by Rebecca West
Overhead the sky arched sharply blue over the pageant of the buoyant white clouds pressing down silence on the plains. All round lay the flat green fields, yellowish with spring, checked out by narrow ditches filled full with the shining floods of March, over which leaned honey-coloured alders and short silver willows. Red cows fed sleekly, and here and there a horse cantered in the pride of the early year. Over all lay the changing pattern of sunlight and cloud shadows. On the far horizon a little red-roofed town battlemented with poplars looked snugly on the hazy marshes. Birds scoured the skies. About the placid landscape there was a strange briskness that stirred the blood.
As Adela sat looking at the scene with the kind of strained attention youth gives to beauty, she thought discontentedly how infinitely more perfect and reasonable is the life of the land than the life of the man. The land followed a cycle, and passed with purpose through the hardship of winter, the gladness of spring, the riot of summer, and the ripe profitable return to leanness of the autumn tide. But the life of man knew no change and no law. Those that were born in the springtime of good fortune could go on, in sinfulness maybe, or fatuity, always enjoying the sunshine and the wet loveliness of the fields, without coming to any harvesting. And those who, like herself, were born in the winter of ill conditions must stay there, impotent to struggle towards the quickening sun and showers. Suddenly, as the sense of her doom struck her, she pushed away the puppy and went to the edge of the platform, and turned her face to the fields. For the rest of her life her beauty and her intelligence would be prisoned blackly in Saltgreave. The years would subdue her to the meanness and ugliness of Saltgreave, and when she came to die she would see the chimney stacks of Saltgreave’s soul against the sky. She would probably die of some mean disease such as afflicted her hideous relatives, infected by her poverty and pinching habits of life. Saltgreave was her sphere.
And, as she looked wildly over the fields, she saw that a road crossed the plains to the little town. It ran with sudden narrowings like a twisted staylace.
Somehow, this road fascinated her. It seemed the most desirable thing in the world to walk along by the bent alders in the lively winds: to become for a time a part of the joyful traffic of the plains: to reach at last the quiet streets of that little town, flooded with blue shadow and the sleepy sounds of church bells tolling and dogs barking drowsily.… To sit in the coolness of some inn and look out on the hot cobbled stones of the marketplace: to watch the pleasant, kindly folk pass in and out on their sober, leisurely occupations, to hold out a hand and grasp at their kindliness. And in the morning to go forth again to somewhere lovelier and more distant to find pleasanter and kindlier people.
For the first time in her life she felt fully the desire for the open road, that before she had only faintly experienced on clear days at the sight of distant purple moors from the high places of Saltgreave. Her cheeks flamed. Overcome by a passion quite as sharp and fiery as any lust, she turned swiftly to make her way out of the station on to that road.
She stopped dead. While she had been musing over the fields a man and woman had entered the station and now stood a few paces away. They were in riding-costume and had evidently just come from a run of the hounds: the joy of physical exercise glittered from the hard surface of their arrogance. The woman was about thirty-five and not beautiful. But if her face was blunt and sallow and heavy, one felt that her high birth and her wealth would cause bluntness and sallowness and heaviness to be proclaimed as essentials of beauty. And if her bosom was solid and square and her hips overlarge, she had retained a pantechnicon-like weight and impressiveness that did not need the aid of beauty to compel respect. And if her expression was self-consciously obtuse, it was because she disdained the vulgar weapon of intelligence. So although she turned ox-like eyes of contempt on Adela, Adela returned her gaze with reverence and admiration. This woman might be stupid, ungainly and uncomely, but she had the supreme gift, the power of being a bully at the right time and in the right way … the power that had kept her class stubbornly sitting on top of all the others in spite of their plaintive agreement that it really shouldn’t if it had any sort of a conscience at all. What it had bought for this woman! The delight she must have experienced already that day, riding some fine-blooded horse in the keen wine of the spring air, from some distant wooded place, drowsy with morning mists, into these clear plains. And this was only one day of the year, and each day had its particular delight. There must be something valuable in a class that has secured unto itself such an existence, thought Adela, driven into the worship of success by the bitterness of her own defeat.
