South Riding

by Winifred Holtby

  “No,” said Sarah.

  “Not yet, eh? Oh, well, Mr. Right’ll come along some day. You’re not all that old, are you? Jennie’s partner’s Lyd Holly. Madame Hubbard takes her free because she’s a natural acrobat. She’s going to High School next term. A real clever girl. Ought to have been three years back, but her poor ma was always expecting and Holly’s not all that. D’you like aniseed?”

  Sarah found a sticky bag thrust upon her.

  “Go on. Good for the digestion. I always get two penn’orth every Friday, qualifying for the Christmas Club at Bosworth’s. Good-evening, Mrs. Pinker. Eeh, your little Gracie, she’s a born dancer.” She turned back to Sarah. “Got a floating kidney and her Gracie’s a bit feeble, but Madame Hubbard’s brought her on wonderful with the dancing. Any amount of patience. Have an aniseed ball, love. A1 for flatulence.”

  “But I haven’t got flatulence,” cried Sarah into a horrid silence caused by the parting of the curtains, revealing a flower-tableau woefully marred by the presence of a small dusty gentleman who clutched tenaciously at the gilded chair on which the Première Danseuse, dressed as a butterfly, precariously balanced.

  “That’ll be Mr. Hubbard again,” observed Sarah’s neighbour happily. “Last concert he wanted to come on and play the triangle. Wouldn’t be shifted, so she just had to let him. He sat in the front and held his triangle all through. Gentle as a babe once he has his way. But she doesn’t really like it.”

  “I suppose not,” agreed Sarah, fascinated by the spectacle of the entire company endeavouring heroically to ignore the wrestling match taking place between Madame Hubbard and her stage-struck husband.

  It occurred to Sarah that the songs about drunken homecomers and bullying wives which she had found so gross dealt after all with commonplaces in the lives of these young singers. Was it not perhaps more wholesome to be taught to laugh at them by the Hubbard method than to turn them into such a tragedy as her father’s habits had seemed to her mother’s ambitious, anxious, serious mind? Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene—(“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”), about child-birth and deformity and deafness—were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?

  But Madame Hubbard was winning. Suddenly retreating to the wings she called in a deep stentorian voice, “Time Gentlemen, Time!” and Mr. Hubbard, slowly detaching himself from the ballet, lurched off grumbling quietly into the wings.

  Madame Hubbard hurled herself at the piano. The chorus, stimulated to even greater efforts by this alluring interlude, embarked upon the plaintive query:

  “Have you heard the tale of Love-in-a-Mist?

  (Love in a mist might lie!)

  Have you heard of the fairy who’d never been kissed?

  (Love in a mist knows why.)”

  Sarah had passed beyond judgment and beyond criticism.

  She watched a Gipsy Ballet, a Fairy Ballet. She heard Gladys Hubbard sing “Lily of Laguna.” She watched Lydia Holly romp with noisy and cheerful athleticism through a Dutch Doll Dance.

  She endured until the end. But the end surprised her.

  The curtains were down. The conductor, cornet in hand, rallied his men. “Grand Patriotic Finale,” announced the programme.

  The Kiplington Memorial Subscription Band crashed into the smashing affirmation of “Land of Hope and Glory” as only a local brass band well plied with beer and enthusiasm in a too small room can play it. The curtains parted. On to the stage marched the Highly Talented Pupils dressed in costumes intended to represent the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Nursing Services. As the tune changed, Gladys Hubbard, a flirtatious and unorthodox V.A.D., tripped forward to sing:

  “On Sunday, I walk out with a soldier.”

  while the obedient babies trotted round her to take their places as soldier, sailor, Boy Scout and other escorts. Again their serenity and beauty affected Sarah irrationally, but this time another emotion also was besieging her.

  Like many women of her generation, she could not listen unmoved to the familiar tunes which circumstance had associated with intolerable memory.

  “If you were the only girl in the world,” sang Madame Gordon, and Sarah bit her lip remembering a last leave and a matinée of The Bing Boys.

  “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” sang Jeanette Marsh, and the inappropriate tears pricked Sarah’s hot eyes.

