Chapter V A Hunting Morning
On such a morning as hunting folk live for, some ten days after the conversation between Stapledon and Mr. Endicott, Christopher, who did not himself hunt, drove Honor to a meet of the Mid Devon. Taking his dog-cart down a mossy by-path at the spinney-side, he stopped not fifty yards distant from where a patch of scarlet marked the huntsman’s standpoint. Above was a race of broken clouds and gleam of sunshine from pale blue sky; below spread opaline air and naked boughs, save where great tods of ivy shone; while underneath nervous tails twitched among brown fern and wintry furzes. Then a whimper came from the heart of the wood, and two old hounds threw up their heads, recognised the sound for a youngster’s excitement, and put nose to earth again. A minute later, however, and a full bay echoed deep and clear; whereupon the pair instantly galloped whence the music came.
Honor and her companion sat in Christopher’s dog-cart behind a fine grey cob.
“They know that’s no young duffer,” said Yeoland, as the melody waxed and the hounds vanished; “he’s one of their own generation and makes no mistake. If the fox takes them up to the Moor, sport is likely to be bad, for it’s a sponge just now, and the field won’t live with the hounds five minutes. Ah! he’s off! And to the Moor he goes.”
Soon a business-like, hard-riding, West Country field swept away towards the highlands, and silence fell again.
Christopher then set out for Little Silver, while conversation drifted to their personal interests and the prosperity in which each now dwelt—a thing foreseen by neither three short years before. They had no servant with them and spoke openly.
“My touchstone was gold; yours a husband of gold,” said Christopher. “Money he possessed too, but it is the magic man himself who has made Endicott’s what it is now.”
“Yes, indeed—dear Myles. And yet I’m half afraid that the old, simple joy in natural things passes him by now. It seems as though he and I could never be perfectly, wholly happy at the same time. While I went dismal mad and must have made his life a curse, he kept up, and never showed the tribulation that he felt, but was always contented and cheerful and patient. Now that I am happier, I feel that he is not. Yes, he is not as happy as I am. He has told me a thousand times that content is the only thing to strive for; and certainly he proved it, for he was well content once; but now our positions are reversed, and I am contented with my life, while daily he grows less so.”
“He’s a farmer, and a contented farmer no man ever saw, because God never made one.”
“It isn’t that; the work never troubles him. He looks far ahead and seems to know, like a wizard, long before the event just what is going to be successful and what a failure. I think I know him better than anybody in the world, but I can’t fathom him just now. Something is worrying him, and he tries hard not to let it worry him and not to show that it does. Partly he is successful, for I cannot guess the trouble; but that there is a trouble he fails to hide. I must find it out and take my share. Sometimes I think——”
She broke off abruptly.
“What? Nothing that involves me? We’re the best, truest friends now, thank heaven.”
“No, no. Time will reveal it.”
For a moment or two they were silent with their thoughts. It struck neither that such a conversation was peculiar; it occurred to neither the man nor the woman that in the very fact of their friendship—of a friendship so close that the wife could thus discuss her husband’s trouble—there existed the seed of that trouble.
Christopher mused upon the problem, and honestly marvelled before it.
“I suppose nobody can be happy really, and he’s no exception to the rule. Yet, looking at his life, I should account him quite the luckiest man I ever heard of. Consider the perfection that he has crammed into his existence. He prospers in his farm; he has Nestor under his roof in the shape of your wiseacre of an uncle; and he has you! Providence must have been puzzled to find a way to hurt him. And she hasn’t hit him under the belt either, for never a man enjoyed finer health. Now where can he have come across melancholy? I suppose it’s his hereafter, or non-hereafter, that’s bothering him. Yet I should judge that the man was too sane to waste good time in this world fretting because he doesn’t believe in another.”
“It’s a cloud-shadow that will pass, I hope.”
“I hope so heartily—such a balanced mind as he has. Now if I began to whine—one who never did carry any ballast—you could understand it. Look ahead and compare our innings. His will end gloriously with children and grandchildren and all the rest of it. And I—but if I painted the picture you’d probably say I was a morbid, ungrateful idiot.”
“Very likely; and I should probably be quite right. There’s a great duty staring you in the face now, Christo, and nobody who cares for you will be contented or happy until you’ve tackled it like a man. Don’t look so innocent; you know perfectly well what I mean.”
“Indeed I do not. I am doing my duty to Godleigh—that’s my life’s work henceforth, and all anybody can expect.”
“But that is just what you are not doing. You’re not everybody, remember; and even if you think you are, you won’t live for ever. You’ll have to go and sleep in real earnest under the skulls with bats’ wings, poor Christo, some day, and Myles and I shall be outside under the grass.”
“Who is morbid now?”
“Don’t evade the point. I want you to think of the thing you love best in the world—Godleigh.”
“Well?”
“Godleigh has got to go on. It won’t stop because you do—Godleigh’s immortal. When a tree falls there, Nature will plant another. Then what is to become of the dearest, loveliest place in Devon after you are gathered to your fathers?”
“I’m going to leave it to you and Myles and your heirs for ever.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Christo; you’re going to leave it to a rightful heir, and it’s high time you began to devote a little thought to him. Don’t wait until you’re a stupid, old, middle-aged thing of half a century. Then you’ll probably die in the gloomy conviction that you leave your children mere helpless infants.”
“So much the better for them, for they’d escape the example of their father. But, as a matter of fact, I’m not going to marry. Godleigh’s my mother and sister and brother and wife and family.”
“Then you’ll leave your family unprovided for, and that’s a very wicked thing to do. We’re growing old and sensible nowadays, and there’ll be plain speaking between us as long as we live; so I tell you now that I’ve thought of this very seriously indeed, and so has Myles. He quite agees with me; and my opinion is that you ought to marry; the sooner the better.”
