Ross Poldark

by Winston Graham

  “So now you wear my mother's clothes!”

  She stammered: “You never told me that. You told me that I mustn’t drink, an’ I’ve never touched nothing since. You never told me not to touch the clo’es!”

  “I tell you now. Go and take those things off.”

  It couldn’t have been worse. But in the depths of horror and despair one comes to a new steadiness. There is no farther to fall. She moved a foot or two into the yellow gleam of the candlelight.

  “Well, don’t you like it?”

  He stared at her again. “I’ve told you what I think.”

  She came to the end of the table, and the moth fluttered past the candles and across the blue of her dress and pattered its reckless wings against the cupboard by the wall.

  “Can I not… sit and talk for a while?”

  Astounding the change. The hair combed up gave her face an altered, a more oval shape. Her youthful features were cleancut and wholesome, her look was adult. He felt like someone who had adopted a tiger cub without knowing what it would grow into. The imp of a sturdy disrespect for his own position tempted him to laugh.

  But the incident wasn’t funny. If it had been, he would have laughed with a clear mind. He didn’t know why it wasn’t funny.

  He said in a withdrawn voice: “You came here as a maid and have been a good one. For that you’ve been allowed certain liberties. But the liberty of dressing yourself in those things is not one of them.”

  The chair on which he had been sitting at the table was still half out, and she subsided on the edge of it. She smiled nervously, but with more brilliance than she thought.

  “Please, Ross, can’t I stay? No one’ll ever know. Please—” Words bubbled to her lips, overflowed in a whisper. “I aren’t doing no ’arm. ’Tis no more’n I’ve done many and many an evening before. I didn’t mean no ’arm putting on these clothes. They was rotting away in the old tin box. It d’ seem a shame to leave all they pretty things there rotting away. I only meant it to please you. I thought you’d maybe like it. If I stay ’ere now till tis time to go—”

  He said: “Get off to bed at once and we’ll say no more of it.”

  “I’m seventeen,” she said mutinously. “I been seventeen for weeks. Are ee always going to treat me like a child? I’ll not be treated like a child! I’m a woman now. Can I not please myself when I d’ go to bed?”

  “You can’t please yourself how you behave.”

  “I thought you liked me.”

  “So I do. But not to let you rule the house.”

  “I don’t want to rule the house, Ross. I only want to sit here and talk to you. I’ve only old clo’es to work in. This is so—to have somethin’ like this on—”

  “Do as I say, or you’ll go home to your father in the morning.”

  From the first desperately shy beginning she had succeeded in working up a feeling of grievance against him; for the moment she really believed that the issue was whether she should be given certain privileges.

  “Well then,” she said, “turn me out! Turn me out tonight. I don’t care. Hit me if you want to. Like Father used to. I’ll get drunk an’ shout the house down, an’ then you’ll have good reason!”

  She turned and picked up his glass from the table. She poured out some brandy and took a gulp of it. Then she waited to see what effect it would have on him.

  He quickly leaned forward and picked up the wooden poker and rapped her sharply across the knuckles with it, so that the glass broke and spilled its contents down the disputed frock.

  For a moment she looked more surprised than hurt, then she put her knuckles into her mouth. The mature and defiant seventeen became a desolate and unfairly rebuked child. She stared down at the frock where the brandy was soaking through the skirt. Tears came into her eyes, beading upon her thick dark lashes till she blinked them away, beading again and trembling at the rim without falling. Her attempt at coquetry had been a painful failure, but nature was coming to her help.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  He didn’t know why he had spoken or why he should apologize for a just and necessary rebuke. Quicksands had moved under his feet.

  “The frock,” she said. “You shouldn’t ’ve spoiled the frock. It was that pretty. I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll go as soon as the light comes.”

  She got up from the chair, tried to say something more, then suddenly was kneeling by his chair, her head on his knees, sobbing.

  He looked down at her, at the head with its tumble of dark hair beginning to come awry, at the gleam of her neck. He touched her hair with its light and dark shadows.

  “You little—” he said. “Stay on if you want to.”

  She tried to dry her eyes but they kept filling up again. For the first time then he put his hands on her, lifted her up. Yesterday the contact would have meant nothing. Without direct intention she came to be sitting on his knee.

  “Here.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Then he kissed her on the cheek and patted her arm, trying to feel the act as a paternal one. His authority was gone.

  That didn’t matter.

  “I like that,” she said.

  “Maybe. Now go you off and forget this ever happened.”

  She sighed and swallowed. “My legs are wet.” She pulled up the front of the pink petticoat and began to wipe her knee.

  He said angrily: “You know what people say of you, Demelza?”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “If you act like this, what they say of you will become true.”

  She looked at him, candidly this time, without coquetry and without fear.

  “I live only for you, Ross.”

  A breeze lifted the curtain at one of the open windows. The birds outside were quiet at last and it was dark. He kissed her again, this time on the mouth. She smiled unsteadily through the remnants of her tears, and the candlelight lent a cream-gold charm to her skin.

  Then by some mischance she put up a hand to push back her hair and the gesture reminded him of his mother.

  He got up, lifting her to her feet so sharply that she almost fell, went to the window, stood with his back to her.

