He grunted, perplexed and angry. ‘And whad you want wi’ me?’ He eyed her pitilessly, taking note of her shape. To have turned her away would have been a hearty meal for that hungry pride in him. He played with the idea.
‘Be you liven here always, Harry? Tis a wild spot.’ She faced his question. ‘I get a middlin dish of tongues every minute of the day from Mother. And Father be always putten the eye on me. So I thought haply you’d let me rest along you. I could work for ee and all manner.’
In spite of his resolve her humility touched him. And that she came in suppliant mood suited his proud fancy. But he did not trust her. ‘What should you be stayen for? Nay, doon’t start snivellen. Ye’re none so handsome without that, tellee.’ She turned her back on him and began moving away. ‘Eh, you be a bag of fancy tricks, Jenny Mykelborne. Gwain now, bainta? Gwain where?’ He knew she had no intention of going anywhere. Nor would he now have let her go, for the idea of human companionship was suddenly a secret bliss to him. He must have someone to talk to, and Jenny would do as well as another.
She turned to him with that rueful large-eyed look with which, as a child, she had so often wheedled her father into obedience. ‘If so be you daun’t want me any more, Harry, I maun goo home again.’
‘Wantee? Why for should I wantee? But I want what you’ve got in y’r belly, darlen. And that be a son of mine? bainta?’ He had need of sons: lusty lads by whose labour, and by his own, he would make himself great. ‘When be your time comen, girl?’
Yes, he had need of sons; and when Jenny’s firstborn proved to be a girl he was sorely disappointed, and remembered, with raging bitterness, how, five months earlier, Tisha Shellett had borne his son for another man to play father to. He cursed this unwanted female child; he cursed the mother; he cursed the midwife he had lured with bribes and threats from Glatting City. And with these curses something of the devil went out of him. By now he had built another and a larger hut, leaving the old one to serve as a stable; and before Charity was two years old he was the father of a son and the master of twenty well-cultivated acres. No one challenged his ownership; no one wished to compete with the madman who had secretly set himself the gigantic task of taming this wilderness. He knew in his heart that not till the whole of Nightingale Roughs was yielding profit would he relax his gargantuan efforts; so year after year he went on, adding acres to acres and son to son (two branches of one endeavour), and sparing neither himself nor his wife. After five years of it he hired a lad from Glatting to help him, paying a shilling a day in winter and spring, one and twopence in haytime, and one and sixpence at harvest, with a reasonable allowance of small beer at all seasons. This modest outlay brought him a generous return; the farm increased more quickly than ever. He employed others and bought more stock. And with every day that passed he grew more cunning in his farmcraft; for he gave the whole of his quick mind to it. By keeping eyes and ears open he learned many a new device, so that before long he was spreading his land with a mixture of marl and dung, broadcasting seed by means of a newly invented machine instead of by hand, and taking care never to sow turnips before four in the afternoon lest they should suffer drythe. By the time Roger his eldest son was ready to take a share in the work, more than half the wilderness had been conquered; and, besides valuable grain and root crops, there was pasture for cows, grazing for a hundred head of sheep, a five-acre field of burnet and clover, and of sainfoin a fourteen-acre of which every unit could be counted on to yield three tuns of good hay. Noke was relentless in his industry, suffering nothing to daunt or delay him. In a certain time of disaster when he found himself short of horses, he harnessed a pair of bullocks to the plough, and laughed at the gaping astonishment he provoked: such a crazy thing, they said, had never happened in Sussex before. He was married to his farm and thought of nothing else. His sons to him were so much man-power; his wife was their mother; his daughter, for he had but one, was a useful milking and butter-making wench. He hardly noticed, and certainly gave it no thought, that Charity, in her late teens, possessed the same kind of plump seductiveness, and the same willingness to make use of it, as her mother had exercised upon himself two decades ago. But when she reached her middle twenties a fantastic idea flowered from the darkness within him. He began looking at his sons with new eyes. Manpower for the farm they were—but they were more than that. For he now entertained consciously a thought that must always have lain hidden in him somewhere: that these sons of his were in a sense, and a profoundly satisfying sense, extensions of his own being. He, Harry Noke, the man who had been reviled and pilloried by a pack of villagers twenty-five years ago, had so increased his substance, had waxed so great, that he was now more than a man: he was six men. Those five sons were each a living proof of him: he looked upon them with a sudden fierce satisfaction. But five was not enough. They had all been born in the first eight years, and then—no more. Why? He suspected Jenny of cheating him; and cursed her for it, knowing her to be now past child-bearing. He was crazy to prove himself further, to beget a numerous progeny. Why not let Charity take a turn, said his demon. The thought was quickly repudiated. He shrank from it, and for a moment hated the man his mirror shewed him: a lean, hungry-eyed, crafty old fellow, with a sharp nose, broad mobile nostrils, and a spade of black beard. But it returned at intervals, causing him a twinge of shame. Despite his angry and continuous endeavours, the gentler instincts of his youth were not yet utterly destroyed; and he raged inwardly, being at war with himself.
CHAPTER 3
SETH SHELLETT DISCOVERS A NEW WORLD, AND AN AXE IS FOUND
Seth Shellett, waking on Midsummer Day, thought first of Noke’s daughter, Charity; and not for several seconds did he remember that today it was his duty and pleasure to tie a green ribbon in his hat, and cut a stick of hazel, and take his part in the year’s high festival In this he differed from most of his neighbours, who for weeks had talked of little else than the coming celebrations. For on Midsummer Day, each year, the folk of Marden Fee made festival. Work was abandoned; authority, with its own consent, was set aside; and the day was dedicated to feasting and the night to saturnalia. Until noon, however, everything was done according to rule and tradition, and of this tradition the Marden Club was the faithful guardian. The club had been founded by Bertram Marden, the first squire of the Fee (of whom only the incorrigible Coachy professed a personal knowledge); but the midsummer ritual it was so zealous in practising was of immemorial antiquity. No one knew, or inquired, when or by whom it was first ordained that on a chosen day of each year the men of that parish, led by a banner-bearer and each carrying a peeled hazel wand cut from the hedges, must assemble at The Nick of Time, and thence, having answered to their names, march up the High Street in the wake of seven white-veiled maidens, and so to church, where the priest awaited them. Lightly screened by a veil, even the plainest girl looked a little enticing, as the men were not slow to notice; and there was always a good deal of giggling among the vestals. But by the time the procession reached the church, the women’s demeanour was as modest as the men’s was solemn. There were wardens at each door to see that no clubfellow escaped his duty; and few attempted to do so, for the pleasure of defaulting was not worth the risk of forfeiting one’s seat at the club dinner. For the most part they sat through the service with a good grace and thought of the feast that was to come, though today there were not wanting those who spared at least enough attention to the admonition to entitle them to say, afterwards, that Parson Hockley were no match for old Parson Croup. ‘A good sarment, but he do beat the devil round the gooseberry bush so much, tis all a body can do to keep waken.’ Parson Croup had died ten years ago, and his successor, a foreigner from Kent, had the inevitable faults of a novice. ‘A middlin raw discourse,’ said Mykelborne. ‘But I say naun to that, for you can’t expect better, seeing he be so new to ut. Festival’s not what it was, neighbours. Parson Croup, when he’d a mind to’t, would send ye to dinner so full of God’s fear as liddle shart of fi’ pints would drive un away. A laamentable pretty preacher was Parson Croup on club days.’