The Romantic | Page 7

her. If John went--
"John, shall you stay on here?"
"I don't know. I shall stick to farming if that's what you mean. Though it isn't what I wanted."
"What did you want?"
"To go into the Army."
"Why didn't you then?"
"They wouldn't have me. There's something wrong with my eyes.... So the land's got me instead."
"Me too. We ought to have been doing this all our lives."
"We'll jolly well have to. We shall never be any good indoors again."
"Has old Burton said anything?"
"I'm getting on. I can drive as straight a furrow as any man in Gloucestershire. I've told my father that. He detests me; but he'd say you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you must farm. He turned all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business. He liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under his engines. He'd simply love to see me here standing up to my knees in wet cow-dung."
"He won't mind your leaving him?"
"Not if I make a good thing out of this. Anyhow he knows he can't keep me off it. If I can't fight I'll farm. It's in my blood and nerves and memory. He sits there selling motor cars, but his people were fighting men. They fought to get land; they fought to keep it. My mother's people, the Rodens, were yeoman farmers. That's why my furrow's so straight."
"And that's why you came here?"
"No. That isn't why."
"Aren't you glad you came? Did you ever feel anything like the peace of it?"
"It's not the peace of it I want, Charlotte,--Jeanne, I mean. It's the fight. Fighting with things that would kill you if you didn't. Wounding the earth to sow in it and make it feed you. Ploughing, Charlotte--Jeanne. Feeling the thrust and the drive through, and the thing listing over on the slope. Seeing the steel blade shine, and the long wounds coming in rows, hundreds of wounds, wet and shining."
"What makes you think of wounds?"
"I don't know. I see it like that. Cutting through."
"I don't see it like that one bit. The earth's so kind, so beautiful. And the hills--look at them, the clean, quiet backs, smoothed with light. You could stroke them. And the fields, those lovely coloured fans opening and shutting."
"They're lovely because of what's been done to them. If those hills had been left to themselves there'd have been nothing on them but trees. Think of the big fight with the trees, the hacking through, the cutting. The trunks staggering and falling. You'd begin with a little hole in the forest like that gap in the belt on the sky-line, and you'd go on hacking and cutting. You'd go on.... If you didn't those damned trees would come up round you and jam you between their trunks and crush you to red pulp.... Supposing this belt of beeches drew in and got tighter and tighter--No. There's nothing really kind and beautiful on this earth. Except your face. And even your face--"
"My face?--"
"Could be cruel. But it never will be. Something's happened to it. Some cruelty. Some damnable cruelty."
"What makes you think so?"
"Every kind and beautiful thing on earth, Jeanne, has been made so by some cruelty."
"That's all rot. Utter rot. You don't know what you're talking about.... It's milking time. There's Gwinnie semaphoring. Do you know old Burton's going to keep us on? He'll pay us wages from this quarter. He says we were worth our keep from the third day."
"Do you want to stay on here?"
"Rather."
"Very well then, so do I. That settles it."
"Get up," she said, "and come along. Gwinnie's frantic."
He sat up, bowed forwards, his hands hanging loose over his knees. She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender back dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of her breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her lips parting.
He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her weight against his weight, tugging.
He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her pull. As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing forgotten, her right hand.
* * * * *
Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable--the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft behind it--she lay thinking.
Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.
"If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie"--She knew what Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another. Thinking