Then it struck her that she came of the same stock. If Amy Motley was of Saltgreave, Digby Furnival was born at Ferney Manor, Ashby-à-Court, Warwickshire. And by inheritance she possessed that inconquerable sense of her own rightness and value, that arrogance of mind that had sometimes desolated her by its divergence from the slave-morality inculcated in girls’ schools. Now she gloried in it. She determined to face life with insolence. She forgot the open road. She was going on to Peartree Green to live not idly in the luxury of her aunt’s home, becoming in each moment of enjoyment more and more the blackguard.
The black-and-tan puppy nuzzled about her feet. She picked it up and hugged it, so that its pink tongue licked her cheek. Its supple sides wriggled over its own ribs: it panted with the excitement of being alive.
As she got into a carriage the man and the woman passed her again.
This time she looked at the man, a slim boy of twenty-five or so, his youth and good looks polished by the fair conditions of his being into the illusion of something precious. Their eyes met. Over his smooth face there flashed an expression of soft, casual voluptuousness. It was not discourteous, it was not evil. It was merely a shameless recognition and response to her beauty, and a comment on it.… ‘If you and I were lovers, that would be jolly, wouldn’t it?’
Adela sulked on the instant and drew back. But as the train moved on the incident soothed her as being another evidence of the immense difference between the dumb dogs of Saltgreave and these proud super-blackguards. In Saltgreave one was ashamed of one’s most decent joys, just as one was ashamed of having a baby, even though one was married. The very simplest and most innocent passions of humanity were dissembled. In sunny days one repressed the natural desire to bake like a lizard and walked on the shady side of the road. When gathered in restaurants the inhabitants of Saltgreave maintained a dignified reserve towards their food and showed as much pleasure and gratification as does a single-cylinder machine when fed with paper. Emotion was as suspect as Socialism.… But these people, these stiff-necked rulers of the earth, were too proud to be ashamed of anything. Quite frankly and charmingly this man had confessed to a passion that was never named in Saltgreave – the mere observation of which made Adela feel a moral bravo. O splendid, shameless Kings among men!
She was physically exalted by this violent change of attitude towards life when she got out at Peartree Green station. Her cousin Evelyn, waiting for her under the railway bridge, thought she looked a little mad. Her face was burnt with a faint copperish flush of excitement: a lock of her strong black hair, streaked with gold, lay across her broad brow: the cheap long coat she wore hung skimpily about her foalish length of limb. The extreme violence of her mental life showed itself outwardly in the intensity of her expression: just now she smouldered with a fierce contemplative fire. The people of Peartree Green were interested. Porters gaped: the driver of a hay-cart that was creaking over the bridge drew up his horse and glutted his eyes on the strange sight: the stationmaster’s baby on its mother’s bosom stopped howling to consider the apparition. And Adela went on standing there, looking so lean and lank and so stupidly unconscious of it all. She really didn’t look quite normal, thought Evelyn, toning down the first crude expression.
So she came forward to protect Adela by her presence. For she was quality, and the people of Peartree Green would never dare to look impertinently at anybody bel
onging to quality.
‘How do you do, dear?’ she said pleasantly, and dropped a kiss lightly on her lips.
The porters ceased to gape, the hay-cart moved again. The stationmaster’s baby was hushed.
Adela, always a little dazed by formal kisses, hesitated a minute before she expressed her real regard for Evelyn by wringing her hand. She smiled round the green banks of the railway-cutting and said emphatically, ‘How well your wild roses are coming on.’ They weren’t Evelyn’s wild roses, so she gazed at them dispassionately and answered, ‘I suppose so. Your train is late. The dog-cart’s waiting. You sent your luggage in advance, didn’t you?’
The dog-cart outside looked just like a toy with its sleek, motionless horse, the immovable groom with a highlight shining fixedly from his top hat, and the neatness and glitter of the polished wood and brass. It revived in Adela the feeling that life with Aunt Olga was half a fairy-tale and wholly a joke.
As she got into the dog-cart the groom turned round to lift aside a rug. She met his eyes and remembered him. ‘How’s that baby?’ she asked with a leaping directness.
‘There’s another now,’ he answered, ‘a boy.’ Then Evelyn got in and he cracked his whip.
