Cold Comfort Farm (8 page)

‘Elfine … my liddle bird,’ he whispered, starting towards the open door.

A brittle silence mocked his whisper; through it wound the rank odours of rattan and barn.

‘My pharisee … my cowdling …’ he whispered, piteously. His eyes had again that look as of waste grey pools, sightless primaeval wastes reflecting the wan evening sky in some lonely marsh, as they wandered about the kitchen.

His hands fell slackly against his sides, and he dropped another plate. It broke.

He sighed, and began to move slowly towards the open door, his task forgotten. His eyes were fixed upon the cowshed.

‘Ay, the beasts …’ he muttered, dully; ‘the dumb beasts never fail a man. They know. Ay, I’d ’a’ done better to cowdle our Feckless in my bosom than liddle Elfine. Ay, wild as a marshtigget in May, ’tes. And a will never listen to a word from annyone. Well, so t’must be. Sour or sweet, by barn or bye, so ’twill go. Ah, but if he’ – the blind grey pools grew suddenly terrible, as though a storm were blowing in across the marsh from the Atlantic wastes – ‘if he but harms a hair o’ her liddle goldy head I’ll
kill
un.’

So muttering, he crossed the yard and entered the cowshed, where he untied the beasts from their hoot-pieces and drove them across the yard, down the muddy rutted lane that led to Nettle Flitch Field. He was enmeshed in his grief. He did
not notice that Graceless’s leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.

Left alone, the kitchen fire went out.

The timeless leaden day merged imperceptibly towards eve. After the rude midday meal Adam was bid by Judith to put Viper, the vicious gelding, between the shafts of the buggy and to drive backwards and forwards to Howling six times to revive his knowledge of the art of managing a horse. His attempt to stave off this event by having a fit during the rude meal was unfortunately robbed of its full effect by the collapse of Meriam, the hired girl, while in the act of passing a dish of greens to Seth.

Her hour had come upon her rather sooner than was anticipated, and in the ensuing scene Adam’s fit, which he had staged in the cowshed out of regard for his personal comfort and safety, passed almost unnoticed except as a sort of Greek chorus to the main drama.

Adam was therefore left without any excuse, and spent the afternoon driving backwards and forwards between Howling and the farm, much to the indignation of the Starkadders, who could see him from their position at the side of the well they were supposed to be getting on with; they thought he was an idle old man, and said as much.

‘How shall I know the maidy?’ pleaded Adam of Judith, as they stood together while he lit the lanthorn hanging on the side of the buggy. Its dim flame flowered up slowly under the vast, uncaring bowl of the darkening sky, and hung heavily, like a brooding corpse-light, in the windless dusk. ‘Robert Poste was aye like a bullock: a great moitherin’ man, aye playin’ wi’ batses and ballses. Do ’ee think his maid will be like him?’

‘There are not so many passengers as all that at Beershorn,’ replied Judith, impatiently. ‘Wait until everybody has left the station. Robert Poste’s child will be the last; she will wait to see if there is anyone to meet her. Be off wi’ you,’ and she struck the gelding upon his hocks.

The great beast bounded forward into the gloom before Adam could check him. They were gone. Darkness fell, a clouded bell of dark glass, eclipsing the soggy landscape.

*

By the time the buggy reached Beershorn, which was a good seven miles from Howling, Adam had forgotten what he was going there for. The reins lay between his knotted fingers, and his face, unseeing, was lifted to the dark sky. ***From the stubborn interwoven strata of his sub-conscious, thought seeped up into his dim conscious; not as an integral part of that consciousness, but more as an impalpable emanation, a crepuscular addition, from the unsleeping life in the restless trees and fields surrounding him. The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think. But Adam’s deafness and blindness came from within, as well as without; earthy calm seeped up from his sub-conscious and met descending calm in his conscious. Twice the buggy was pulled out of hedges by a passing farm-hand, and once narrowly shaved the vicar, driving home from tea at the Hall.

‘Where are you, my birdling?’ Adam’s blind lips asked the unanswering darkness and the loutish shapes of the unbudded trees. ‘Did I cowdle thee as a mommet for this?’

