He lay awake that night thinking about Ralph and the girl. It was the first night since his return from the sea that he had been able to lie awake without the torment of Sarah’s lace before him.
When he had had his breakfast next morning, he went to the garden to find Ralph. He was not there, and Finch was walking along the flagged path towards the tennis court when he met the gardener running towards him. Ash’s fresh-coloured face was pallid, his mouth was wide open, showing his smooth, toothless gums. He was gasping as though he had run a long distance.
“Oh, zir,” he managed to get out, “whatever shall us do? Ralph Hart’s lying over in the shed there poisoned! He’s killed hissen!”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“I’m not sure; I think so. Will you come with me, zir?”
They ran together to the shed. Ralph was lying, curled up, in an attitude of agony. They bent over him. Finch, shaking from head to foot, peered into his face. It was a greenish colour, the mouth contorted and stained with something. Beside him was a tin half filled with a liquid, some of which had been spilled on the floor. This was the place where garden implements were kept and where Arthur had told Finch of his love for Sarah.
The gardener knelt down and felt the boy’s heart. “Tidden beating! He’s dead as can be!” Tears began to run down his face.
“We must tell my aunt,” said Finch, with a feeling of numbness in his limbs and throat. Could he move? Could he run to the house? He found that he could, but he moved lurchingly. Ash, either because he was eager to tell the news or because he was afraid to stay with the dead boy, ran after him. They stood before Augusta, while behind her stood the cook and the parlourmaid, who had followed her out to the drive. She had been giving them their orders when, looking out of the window, they had seen the two white-faced running figures approaching the house.
Augusta’s self-control was admirable. She drew herself up and surveyed them with a look of command.
“Are you sure he is dead?” she asked.
“Ay, that I am, my lady. There be no breath of life in un. I’ll warrant he were dead a quarter hour when I found un. He come to me hissen and asked me for the poison spray us uses for plants, and I don’t rightly know the sense of why he swallered it, but swaller it he did. And it’s took he off proper!”
“Fetch the doctor as quickly as you can, Ash,” said Augusta. “I must go and break the news to his poor mother. But Ralph must not be left alone there.”
“I will stay with him.” Finch said it between set teeth.
He stayed with Ralph’s body until the doctor came. He stayed until it was put on a hurdle and carried down to his mother’s cottage. Augusta spent most of the day with the poor mother, went with her to order Ralph’s coffin, interviewed the vicar, urging him to appeal to the bishop for permission to have the boy buried inside the churchyard.
It was said that the little kitchenmaid cried aloud when she heard of Ralph’s death, declaring that it was not her fault, that she’d never given him any encouragement.
“You’ve got to turn that girl out,” said Finch savagely to his aunt. “We can’t have her staying on here. She’s a beast. She killed Ralph.”
“No,” answered Augusta, firmly. “I cannot dismiss her. Any girl has the right to change her mind. She wrote to him, quite kindly she tells me, saying that he no longer attracted her.”
“Little bitch!” sneered Finch.
“Finch! Not one word more of such language! I’m surprised at you. At such a time too! I blame Renny very much tor the language you boys use.”
Finch muttered—“Renny’s not to blame. A saint would use bad language about that girl!”
A newspaper reporter came to Lyming and interviewed Ralph’s sweetheart. An article appeared in the local paper in which it was stated that Miss Muriel Slater denied having ever been engaged to the suicide. She had walked out occasionally with Hart, but that his company had of late been distasteful to her and that he had tried to create a scene when she had informed him of this.
The day of the funeral was the most beautiful day of the season. The village, with its surrounding fields and meadows, appeared as tranquil as a village in a dream surrounded by fields of powdered gold. Even the dark Tors looked gold today, their heads hidden in a golden mist. In striking contrast to this pervading colour in the landscape, the thorn trees, covered thickly by scarlet berries, stood out in vivid procession along the roadside.