The lane to Peartree Green, being a true South Hertfordshire lane, climbed a hill and ran straightly along the top of a ridge between two high grass banks sprigged with primroses and surmounted by a hedge breaking into green and here and there splashed with the foam of may-bloom. Every now and then at some sudden rise of the road one looked over the hedge at the purplish elm-tops of some other ridge. For the bland green fields sloped down to broad wet vales, and rose swellingly again to another height, topped with such a lane as this. And on the other side they sank again and rose again, and so on. So that to left and right ridges rose one above the other, each one dimmer and bluer than the last, till they melted into the haven of the horizon.
Adela liked driving through this quiet country that always looked as if it was prepared for a garden-party with Evelyn. Evelyn fitted into it so swell, as was only natural: for she was an aristocrat, one of those who had ordered the countryside from the dawn of Society. For on her father’s side she was a Furnival, and the Lorikoffs, her mother’s people, were, in spite of their Russian name, of the blood of many noble families. And Evelyn was an aristocratic type. She was an undismayed twenty-nine, not beautiful, but good to look upon and eminently ‘right’. Her fairness was quite unradiant, but gave the impression that she was cool like the inside of a rose. There was no beauty about her thin figure itself, for the waist was thick and her hips were too flat, but she looked immensely strong and moved slowly with a deliberate grace. Her face disdained expression, but about her there was a suggestion of reserved force and self-control that often made Adela, with her obsession of shyness and her sudden grasps at emotion, feel a fool.
After a long silence Evelyn asked: ‘How’s Aunt Amy?’ She was so determined not to put herself out for anybody that she did not open her mouth when she spoke, so that her voice drawled through her teeth.
Adela winced. She was aware from the intonation that she should have asked at once how Aunt Olga was. She didn’t see why. She was quite certain that Aunt Olga was all right. No one could imagine the lady – who weighed twelve stone and ate everything she liked and rode to hounds – being anything else. Nevertheless she felt guilty. ‘Oh, very well – how’s Aunt Olga?’ she stammered, hating herself for showing so plainly that she had felt the rebuke.
‘Has had a touch of bronchitis. Went out to the Stitchington meet when she hadn’t really got over a cold in her chest. Came home a wreck.’
‘I am sorry.’ She forced concern into her voice.
‘She’s all right again, however.’
Then there fell another silence.
‘Been doing well at school?’
‘Fairly well. I won the Science Scholarship. But of course I can’t use it.’
‘That’s a pity. It would have been such a nice start for you. I mean, one makes such nice friends. Was it Girton or Newnham?’
In Adela’s most fatuous moments she had never thought of the University as a place where one went to make friends. She felt her flesh creep.
‘No, nowhere like that. I could have gone with it either to Liverpool or Manchester (that’s Victoria University) or Leeds.’
‘Oh. Then it doesn’t matter so much, does it? They’re quite new places, aren’t they?’
‘They have the loveliest laboratories,’ said Adela passionately. A stray sentimentalist passing by would have said that her eyes were the eyes of a childless woman yearning for a babe. But really she was looking down the vista of a laboratory, looking lovingly at the light shining back from the glass jars and the scales, watching enviously the quiet figures of those who were privileged to work there.
‘Yes, but it isn’t that sort of thing that lasts, is it? I mean, at Girton and Newnham there’s an atmosphere.’
‘I wouldn’t waste my money going to an atmosphere. I want to study Science,’ snapped Adela, her eyes filling with fierce tears. The next moment she thought: ‘I mustn’t be cross. Hang it all, I am her guest,’ and looked nervously at her. But evidently Evelyn hadn’t noticed, for her clear brows were serene. How could she be so obtuse about the thirst for knowledge? It was the only passion Adela knew and to her it was as sacred as religion, they say, is to some people. She pushed back the suspicion that Evelyn was stupid, in view of the conception of aristocracy she had formed that morning, for she was young enough to keep to her conceptions for twenty-four hours together. Of course there were so many physical and social delights at Evelyn’s command that it would have been sheer greed in her to lust after knowledge.
‘Mother and I have talked very seriously over your prospects for the last month or so,’ said Evelyn impressively. ‘And we came to a definite conclusion last night.’