“Don’t,” he said; “don’t go in for having opinions. When anybody begins to cultivate and profess opinions their sense of humour must be on the wane. Keep your mind free of rooted ideas. You were wont to love the rainbow play of change, to welcome sudden extremes as a sign of health and mental activity. Before you married you hated opinions.”
“That was before I grew happy, I think. Happiness runs one into a groove very quickly; it steadies our ideas. Now, you won’t be perfectly happy until you marry.”
“To find her.”
“Why, that’s not so difficult.”
“Never, Honor. There was only one possible mother for my children. You are going over ground that I travelled centuries ago; at least it seems centuries. I told my fib and looked ahead, quite like a son of wisdom for once, and counted the cost, or tried to. Let all that sleep. I shall never know to my dying day how I brought it off, but I did. Perhaps a generous sympathy for unborn boys and girls had as much to do with it as anything else. Candidly and without sentiment, it is time we Yeolands came to an end. For my part I shall die easier knowing that I’m the last of them. I never was very keen about living for the mere sake of living, even in old days, and now I care less than ever. Not that I want to die either; but I go wandering through this great, roaring, rollicking, goose-fair of a world, stopping at a booth here, shooting for nuts or something equally valuable there; and when Dustman Death surprises me, pottering about and wasting my money,—when he puts out his grey claws and asks for his own again, I shall welcome him with perfect cheerfulness.”
“Nonsense—and wicked nonsense! You—what?—thirty-two, or some absurd age—trying to talk like Uncle Mark! And Godleigh free! I won’t have it, Christo. If ever you loved me, you must obey me in this and find a wife.”
“Can’t; won’t; too small-hearted. I’ve got nothing to give a girl; and all your fault. Some of me really died, you know, when I pretended that all of me did.”
“Then I suppose that it’s my turn to go away and perish now? Would you feel equal to marrying anybody if I was dead?”
“Not a parallel instance at all. For you there was a grand chap waiting—a man worth having; else I should not have died, I assure you. In my case there’s no grand woman waiting; so if you expire, you will merely be bringing a great deal of trouble upon many excellent people and doing nobody the least good—not even my nebulous prospective lady. No, Myles and I would merely share a mile of crape and live in black gloves for ever. You die! What a thought!”
“Sometimes I wish I had long ago.”
“No; you must live to brighten these dull Devonshire winters and strew flowers upon your husband and me when our turns come. Dear old Stapledon! I’m really bothered to know that something is troubling him. I’d tackle him myself, only if you cannot win the truth, I certainly should not. I wish he’d be confidential; I do like confidential men. For my part I haven’t got a secret from him in the world.”
“He works too hard.”
“He does. The man has a horrible genius for making work. It knocks the vitality out of him. I hate this modern gospel that sets all of us poor little world-children to our lessons as a panacea for every evil under the sun. Just look what dull dogs all the hard workers are.”
“Well, you’ve played truant from your youth up.”
“Deliberately, as an example to others. But I’m doing any amount of work now. Brain-work too; which is easily the most hateful sort of work. And all for my Godleigh. Yet she doesn’t thank me. I see poor Mother Nature stealing about miserably and suspiciously when I go into the woods. She liked me better a pauper. She doesn’t know that I’m helping her to make this little corner of earth more and more perfect. She doesn’t look ahead and judge how much toil and trouble I am saving her with the ruins of things that must be cleared away—either by her method or my quicker one. She hates axes and ploughs and pruning-hooks, old stick-in-the-mud that she is.”
“Treason!”
“No treason at all. Common sense I call it. I’m weary of this nonsense about going straight to Nature. Australia taught me to suspect. She’s a bat, a mole; she doesn’t know her best friends. She’ll sink a saint in mid-ocean—a real saint with an eighteen-carat halo—and let a pirate come safely and happily to some innocent merchantman stuffed with the treasures of honest men, or her own priceless grains and seeds. She’ll put back the hand of progress at the smallest opportunity; she’ll revert to the primitive if you turn your back on her for an instant; she’ll conjure our peaches into wild plums, our apples into crabs, man into—God knows what—something a good deal lower than the angels, or even the cave-dwellers. If we let her, she would hunt for and polish up the missing link again, and huddle the world backwards faster than we spin round the sun. Nature is a grand fraud, Honor. Take the personal attitude, for instance. What has she ever done for me? Did she show me any of her hoarded gold during the month I nearly killed myself exploring in New South Wales? Did she lead me to the water-holes when I was thirsty, or lend me a cloud to hide the sun when I was hot? Has she opened a flower-bud, or taught a bird to sing, or painted a dawn, or ever led the wind out of the east, that I might be the happier? We fool ourselves that we are her favourites. Not so. She is only our stepmother, and behaves accordingly. She knew that the advent of conscious intelligence must be a death-blow to her, and she has never forgiven man for exhibiting it.”
“So I’m not the only one in Little Silver who is developing opinions, I see,” laughed Honor. “You’re growing egotistical, Christo; you’re expecting almost too much, I fear. Nature has something better to do than plan your private fortune and convenience, or arrange the winds of heaven to suit a cold in that silly head of yours! Never in my most dead-alive moment did I grow so dull as that. To be cross with poor Nature—as if she had not to do what she is told, like everybody else. To blame her!”
“I don’t blame her. I know where to throw the blame of things perfectly well.”
“Then you’re the only man in the world who does, and you ought to tell everybody and so make yourself famous.”
Thus they prattled in the old manner, and, unconscious of difficulty or danger, passed upon their way. Much each saw of the other; much frank delight each took in the other’s company; and through the passage of winter to the advent of spring they progressed, coming nearer and nearer to discovery of the secret tribulation in Stapledon’s heart that each now innocently, honestly mourned and misunderstood.