Nymet Crews was one of those villages the centre of which is a level green. Around it the whitewashed cottages gathered as though for sociability, and, on the green, a loose horse and a cow or two were almost always to be seen cropping the grass. The thatch of the cottages also was transformed to gold on this day, and their drawn blinds, and the closed shutters of the little shops, gave an air of great tranquillity to the scene. Even the ducks on the pond seemed less noisy today, floating in a peaceful group on its unruffled surface. Nymet Crews had its idiot, and he, no larger than a boy of five, though he was in truth past twenty, pushed himself about on his toy velocipede, rolling his enormous goggle eyes in wonder at the unaccustomed air of the street.
It was very hot for September. When Finch reached the foot of the hill he took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his face and neck before entering the village. He was embarrassed by the groups of women who stood in doorways talking together. He felt that they were saying—“Here comes her Ladyship’s nephew. It was he that found the body... It was he that stayed with the body while the gardener fetched the doctor.”
The cobbles of the narrow pavement felt hot beneath his feet. It was easy to distinguish the cottage where Ralph’s mother lived by the knot of people standing at the door. Two women in black were hurrying across the green towards it, as though fearful of being late. He went to the door, and the group of people separated to let him pass. He saw the room crowded, the coffin standing in the midst. He could not force himself to enter. He turned hurriedly away, his face growing crimson under the gaze of those about. He turned quickly back along the street till he came to a lane where about twenty young men, friends of Ralph, were collected. They wore their Sunday clothes of navy blue serge with bowler hats or tweed caps. Their faces and hands looked hot and sunburned in this apparel. Finch joined the group, but stood a little to one side. They glanced curiously at him, then went on talking together. Talking among themselves their dialect was so strong that only a phrase now and then was intelligible to him. He made out something about a football match. Evidently they had said all there was to say about Ralph’s death, and now their thoughts turned to other things.
He had feared he would be late, but it seemed a long time that he stood there waiting. He saw his aunt come down the road and cross the common into the narrow street that led to the church. She had put on black clothes for the occasion. That was nice of her, he thought. She looked tall and dignitied and very tired, for it was the second time that day she had taken the steep dusty walk.
Soon after she disappeared in the direction of the church the bell began to toll. Nineteen solemn knells, one for each year of Ralph’s short life. Soon the funeral procession appeared from the cottage and made its way slowly along the road.
The coffin was carried by six young men, four of them Ralph’s brothers. It was stained a light oak colour and highly varnished. It must have been heavy, for the young men showed that they moved under a strain. On the top of it were wreaths of bright flowers. The idiot boy moved his velocipede on to the roadside so that he might miss nothing of the procession. Following the coffin were relatives of the dead boy. Women and young girls in black, carefully kept in drawers for occasions like this. Men, some of them quite old. One of those, Finch thought, was the grandfather. He was leading Ralph’s mother. She looked bowed down by her black and her grief, a stout thickset figure, holding a handkerchief to her eyes.
All the young men left the shelter of the lane and hurried across the cobbles to join the procession. Their heavy boots made a clumping, sinister sound to Finc
h’s ears, as he went with them. Augusta had wanted him to accompany her to the church, but he had been determined to follow behind Ralph’s body.
XIV
EDEN AND FINCH
THE STARS had never seemed to hang so low in the sky as they did that night. The various heavenly patterns which they formed stood out in burning brightness. The full moon, when it swung clear of the hills, appeared to be too large for the earth which lay flooded in its light. The earth dwindled beneath the moon, overflowing with brightness, as a green goblet held beneath the foam of a cascade. The moorside fields were almost white, and, in contrast, the intricate design of the hedges and copses was black as ebony. The silence was so deep that Finch, standing on the dew-drenched lawn, could hear the murmur of the stream beyond the orchard, the movement of sleepy birds on the bough.
Down below he could see the church tower rising out of the trees, and about it clustering the village. Down there was Ralph’s mother in her cottage. Down there was Ralph in his grave. From the tower sounded the four quarters, then slowly came eleven strokes. Soon the orange squares of the drawing-room windows were darkened.