He knew that Elfine was out on the Downs, striding on her unsteady colt’s legs towards the Hall and the bright, sardonic hands of Richard Hawk-Monitor. Adam’s mind played
uneasily, in bewildered pain, with the vision of his nurseling between those casual fingers …

But the buggy reached Beershorn at last, and safely: there was only one road, and that led to the station.

Adam pulled Viper up on his haunches just as the great gelding was about to canter through the entrance to the booking-hall, and knotted the reins on the rennet-post near the horse-trough.

Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough. Humanity left him abruptly.

For some time he brooded, but time conveyed to him nothing of itself. It spun endlessly upon a bright point in space, repeating the names of Elfine and Richard Hawk-Monitor. If time passed (and presumably it did, for a train came in, and its passengers got out, and were driven away) there was no time for Adam.

He was at last roused by an obscure agitation which seemed to be taking place on the floor of the buggy.

The straw which had lain upon the floor for the past twenty-five years was being energetically kicked out into the road by a small foot shod in a stout but shapely shoe. The light of the lantern showed nothing above this save a slender ankle and a green skirt, considerably agitated by the movements of the leg which it covered.

A voice from the darkness above his head was remarking, ‘How revolting!’

‘Eh … eh,’ muttered Adam, peering blindly up into the vague air beyond the lantern’s rays. ‘Nay, niver do that, soul. That straw was good enough for Miss Judith’s wedding-trip to Brighton, and it must serve. Straw or chaff, leaf or fruit, we mun’ all come to’t.’

‘Not while I can prevent myself,’ the voice assured him. ‘And I can believe
most
things about Sussex and Cold Comfort, but not that Cousin Judith ever went to Brighton. Now, shall we be getting along, if you have finished brooding? My trunk is coming up to the farm by the carrier’s van tomorrow. Not’ (the
voice went on, with a certain tartness), ‘that you would be likely to care if it stayed down here until it seeded.’

‘Robert Poste’s child,’ murmured Adam, staring up at the face he could now dimly see beyond the circle of lantern light. ‘Eh, but I was sent here to meet ’ee, and I niver saw ’ee.’

‘I know,’ said Flora.

‘Child, child—’ began Adam, his voice rising to a wail.

But Flora thought otherwise. She checked him by asking him if he would prefer her to drive Viper, and this so affronted his male pride that he unhitched the reins from the rennet-post and the buggy drove off without any more delay.

Flora sat with her fur jacket drawn close round her throat against the chill air, nursing her small case containing her nightgown and toilet articles upon her knees. She had not been able to resist the impulse to slip into this small case, at the last moment, her dearly-loved copy of the Pensées of the Abbé Fausse-Maigre; her other books would come up in her trunk tomorrow, but she had felt that she would find it easier to meet the Starkadders in a proper and civilized frame of mind if she had her copy of the Pensées (surely the wisest book ever compiled for the guidance of a truly civilized person) close at hand.

The Abbé’s other and greater work, ‘The Higher Common Sense’, which had won for him a Doctorate of the University of Paris at the age of twenty-five, was in her trunk.

She thought of the Pensées as the buggy left the lights of Beershorn behind and began to mount the road which led to the invisible Downs. Her spirits were somewhat discomposed. She was chilly, and felt soiled (though indeed she did not look it) by the rigours of her journey. The prospect of what she would find at Cold Comfort was not calculated to cheer her spirits. She thought of the Abbé’s warning: ‘Never confront an enemy at the end of a journey, unless it happens to be his journey’, and was not consoled.

Adam did not say a word to her during the drive. But that was all right, because she did not want him to; he could be coped with later. The drive did not last so long as she had feared, because Viper seemed to be a pretty good horse and went at a smart pace (Flora supposed that the Starkadders had
not owned him for long), and in less than an hour the lights of a village appeared in the distance.

‘Is that Howling?’ asked Flora.

‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’

There did not seem to be anything more to say. She fell into a slightly more comfortable muse, wondering what her rights were, those rights which her Cousin Judith had mentioned in her letter, and who had sent the postcard with the reference to a generation of vipers, and what was the wrong done by Judith’s man to her father, Robert Poste?

