Cold Comfort Farm (7 page)

The sound woke Adam. He lifted his head from the flank of Feckless and looked around him in bewilderment for a moment; then slowly his eyes, which looked small and wet and lifeless in his primitive face, lost their terror as he realized that he was in the cowshed, that it was half-past six on a winter morning, and that his gnarled fingers were about the task which they had performed at this hour and in this place for the past eighty years and more.

He stood up, sighing, and crossed over to Pointless, who was eating Graceless’s tail. Adam, who was linked to all dumb brutes by a chain forged in soil and sweat, took it out of her mouth and put into it, instead, his neckerchief – the last he had. She mumbled it, while he milked her, but stealthily spat it out so soon as he passed on to Aimless, and concealed it under the reeking straw with her hoof. She did not want to hurt the old man’s feelings by declining to eat his gift. There was a close bond: a slow, deep, primitive, silent down-dragging link between Adam and all living beasts; they knew each other’s simple needs. They lay close to the earth, and something of earth’s old fierce simplicities had seeped into their beings.

Suddenly a shadow fell athwart the wooden stanchions of the door. It was no more than a darkening of the pallid paws of the day which were now embracing the shed, but all the cows instinctively stiffened, and Adam’s eyes, as he stood up to face the new-comer, were again piteously full of twisted fear.

‘Adam,’ uttered the woman who stood in the doorway, ‘how many pails of milk will there be this morning?’

‘I dunnamany,’ responded Adam, cringingly; ‘’tes hard to tell. If so be as our Pointless has got over her indigestion, maybe ’twill be four. If so be as she hain’t, maybe three.’

Judith Starkadder made an impatient movement. Her large hands had a quality which made them seem to sketch vast horizons with their slightest gesture. She looked a woman without boundaries as she stood wrapped in a crimson shawl to protect her bitter, magnificent shoulders from the splintery cold of the early air. She seemed fitted for any stage, however enormous.

‘Well, get as many buckets as you can,’ she said, lifelessly, half-turning away. ‘Mrs Starkadder questioned me about the milk yesterday. She has been comparing our output with that from other farms in the district, and she says we are five-sixteenths of a bucket below what our rate should be, considering how many cows we have.’

A strange film passed over Adam’s eyes, giving him the lifeless primaeval look that a lizard has, basking in the swooning Southern heat. But he said nothing.

‘And another thing,’ continued Judith, ‘you will probably have to drive down into Beershorn tonight to meet a train. Robert Poste’s child is coming to stay with us for a while. I expect to hear some time this morning what time she is arriving. I will tell you later about it.’

Adam shrank back against the gangrened flank of Pointless.

‘Mun I?’ he asked, piteously. ‘Mun I, Miss Judith? Oh, dunna send me. How can I look into her liddle flower-face, and me knowin’ what I know? Oh, Miss Judith, I beg of ’ee not to send me. Besides,’ he added, more practically, ‘’tes close on sixty-five years since I put hands to a pair of reins, and I might upset the maidy.’

Judith, who had slowly turned from him while he was speaking, was now half-way across the yard. She turned her head to reply to him with a slow, graceful movement. Her deep voice clanged like a bell in the frosty air:

‘No, you must go, Adam. You must forget what you know – as we all must, while she is here. As for the driving, you had best harness Viper to the trap, and drive down into Howling and back six times this afternoon, to get your hand in again.’

‘Could not Master Seth go instead o’ me?’

Emotion shook the frozen grief of her face. She said low and sharp:

‘You remember what happened when he went to meet the new kitchenmaid … No. You must go.’

Adam’s eyes, little blind pools of water in his primitive face, suddenly grew cunning. He turned back to Aimless and resumed his mechanical stroking of the teat, saying in a sing-song rhythm:

‘Ay, then. I’ll go, Miss Judith. I dunnamany times I’ve thought as how this day might come … And now I mun go to bring Robert Poste’s child back to Cold Comfort. Ay, ’tes strange. The seed to the flower, the flower to the fruit, the fruit to the belly. Ay, so ’twill go.’

Judith had crossed the muck and rabble of the yard, and now entered the house by the back door.