  “There’s a long, long trail,” wailed the chorus, and Sarah wanted to run away.

  For though, apart from the death of young Roy Carbery, she had suffered less from the war than many women, seen less of it, remained less keenly conscious of its long-drawn catastrophe, the further it receded into the past, the less bearable its memory became. With increasing awareness every year she realised what it had meant of horror, desperation, anxiety, and loss to her generation. She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence. Ten million men, she told herself, who should now have been between forty and fifty-five—our scientists, our rulers, our philosophers, the foremen in our workshops, the head masters in our schools, were mud and dust, and the world did ill without them.

  She was haunted by the menace of another war. Constantly, when she least expected it, that spectre threatened her, undermining her confidence in her work, her faith, her future. A joke, a picture, a tune, could trap her into a blinding waste of misery and helplessness.

  She gazed through burning eyes at the medley of khaki, blue and scarlet. The first notes of “Tipperary” shook her into sick despair. She no longer disliked the precocious unpleasant children. She no longer resented the perverse efficiency of Madame Hubbard. She only felt it intolerable that the greed and arrogance and intellectual lethargy, the departmental pride and wanton folly of an adult world, should endanger those unsuspecting children.

  The helpless tender charm of the smallest singers wrung her heart. She longed, to save and to redeem them, no longer from the nauseating inadequacy of the well-intentioned Hubbards, but from the splintering shrapnel, the fog of poison gas.

  The passion of all crusaders, missionaries and saviours tore her soul.

  For to hear them singing, as jolly dancing tunes, the songs so pregnant with association; to see them marching, drilling, obeying the barked commands, “Form Fours I Salute!” as though these motions, these melodies meant no more to them than the gipsy ballet and the flower chorus; to watch their youth and silly innocence aping that which had meant anguish of apprehension and pain and panic—all this was too much for her. She could not bear it. She could not bear it for them. What she herself had been through, what still confronted her, were matters between her and her own conscience. But for them, these silly children . . .

  In the darkened, stifling, stamping, shouting, audience, Sarah dropped her head into her hands and wept shamelessly.

  She became aware of some one patting her knee, of a motherly voice saying below the din:

  “There, there. It’s all right, love.”

  “I know.” She fumbled for her handkerchief. “It’s nothing. I’ve no right . . .”

  “It takes you like that sometimes. I know. I lost my man.”

  The first notes of God Save the King swept them to their feet. Sarah and Mrs. Marsh stood up together. Mrs. Marsh knew that Sarah suffered from unaccountable weaknesses. Sarah knew that Mrs. Marsh suffered from unaccountable weaknesses. Sarah knew that Mrs. Marsh’s “man” was not her present husband.

  They had shared an experience.

  Book Two

  HIGHWAYS AND BRIDGES

  “3. The Ministry of Transport have intimated that they will make a grant of 60 per cent of the cost of constructing the new road from Skerrow to Kiplington, and instructions have therefore been given for the work to proceed.”

  Extract from the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Highways and

  Bridges Committee of the South Riding County Council. County
/>   Hall, Flintonbridge. November 1932.

  1

  Councillor Carne Misses a Sub-Committee

  ONE NOVEMBER morning, hounds were to meet at Garfield Cross and the day promised good sport. As Hicks trotted to the meet on the little bay mare he was schooling for sale next spring, behind Carne’s heavyweight Black Hussar, he sniffed with satisfaction. The morning was moist and warm yet fogless, the air fragrant with burning wicks, damp earth and horses. An untidy litter of rooks, like smuts from a giant chimney, blew across the grey sky. On Turnbull’s land the wheat already stood three inches high. Robins and tits sang in the rusty tangle of brambles. The mare danced merrily.

  “Bucking a bit?” asked Carne.

  “Wick as a kitten,” grinned the groom. “She’ll be all right when we’ve taken the tickle out of her feet. Easy, my lass.”

  Carne eyed her affectionately. “I could get a hundred and fifty for her if she does anything like she should in the Rimsey Point to Point.”