The buggy now began to climb a hill, leaving Howling behind.

‘Are we nearly there?’

‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’

And in another five minutes Viper stopped, of his own will, at a gate which Flora could just see in the obscurity. Adam struck him with the whip. He did not move.

‘I think we must be there,’ observed Flora.

‘Nay, niver say that.’

‘But I do say it. Look – if you drive on we shall go slam into a hedge.’

‘’Tes all one, Robert Poste’s child.’

‘It may be all right for you, and all one, but it isn’t to me. I shall get down.’

So she did; and found her way slowly, through darkness only lit by faint winter starlight, along a villainous muddy path between hedges, which was too narrow for the buggy to enter.

Adam followed her, carrying the lantern, and leaving Viper at the gate.

The buildings of the farm, a shade darker than the sky, could now be distinguished in the gloom, a little distance on, and as Flora and Adam were slowly approaching them, a door suddenly opened and a beam of light shone out. Adam gave a joyful cry.

‘’Tes the cowshed! ’Tes our Feckless openin’ the door fer me!’ And Flora saw that it was indeed; the door of the shed, which was lit by a lantern, was being anxiously pushed open by the nose of a gaunt cow.

This was not promising.

But immediately a deep voice was heard: ‘Is that you, Adam?’ and a woman came out of the cowshed, carrying the lantern, which she lifted high above her head to look at the travellers. Flora dimly discerned an unnecessarily red and voluminous shawl on her shoulders, and a tumbling mass of hair.

‘Oh, how do you do?’ she called. ‘You must be my Cousin Judith. I’m so glad to see you. How nice of you to come out in all this cold. Terribly nice of you to have me, too. Isn’t it curious we should never have met before?’

She put out her hand, but it was not taken at once. The lantern was lifted higher while Judith steadily looked into her face, in silence. The seconds passed. Flora wondered if her lipstick were the wrong shade. It then occurred to her that there was a less frivolous cause for the silence which had fallen, and for the steady regard with which her cousin confronted her. So, Flora mused, must Columbus have felt when the poor Indian fixed his solemn, unwavering gaze upon the great sailor’s face. For the first time a Starkadder looked upon a civilized being.

But one could weary even of this; and Flora soon did. She asked Judith if Judith would think her terribly rude if she did not meet the rest of the family that evening. Might she, Flora, just have a morsel of food in her own room?

‘It is cold there,’ said Judith, draggingly, at last.

‘Oh, a fire will soon warm it up,’ said Flora, firmly. ‘Too nice of you, I do think, to take so much care of me.’

‘My sons, Seth and Reuben—’ Judith choked on the words, then recovered, and added in a lower voice, ‘My sons are waiting to see their cousin.’

This seemed to Flora, in conjunction with their ominous names,
too
like a cattle show, so she smiled vaguely and said it was so nice of them, but she thought, all the same, she would see them in the morning.

Judith’s magnificent shoulders rose and fell in a slow, billowy shrug which agitated her breasts.

‘As you will. The chimney, perhaps, smokes—’

‘I should think it more than probable,’ smiled Flora. ‘But we can see to all that tomorrow. Shall we go in now? But first’ –
she opened her bag and took out a pencil and tore a leaf from a little diary – ‘I want Adam to send this wire for me.’

She had her way. Half an hour later she sat beside a smoky fire in her room, pensively eating two boiled eggs. She thought these were safest to ask for; Starkadder bacon, especially if cooked by Adam, might interfere with the long night’s rest which she proposed to take, and for which, a short time later, she began to prepare.

She was really too sleepy to notice much of her surroundings, and too bored. She wondered if she had been wise to come. She reflected on the length, the air of neglect and the intricate convolutions of the corridors through which Judith had led her to her bedroom, and decided that if these were typical of the rest of the house, and if Judith and Adam were typical of the people who lived in it, her task would indeed be long and difficult. However, her hand was on the handle of the plough, and she would not turn back, because, if she did, Mrs Smiling would make a particular sort of face, which in another and more old-fashioned woman would have meant: ‘I told you so.’