A white figure appeared out of the park and came toward him. It was Eden. Since Mrs. Court had left he had come several times to the house. But Augusta had not asked him to bring Minny. What she was really afraid of was that if Eden once got Minny inside the house he and she would settle down for a visit. Eden had remarked more than once that he was tired of Minny’s attempts at cooking.
On the one hand Augusta felt that it was her duty to force the young couple into marriage by forbidding her house to them. On the other hand she feared the responsibility of pushing Eden into a permanent union for which he seemed by his temperament to be unfitted. Every time Eden came near her he put his arm about her long sloping waist and remarked:
“Darling Auntie, you are the only one who understands me!”
“What about Minny?” Augusta had asked once, somewhat sternly.
And he had replied: “Minny is not intellectual. She is natural. She doesn’t need to understand. But you are both intellectual and natural.”
She had looked dubious, but it was hard for her to resist him.
Now he asked:
“What are you looking so tragic about, Brother Finch?”
“Strange if I wouldn’t,” answered Finch heavily.
“You mean because of that boy who killed himself. But why feel tragic about him? Sooner be envious of him. How much better off he is than we are! He’ll never get tired. His hair will never get thin and grey or the sap dry up in his bones. He won’t see his girl turn into a sloven or a shrew, and his children turn out wrong. He’s as bright and fixed as one of those stars. Let’s choose a star for him and name it Ralph Hart.”
Finch raised his eyes to the stars. “Do you believe in life after death, Eden? Do you believe that somewhere Ralph is conscious?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps he is walking about a garden at this moment. Perhaps he is looking in his girl’s window trying to tell her how glad he is she let him out of all that.”
Finch exclaimed—“Eden, you contradict yourself! That time I tried to drown myself and you stopped me—you said that life was better than death, no matter what the suffering! You said that nothing you had ever gone through had made you desire death for a moment. Life, life, life, that was what you kept drumming into me. If everything else is gone, you said, there is always the wind on the heath.” He turned his troubled young face to Eden’s.
“I know. And I still think so. Whatever happens is best. This is a glorious tree, isn’t it, but if the next gale takes it down we shall have a better view.” He put his arm into Finch’s. “Let’s go for a walk! We haven’t had one together for a long time. Let’s be jolly glad we are alive and drink the moonlight like wine.” He tugged at Finch, laughing as though he had a joke hidden from the rest of the world.
Something magnetic in him drew Finch along. They went through a gap in the hedge, through the park, and into the meadows. An immense sweetness and purity enveloped them. Finch’s mood of melancholy left him. A wild joy in life surged through him as though it rose from the earth into his body, rained down on him from the stars.
“If there’s anything better than this,” cried Eden, “I should like to know it!” His hand slid down Finch’s arm till their fingers were linked. They strode along a winding shepherd’s path hand in hand.
Each moment brought them new delight, made them more carefree. They were flooded, as the earth was flooded by moonlight, with joy in their own bodies. They went till they reached the moor. On its shaggy vastness, among its silvered ling and bracken and gorse and heather they laughed and sang. They felt swept clean of all the grief that had ever been in them. Their bodies felt new and strong and sinless.
They threw themselves flat on the ground and stared at the moon.
“I give you back stare for stare, old moon!” shouted Eden. “I’m not afraid! I’m alive! I had rather be Eden Whiteoak than anyone on earth!”
“And I had rather be Finch!” shouted Finch. “I’m alive! I’m alive! And you, old moon, you are alive because the sun is kissing you!”
They were only on the skirts of the great waste of Dartmoor which stretched beyond, its rolling hills that climbed upward to the hoary heads of High Willhayes and Cawsand Beacon and Yes Tor. The fastness of its granite, its bogs, its dark cushions of furze turned by the moonlight to silver and amethyst. They could look back on newly thatched ricks, on the shapes of hillside fields which crept to the edge of the moor, but they felt that they had left civilisation far behind them. They felt that life must continue with them forever.