  Hicks frowned. This preoccupation with money jarred on him. He was a sportsman. Horses were bred for pleasure. It was alien to Carne’s nature to regard them as so many potential pounds, shillings and pence. Hicks had never considered his own wages inadequate, but he hated to feel his employer short of money.

  “Shouldn’t be surprised if we draw the Wastes first,” he ran on, trying to banish from his mind the thought that times had changed, that Carne, who made so handsome and proper a figure in his pink on the well-groomed horse, was no longer a gentleman out to enjoy himself, but a salesman exhibiting merchandise. “Leckton told me last month they threw in sixteen and a half couple of hounds and couldn’t see a dog. Lost in thistles and willow herb—but lousy with foxes.”

  Carne did not answer.

  It’s that damned letter from Harrogate, thought Hicks.

  He met the postman, read postmarks and postcards, and kept an anxious, paternal eye on his master’s business. He knew all too well the discreet blue typewritten envelopes from the nursing home, or the sprawling uneven hand, tilted towards the top right-hand corner, which was his mistress’s. They let her write once a month, poor devil, but lately her letters had not appeared.

  Hicks wondered if she had changed much. He could see her now as she was when she first came to the South Riding— a slim pale girl with wild brown eyes on a raking chestnut. She had been staying with the Lawrences. Mrs. Lawrence was laid up with a broken collar-bone and Mr. Rupert hunting his own hounds that day. “Miss Sedgmire comes from the West Country,” Hicks had heard him saying to Carne. “I want you to look after her for me. Give her a lead. She’s not used to our drains yet.”

  After that, thought Hicks, it was she who’d led Carne. And what a dance she’d led him, not only across country but across Europe. Baden-Baden, Cannes, San Remo—seeking cures for her “nerves.” She never had nerves in the hunting season. It was the War that finished her. Not getting abroad and not able to hunt when her child was coming. Aye. That was it. If she’d been able to ride in the winter of ’17 and ’18, she wouldn’t be put away where she was now, poor lady—costing all that money and forcing Carne to sell his horses.

  Hicks could remember how she walked up and down the dripping avenues at Maythorpe, fretting her heart out. “They won’t let me ride any more, Hicks,” she used to complain, her eyes puzzled and bright as a startled hare’s. Then she’d order the horse and trap and drive to the station and be off away to York or Doncaster or Newmarket—looking for race meetings that had never been billed.

  Aye. It was a queer job for Carne. Pity the old man was gone. He might have helped him. Mr. William was no manner of use except to find the Home when she had to be put away.

  Carne had had to go back to France before the baby arrived. He’d come out one day and stood in the stable-yard, a big fine chap in his uniform, but awkward and unhappy—and no wonder. “If Mrs. Carne orders you to get the trap ready, Hicks, don’t do it. Make some excuse. Say the mare’s lame or the shaft’s cracked. Lame the mare—crack the shaft if necessary. But don’t let her go. Doctor’s orders. Understand, eh?” He knew she was queer then, and he had to go off and leave her alone to the care of grooms and servants.

  It wasn’t right, thought Hicks. And it wasn’t right for her own folk to have cast her off like that. As if the Carnes of Maythorpe weren’t good enough even for a baron’s daughter. They must have known she was a bit queer from the beginning. The wild Sedgmires. But she could ride. By God, she could ride. A clinker across country. Pity Midge never took to it.

  The village street was crowded. Every one was making for the Cross—the butcher’s boy in his blue coat on a bicycle, the clergyman’s daughters trotting in their governess car, old Mr. Coster, nearly blind, on a white pony, pedestrians with walking-sticks, motorists, cyclists, hurrying between the raw red cottages, where women with babies in their arms leaned from the doorways.

  “Hounds arrived yet?” Carne asked an old labourer, grinning through his whiskers and clutching a thorn stick in knotted hands.

  “Aye. Yessir. Just gone through.”

  There they were—moving and whimpering round the white war memorial.

  The Master spoke to Carne.

  “Thought it was going to be frost. Said so last night on the damned wireless.”

  “Never listen to the things,” said Carne. “Don’t believe in ’em.”

  “You’re right. You’re dead right. Been to the Wastes this season?”

  “No, but my groom says it’s lousy with foxes.”