‘I don’t see how you could do that!’ exclaimed Adela blankly. ‘I didn’t know myself that I couldn’t use my scholarship till yesterday evening.’ She was Adela Furnival, prizeman of the Mary Patience Grammar School (established 1725), and seventeen years and three months, and she objected very strongly to anybody discussing such an important subject as herself without consulting her. She compressed her lips and prepared to speak shrewishly. Then she leapt to her feet and looked around with ecstasy. ‘Oh, Evelyn, do let’s get out and walk.’
They had left the lane. Peartree Green lay to their left, thrown down on the hilltop like a crumpled handkerchief, rucked up into absurd little hillocks, crossed by deep folds from whose velvet-green depths there flashed the lights of scattered waters. It was sundered in two by a wide avenue of age-old elms, whose green treetops sang slowly in the wind. To the left a billow of orchard blossom raised its snowy crest above a sun-soaked red brick wall and seemed about to break, but always the light breezes beat it back. Facing this across the Green was the village inn, with its balcony blazing with jolly red geraniums, and a great swinging yellow sign of the rising sun, neighboured by an ivy-clad house in whose sleek garden a curate mowed the lawn. Next to it noble Scotch firs guarded the yellow stone front of some great house. And far, far down the straggling of the Green there stood the pear tree that, they said, had given it its name, a whirling pillar of light in the quivering radiance of the sun. It caught the eyes and gave so bold a proclamation of the wonder of the world that the blood leapt in Adela’s veins and she laughed in sheer excitement.
‘Very well, we’ll walk,’ said Evelyn indulgently. So they got down and Adela ran up on to the springing turf. She wished she had that black-and-tan puppy to play with now, and reproached herself because she had not given it all the caresses it had asked for when she had had it. Running on a few paces before Evelyn, she walked down the avenue with her head bent back so that she could see the pattern the branches stamped out against the sky. She turned round to cry out on the beauty of the day, and saw on her cousin’s face a gentle smile – the kind of smile a voluntary helper would bestow
on a Bethnal Green infant enjoying the benefits of the Fresh Air Fund.
She smarted horribly. But the sight of the shining pear tree reminded her that she was right, and she refused to feel snubbed. ‘Oh, Evelyn, you are a callous brute!’ she cried.
‘I dare say it is a change after Saltgreave,’ said Evelyn. ‘I can’t think why you didn’t settle down at a place like this instead of going to that abominable place.’ She spoke with an air of pained and amused common sense.
‘I couldn’t have got any Education!’ exclaimed Adela.
Evelyn’s tone changed to one of pained and amused ‘niceness’. ‘Perhaps not. But it would have been nicer for your mother, wouldn’t it?’
‘And how in the wise world could Mother have made money by typewriting in a hole like this!’
‘Oh,’ said Evelyn. ‘She wouldn’t have needed to. You can live on very little here. I believe you can get quite a nice cottage in the village for half a crown a week.’
‘Indeed you can’t,’ declared Adela.
‘My dear, how can you tell? Rents are very different –’
‘I’ve read it dozens of times in Fabian tracts and things. And anyway there aren’t half enough cottages – you told me yourself about the overcrowding –’
‘Oh, but I think that is just their lack of fastidiousness –’
Adela wanted to respect Evelyn and did not want to think she was stupid. So she pretended she had not heard it. ‘So there aren’t any to let. And anyway, in such a snobby place as this it wouldn’t have done for you to have pauper relatives herding in a tiny cottage down the village, would it?’
‘I only meant somewhere like this,’ said Evelyn tranquilly. ‘Not here, of course. It wouldn’t do.’
Adela stopped dead. She wanted to strike Evelyn across the mouth and call her out to a duel with pistols. The implication, blandly delivered in that lazy voice, was that Amy and Adela really ought to huddle their poverty and squalid circumstance out of the way of the delicate into the darkest corner they could find. It was insolent and silly: no one had the right to despise them for their war against penury. Yet this insolence and silliness had the power to strip her of every quality. She felt ugly and sordid and uncouth: she stumbled as she walked. Her passion seemed insurgent yet mean, like a beaten lackey’s.
