young was life in this English
countryside. . . .

CHAPTER I
Mayday afternoon in Oxford Street, and Felix Freeland, a little late, on
his way from Hampstead to his brother John's house in Porchester
Gardens. Felix Freeland, author, wearing the very first gray top hat of
the season. A compromise, that--like many other things in his life and
works--between individuality and the accepted view of things,
aestheticism and fashion, the critical sense and authority. After the
meeting at John's, to discuss the doings of the family of his brother
Morton Freeland--better known as Tod--he would perhaps look in on
the caricatures at the English Gallery, and visit one duchess in Mayfair,
concerning the George Richard Memorial. And so, not the soft felt hat
which really suited authorship, nor the black top hat which obliterated
personality to the point of pain, but this gray thing with narrowish
black band, very suitable, in truth, to a face of a pale buff color, to a
moustache of a deep buff color streaked with a few gray hairs, to a
black braided coat cut away from a buff-colored waistcoat, to his neat
boots--not patent leather--faintly buffed with May-day dust. Even his
eyes, Freeland gray, were a little buffed over by sedentary habit, and
the number of things that he was conscious of. For instance, that the
people passing him were distressingly plain, both men and women;
plain with the particular plainness of those quite unaware of it. It struck
him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so
many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up
even as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it
seemed little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this
crowd of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of
hopelessly mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what
indeed!--since they