  “Good man.”

  Carne and the Master both grinned at Hicks. Hicks grinned back. Now he was happy. Here even Carne was happy. This was the life—this was the life undoubtedly. Farmers, county, villagers, yes, and even townsfolk, all drawn together by one common interest. And then some fools said fox-hunting was immoral.

  Hicks reined the little mare aside. Aye, she was bonny. He didn’t approve of this salesmanship-in-the-field business, but she was a beauty—a rare little bloodstock. By Romeo II out of Galway Girl. Hicks liked a touch of Irish in a horse.

  There was Alderman Mrs. Beddows driven up in her shabby car by Miss Sybil. A nice girl. Hicks approved of Sybil Beddows.

  “Coming to Highways and Bridges this afternoon?” Mrs. Beddows asked Carne. He often hunted all morning, left his horse with Hicks, and caught a train from the nearest station to a committee at Flintonbridge. He had gone there once with two broken ribs and a bang on the head fit to knock out three other men.

  “I’m coming if we land up anywhere within reason.”

  “Anything I can do for you if you don’t get?” she twinkled.

  “We-ell.” His horse moved impatiently beside the car. “They won’t get to that new Skerrow road business, I don’t suppose.”

  “Can’t tell. Any orders?”

  “Stamp on it. Nonsense. Waste of money. We’ve got the whole place splintered with motor roads now—can’t keep a horse on its feet. Hopeless for farmers.”

  “I can’t say I feel all that about it. The new road might benefit us a good deal at Kiplington.”

  “More trippers. Come up!”

  The big horse pulled at the curb.

  “Have you been to see Miss Burton yet?”

  Carne shook his head.

  “Well—you really are——! First you make all that fuss about the High School not being good enough for Midge. Then you can’t even bother to go and call on her head mistress.”

  Mrs. Beddows teased, but her heart melted towards him. She loved to see him thus, superb in his pink, on his great black horse, standing beside her shabby car, talking to her, though half the county was present and ready to greet him. Flattered and charmed, she rallied him.

  But hounds began to move off along the chalk road to Leame Ferry Waste, and Carne, waving good-bye to the Beddows, joined the jolting, tittirruping, creaking, plunging field. His eye was on the little bay mare, his mind absorbed by her. To him she meant both gracefully perfect horseflesh and the hundred and f
ifty pounds which would pay nearly four months of Muriel’s expenses. The ten guineas a week charged by the Laurels nagged at his mind, haunted his dreams, sat, like indigestion, upon his chest all day. Even the joy of riding towards a covert on a moist November morning was robbed of flavour.

  He was losing now steadily on the farm—had been losing since 1929—not much at first, but each year increasingly. He was cutting into capital; he had a heavy overdraft and a mortgage on the estate. Another year like last and he would be ruined.

  He liked the matron at the Laurels Nursing Home; but he knew the charges, fixed by her employers, to be inordinately high. Yet he dared not refuse one of the extras they demanded. He carried too vividly in his mind the memory of Muriel, crying, as she had cried that time he found her in Doncaster, standing wide-eyed and tense in the hotel bedroom. “Don’t let me down, Robin, promise! Promise! They’ve all failed me. Promise me you’ll stand by me, always, always!”

  He had promised, and he had kept his promise. He had mortgaged Maythorpe, stinted Midge’s education, strained his overdraft, jeopardised the living, the sane, the active, in order that Muriel might be kept in comfort. A phantom rode with him to hounds, sat with him at table, shared with him his bed, a voice accused him, “You ride. You hunt. You take your pleasures, while I am for ever cut off from life and freedom. I am here, trapped in a living grave. Because I violated my own instincts and traditions; I married you; I bore your daughter; I am doomed and damned eternally.”

  North of Garfield the South Riding no longer lies dead flat and striped with ditches. Tall hedges cut the round contours of undulating hills. The fields lie eighty and sixty acres broad, winter wheat, ploughed land, beautiful hunting country. If the fox got away North-East of the Wastes, he might give them a clinking run clear to the sea.

  A familiar and lovely noise broke the tension of waiting. It had happened.