In the large kitchen, which occupied most of the middle of the house, a sullen fire burned, the smoke of which wavered up the blackened walls and over the deal table, darkened by age and dirt, which was roughly set for a meal. A snood full of coarse porridge hung over the fire, and standing with one arm resting upon the high mantel, looking moodily down into the heaving contents of the snood, was a tall young man whose riding-boots were splashed with mud to the thigh, and whose coarse linen shirt was open to his waist. The firelight lit up his diaphragm muscles as they heaved slowly in rough rhythm with the porridge.

He looked up as Judith entered, and gave a short, defiant laugh, but said nothing. Judith slowly crossed over until she stood by his side. She was as tall as he. They stood in silence,
she staring at him, and he down into the secret crevasses of the porridge.

‘Well, mother mine,’ he said at last, ‘here I am, you see. I said I would be in time for breakfast, and I have kept my word.’

His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man.

Judith’s breath came in long shudders. She thrust her arms deeper into her shawl. The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it.

‘Cur,’ said Judith, levelly, at last. ‘Coward! Liar! Libertine! Who were you with last night? Moll at the mill or Violet at the vicarage? Or Ivy, perhaps, at the ironmongery? Seth – my son …’ Her deep, dry voice quivered, but she whipped it back, and her next words flew out at him like a lash.

‘Do you want to break my heart?’

‘Yes,’ said Seth, with an elemental simplicity.

The porridge boiled over.

Judith knelt, and hastily and absently ladled it off the floor back into the snood, biting back her tears. While she was thus engaged, there was the confused blur of voices and boots in the yard outside. The men were coming in to breakfast.

The meal for the men was set on a long trestle at the farther end of the kitchen, as far away from the fire as possible. They came into the room in awkward little clumps, eleven of them. Five were distant cousins of the Starkadders, and two others were half-brothers of Amos, Judith’s husband. This left only four men who were not in some way connected with the family; so it will readily be understood that the general feeling among the farm-hands was not exactly one of hilarity. Mark Dolour, one of the four, had been heard to remark: ‘Happen it had been another kind o’ eleven, us might ha’ had a cricket team, wi’ me fer umpire. As ut is, ’twould be more befittin’ if we was to hire oursen out for carryin’ coffins at sixpence a mile.’

The five half-cousins and the two half-brothers came over to the table, for they took their meals with the family. Amos liked
to have his kith about him, though, of course, he never said so or cheered up when they were.

A strong family likeness wavered in and out of the fierce, earth-reddened faces of the seven, like a capricious light. Micah Starkadder, mightiest of the cousins, was a ruined giant of a man, paralysed in one knee and wrist. His nephew, Urk, was a little, red, hard-bitten man with foxy ears. Urk’s brother, Ezra, was of the same physical type, but horsy where Urk was foxy. Caraway, a silent man, wind-shaved and lean, with long wandering fingers, had some of Seth’s animal grace, and this had been passed on to his son, Harkaway, a young, silent, nervous man given to bursts of fury about very little, when you came to sift matters.

Amos’s half-brothers, Luke and Mark, were thickly built and high-featured; gross, silent men with an eye to the bed and the board.

When all were seated two shadows darkened the sharp, cold light pouring in through the door. They were no more than a growing imminence of humanity, but the porridge boiled over again.

Amos Starkadder and his eldest son, Reuben, came into the kitchen.

Amos, who was even larger and more of a wreck than Micah, silently put his pruning-snoot and reaping-hook in a corner by the fender, while Reuben put the scranlet with which he had been ploughing down beside them.

The two men took their places in silence, and after Amos had muttered a long and fervent grace, the meal was eaten in silence. Seth sat moodily tying and untying a green scarf round the magnificent throat he had inherited from Judith; he did not touch his porridge, and Judith only made a pretence of eating hers, playing with her spoon, patting the porridge up and down and idly building castles with the burnt bits. Her eyes burned under their penthouses, sometimes straying towards Seth as he sat sprawling in the lusty pride of casual manhood, with a good many buttons and tapes undone. Then those same eyes, dark as prisoned king-cobras, would slide round until they rested upon the bitter white head and raddled red neck of Amos, her
husband, and then, like praying mantises, they would retreat between their lids. Secrecy pouted her full mouth.