  It was not the gesture but the frock. Perhaps the smell of it: something that brought up to him the taste, the flavours of yesterday. His mother had lived and breathed in that frock, in this room, in that chair. Her spirit moved and quickened between them.

  Ghosts and phantoms of another life.

  “What's to do?” she asked.

  He turned. She was standing at the table, holding to it, the broken glass at her feet. He tried to remember her as a thin little urchin trailing across the fields with Garrick behind her. But that was no use at all. The urchin was gone forever. It was not beauty she had grown overnight but the appeal of youth, which was beauty in its own right.

  “Demelza,” he said, and even her name was strange. “I didn’t take you from your father—for—to—”

  “What do it matter what you took me for?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “Get out. Get out.”

  He felt the need to soften what he had said, the need to explain. But the slightest movement on his part would throw restraint away.

  He stared at her and she did not speak. Perhaps she was silently admitting defeat, but he didn’t know, he couldn’t read her. Her eyes were the eyes of a stranger who had usurped familiar ground. They stared at him with a challenge grown hostile and hurt.

  He said: “I am going to bed now. You also go to bed and try to understand.”

  He picked up one of the candles, blew out the others in that sconce. He glanced at her briefly, forced a half smile.

  “Good night, my dear.”

  Still she did not speak or move. When the door closed behind him, then at last in the silent room with only the frustrated moth for company she turned and picked up a candle for herself and one by one began to blow out the others he had left.

  3

  In his
bedroom he was beset by a wave of cynicism of quite surprising violence. What sort of a monk and anchorite was he becoming? Shades of his own father seemed to rise and whisper, “Young prude!”

  Heaven! he said to himself. What moral code had he drawn for himself that he had to obey these nice distinctions? You could fritter away a whole youth tracing the petty differences between one moral obligation and another. Slender refined Elizabeth, gaunt lascivious Margaret, Demelza with her flowering maidenhood. A passion ate child rolling in the dust with her ugly dog; a girl driving oxen; a woman… Did anything else matter? He owed no one anything; certainly not Elizabeth. She was nothing any longer to him. This was no blind seeking after sensation in order to drown a hurt, as it had been on the night of the ball. God, he had never been so drunk on so little brandy before. That old stiff silk dress, part of an older love…

  He sat on the bed uncertainly and tried to think. He tried to think over the incidents of the day. The beginning was frustration and the end was frustration. “Frankly, Mr. Poldark, I am inclined to agree with my friend, Dr. Halse. It is no doubt very unfortunate that the prisoner is suffering from this disability—” Who but a dolt would have expected the magistrates to do anything but agree with each other. “Must back each other up, esprit de carps, good of the community, good of the class.” That was what he had ignored. One did not stand up in a witness box and argue against one's own class in public, let alone harangue them in front of a crowd of court idlers. It wasn’t done. Well, he had his own standards of behaviour, though no one gave him credit for them. It was nothing out-of-the-way for the younger gentry of the neighbourhood to tumble their kitchenmaids. They didn’t kidnap them when they were under age, that was all. Well, she was of age now, age enough to know her own mind and sense enough to read his before he knew it himself. What was the matter with him? No sense of humour to leaven life? Must every act be dead serious, a weight upon his head and hands? Loving was a recreation; all the poets sang of its lightness, its levity; only the dull clod raised barriers of creed or conscience.

  There was no air tonight. The temperature didn’t often keep up after dusk.

  At least he had in some way earned the increased gratitude of Jinny. These years would seem even longer for her than for Jim. Would he see them through? “Quite the sentimental fool. Quite the renegade. Mixing with the Indians and fighting against the whites. Traitor to one's own station in life…” “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty…” “Beauty is but a flower which wrinkles will devour…”

  “Upsetting himself about some farm labourer with a bad cough. Rather unbalanced, one supposes. After all, one has to accept the rough with the smooth. Last year when my prize mare took the blood poisoning…”

  “Every wise man's son doth know.”

  He got up and went to the north window to see if it was open. The sophistries of the poets. Tonight he could see nothing straight. Were sweet singers the best counsellors? Yes, the window was wide open. He pulled back the curtain and stared out. In twenty-seven years he had worked out some sort of a philosophy of behaviour; did one throw it over at the first test? There was a tap on the door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  He turned. It was Demelza, carrying a candle. She did not speak. The door swung to behind her. She hadn’t changed and her eyes were like lamps.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “This frock.”

  “Well?”

  “The bodice unfastens down the back.”

  “Well?”

  “I can’t reach the hooks.”

  He frowned at her a moment.

  She came slowly up to him, turned, set the candle clumsily upon a table. “I’m sorry.”

  He began to undo the dress. She felt his breath on her neck.

  There was still one scar of those he had seen on the way home from Redruth Fair.

  His hands touched the cool skin of her back. Abruptly they slipped inside her frock and closed about her waist. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and he kissed her until the room went dark before her eyes.

  But now at this last moment when all was won she had to confess her deceit. She couldn’t die unshriven.