XV
AUNT AND NEPHEW
NICHOLAS AND ERNEST decided to return to Jalna while the fair weather held. They went to London, intending to spend ten days there before sailing, but the ten days became a month and they ended by making the voyage in heavy gales toward the end of October. By the time all their expenses had been paid Finch found that his present of a trip to them had been a costly one. But he did not regret it. He scarcely felt interested in the fact.
A curious numbness had descended on him since the death of Ralph Hart. After the night that he and Eden had spent on the moor he had experienced an almost hallucinated happiness for several days. It had seemed enough for him that he was alive and young. He turned from one of the primitive pleasures of life to another, savouring each as though it were the last time he was to enjoy it. He wanted to be alone in order that all his senses might have unhampered play. He shunned Eden as though fearing that the fire of his presence might shatter the clear crystal of this mood.
He had gone to church on Sunday, sitting in the high carved pew with his aunt. In the church he had felt a return of the sickness of spirit that had shaken him during the funeral service. He could scarcely make himself believe that Ralph’s coffin was not in the church. He knelt, pressing his knuckles into his eyes, trying to shut out the sight. The musty smell of the old church became the smell of a grave. He perceived the innumerable wormholes in the end of the pew and was filled with loathing. His mind turned to the thought of Ralph in his grave, and tore at it savagely like a persistent dog unearthing foulness. The hymns became howls of mourning to him. He saw, near the back of the church, all Ralph’s relations in deep black. They had come in a body as was the custom, on that first Sunday. Ralph’s mother knelt during the entire service, a bulky mourning figure, her face covered by her hands in black cotton gloves.
Nicholas had remarked to Ernest that afternoon:
“The boy seems very down in the mouth. I think he should come up to London with us. He’s really wasting his time in the country when he ought to be seeing life.”
“He’s a strange, moody boy,” Ernest had replied. “One never quite knows how he will take things. I thought he was very callous about that young gardener’s death. He scarcely spoke of it. But this morning, after service, when we passed the boy’s relations all gathered about his
grave, Finch’s face was working as though he were going to cry.”
“He ought to come up to London with us. He needs a change after the shock he had. He’s a bundle of nerves like his poor flibbertigibbet mother.” The shadow on Ernest’s face, caused by his anxiety over Finch, deepened to gloom at what he could only consider Nick’s mimicry of their mother.
But when they approached Finch on the subject of accompanying them, he said that he wanted to remain in Devon. While Augusta was flattered by his desire to remain, the thought of being entirely rid of visitors was not unpleasing to her. She was afraid, too, that if Finch stayed behind she would see more and more of Eden and Minny. It was becoming the problem of her life how to get them to remove from the lodge. But she could not definitely ask Eden to go, since he had no money to go on. Really she thought, what with two difficult elderly brothers in the house and a fidgety friend like Mrs. Court, and a moody boy, and a marriage, and a suicide, she needed a rest.
Well, what was Finch going to do? Was he going to London later? Was he going to Paris or Rome? It was usual for young men to sow a few wild oats in these places, the elderly men suggested.
Yes, he would see those places later. Just now what he wanted was to be let alone. Soon after this Nicholas and Ernest left for the return journey.
He took long walks about the countryside. The ankle he had strained at the sea was still weak, and he learnt to ease it by the carrying of a stick. Soon the figure of the tall, thin boy with the stick was familiar to all in the neighbourhood. Many a time he thought of the spaniel bitch Ralph Hart had been going to get him. He began to picture it as trotting at his heels.
Once at dusk when he was returning from a walk he was just about to enter the drive when he saw the figures of two girls in cap and apron. They had been speaking to a young man on a bicycle, and they now stood giggling together at some remark of his. Finch saw that one of them was the kitchenmaid, Ralph’s girl. He was suddenly aflame with anger at the sight of her on the roadside making free with a passing youth. Her round white face, which he had never seen in any but this dim light, was widened by a smile. He went up to her, raising his stick.
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 23