Suddenly Amos, looking up from his food, asked abruptly:

‘Where’s Elfine?’

‘She is not up yet. I did not wake her. She hinders more than she helps o’ mornings,’ replied Judith.

Amos grunted.

‘’Tes a godless habit to lie abed of a working day, and the reeking red pits of the Lord’s eternal wrathy fires lie in wait for them as do so. Ay’ – his blazing blue eyes swivelled round and rested upon Seth, who was stealthily looking at a packet of Parisian art pictures under the table – ‘ay, and for those who break the seventh commandment, too. And for those’ – the eye rested on Reuben, who was hopefully studying his parent’s apoplectic countenance – ‘for those as waits for dead men’s shoes.’

‘Nay, Amos, lad—’ remonstrated Micah, heavily.

‘Hold your peace,’ thundered Amos; and Micah, though a fierce tremor rushed through his mighty form, held it.

When the meal was done the hands trooped out to get on with the day’s work of harvesting the swedes. This harvest was now in full swing; it took a long time and was very difficult to do. The Starkadders, too, rose and went out into the thin rain which had begun to fall. They were engaged in digging a well beside the dairy; it had been started a year ago, but it was taking a long time to do because things kept on going wrong. Once – a terrible day, when Nature seemed to hold her breath, and release it again in a furious gale of wind – Harkaway had fallen into it. Once Urk had pushed Caraway down it. Still, it was nearly finished; and everybody felt that it would not be long now.

In the middle of the morning a wire came from London announcing that the expected visitor would arrive by the six o’clock train.

Judith received it alone. Long after she had read it she stood motionless, the rain driving through the open door against her crimson shawl. Then slowly, with dragging steps, she mounted the staircase which led to the upper part of the house. Over her
shoulder she said to old Adam, who had come into the room to do the washing up:

‘Robert Poste’s child will be here by the six o’clock train at Beershorn. You must leave to meet it at five. I am going up to tell Mrs Starkadder that she is coming today.’

Adam did not reply. And Seth, sitting by the fire, was growing tired of looking at his postcards, which were a three-year-old gift from the vicar’s son, with whom he occasionally went poaching. He knew them all by now. Meriam, the hired girl, would not be in until after dinner. When she came, she would avoid his eyes, and tremble and weep.

He laughed insolently, triumphantly. Undoing another button of his shirt he lounged out across the yard to the shed where Big Business, the bull, was imprisoned in darkness.

Laughing softly, Seth struck the door of the shed.

And as though answering the deep call of male to male, the bull uttered a loud, tortured bellow that rose undefeated through the dead sky that brooded above the farm.

Seth undid yet another button, and lounged away.

*

Adam Lambsbreath, alone in the kitchen, stood looking down unseeingly at the dirtied plates which it was his task to wash, for the hired girl, Meriam, would not be here until after dinner, and when she came she would be all but useless. Her hour was near at hand, as all Howling knew. Was it not February, and the earth a-teem with newing life? A grin twisted Adam’s writhen lips. He gathered up the plates one by one and carried them out to the pump, which stood in a corner of the kitchen, above a stone sink. Her hour was nigh. And when April like an over-lustful lover leaped upon the lush flanks of the Downs there would be yet another child in the wretched hut down at Nettle Flitch Field, where Meriam housed the fruits of her shame.

‘Ay, dog’s-fennel or beard’s-crow, by their fruits they shall be betrayed,’ muttered Adam, shooting a stream of cold water over the coagulated plates. ‘Come cloud, come sun, ’tes aye so.’

While he was listlessly dabbing at the crusted edges of the porridge-plates with a thorn twig, a soft step descended the
stairs outside the door which closed off the staircase from the kitchen. Someone paused on the threshold.

The step was light as thistledown. If Adam had not had the rush of the running water in his ears too loudly for him to be able to hear any other noise, he might have thought this delicate, hesitant step was the beating of his own blood.

But, suddenly, something like a kingfisher streaked across the kitchen in a glimmer of green skirts and flying gold hair, and the chime of a laugh was followed a second later by the slam of the gate leading through the starveling garden out on to the Downs.

Adam flung round violently on hearing the sound, dropping his thorn twig and breaking two plates.