  “I lied,” she whispered, crying again. “I lied about the hooks. Oh, Ross, don’t take me if you h-hate me. I lied… I lied—”

  He said nothing, for now nothing counted, not lies nor poets nor principles nor any reservations of mind or heart.

  He released her and lit another candle.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHE WOKE AT DAWN. SHE YAWNED, AT FIRST NOT AWARE OF THE CHANGE. THEN she saw that the rafters overhead ran a different way…

  The pipe and the silver snuffbox on the mantelshelf, the oval mildewed mirror above it. His bedroom. She turned and stared at the man's head with its copper-dark hair on the pillow.

  She lay quite still with closed eyes while her mind went over all that had happened in this room, and only her breathing coming quick and painful showed she was not asleep.

  The birds were waking. Another warm still day. Under the eaves the finches made liquid sounds like water dripping in a pool.

  She slid quietly to the edge of the bed and slipped out, afraid of waking him. At the window she stared across the outhouses to the sea. Tide was nearly full. Mist lay in a grey scarf along the line of the cliffs. The incoming waves scrawled dark furrows in the silver-grey sea.

  Her frock—that frock—lay in a heap on the floor. She snatched it up and wrapped it round her, as if by so doing she hid from herself. On tiptoe across to her own bed room. She dressed while the square of the window slowly lightened.

  No stirrings in the house. She was always the first abroad, had often been to the end of the valley for flowers before Jud and Prudie grumblingly saw the light. Today she must be out of the house first.

  Barefoot down the short shallow stairs and across the hall. She opened the front door. Behind the house might be the old grey sea; but in the valley was all the warmth and fragrance which the land had stored up during the short summer night. She stepped out and the warm air met her. She filled her lungs with it. In odd parts of the sky clouds lay thin and streaky, motionless and abandoned as by the sweeping of a careless broom.

  The damp grass was not cold to her bare feet. She walked across the garden to the stream, sat on the wooden footbridge with her back to the rail and dipped her toes in the trickle of water. The hawthorn trees growing along its banks were in bloom, but the blossom had lost its whiteness, was turning pink and falling, so that the stream was full of drifting tiny petals like the remnants of a wedding.

  In her loins and in her back there was pain; but the frightening recollections of the night were fading before the remembrance of its triumphs. She had no twinges of conscience as to the way she had gained that end, for to live and fulfill the purpose of life seemed to absolve all. Yesterday it couldn’t happen. Today it had happened. Nothing could touch that; nothing.

  In a few minutes the sun would be up, lighting the ridge of the valley behind which a few short hours ago it had set. She drew up her legs, sat a moment on the bridge, then knelt, scooped up the water in her hands and bathed her face and neck. Then she stood up and in a sudden excess of feeling hopped and skipped across to the apple tree. A thrush and a blackbird were competing from neighbouring branches. Under the trees some leaves touched her hair, sprinkling her ear and neck with dew. She knelt and began to pick a few of the bluebells which made a hazy carpet under the trees. But she had taken no more than a dozen when she gave it up and sat against a lichened tree, her head back, the thin juicy stems of the bluebells clutched to her breast.

  She sat so still, her neck curved in lassitude, her skirts drawn up, her bare legs in sensuous contact with the grass and the leaves, that a chaffinch hopped down and began its “pink-pink” cry beside her hand. Her throat ached to join in, but she knew she would only croak.

  A big fly came down also and settled on a leaf close to her face; he had two round brown knobs on his head a
nd at this range looked enormous, a prehistoric animal which had roamed the jungles of a forgotten world. First he stood on four front legs and rubbed the two back ones with sinuous ease up and down his wings; then he stood on the four back and rubbed the two front ones like an obsequious shopkeeper. “Buzz, buzz!” said Demelza. He went with a sudden hum but was back again in the same position almost at once, this time rubbing his head as if over a wash tub.

  A spider's web was outlined in fine beads of moisture above her head. The blackbird which was singing stopped his song, balanced a moment with a tail like a lady's fan, flew away. Two last petals of pink-brown apple blossom, disturbed by the movement, floated indolently to earth. The finch began to peck at one of them.

  She put out her hand and made an encouraging sound, but he wouldn’t be deceived and fluttered sidelong to a safer distance. In the fields a cow lowed. There was still that about the early hour which set it apart from men. At the back of all the chatter of the birds was the quietness of a world not yet awake.

  A rook flew low overhead, his shabby plumage gilded, his wings making a creaky sound as they beat the air. The sun rose and flooded into the valley, casting dewy silent shadows and shafts of long pale light among the trees.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ROSS WOKE LATE. IT WAS SEVEN BEFORE HE WAS STIRRING.

  When he got up he had a nasty taste in his mouth. It had been poor stuff at the Fighting Cock's Inn.

  Demelza… Stiff old silk of the dress… The hooks. What had got into her? He had been drunk, but was it with liquor? The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action… past reason hated—how did it go? He had not thought of that sonnet last night. The poets had played him false. A strange affair.

  At least there had been an expense of spirit…

  And the whispering shrews of three villages had only anticipated the truth. Not that that mattered. What mattered was Demelza and himself. What would he find her this morning: the friendly drudge of daylight or the silk-mouthed stranger he had imagined through the summer night?