After the departure of Seth, life at the farm settled down and became normal again (at least, as normal as it ever was), and Flora was quite glad to have a rest after the strenuous weeks during which she had drilled Elfine, and the series of shocks which had resulted in the whisking of Seth and Amos away from Cold Comfort.
The first of May brought a burst of summer weather. All the trees and hedges came into full leaf over-night; and from behind the latter, in the evenings, cries could be heard of: ‘Nay, doan’t ’ee, Jem’, and ‘Nay, niver do that, soul’, from village maidens who were being seduced.
At the farm, life burgeoned and was quick. A thick, shameless cooing was laid down, stroke on stroke, through the warm air from the throats of the wood-pigeons until the very atmosphere seemed covered with a rich patina of love. The strident yellow note of the cockerel shot up into the sunshine and wavered there, ending in a little feather-tuft of notes. Big Business bellowed triumphantly in the great field. Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death. Mrs Beetle appeared in a cotton dress, well skewered up at the neck by a brooch with ‘Carrie’ engraved on it. Flora wore green linen and a shady hat.
The first rays of May fell into the room where Judith lay on her bed in silence; and were withered. The sordid flies, intent on their own selfish pleasure, buzzed in idiotic circles above her head with as much noise and as little meaning as life itself, and their sound drew a web of scarlet pain into her withdrawn darkness. She had veiled each of the two hundred photographs of Seth with a little black crкpe curtain. This done, what else did life hold? The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair.
It, too, was like life – and as meaningless.
The old woman kept her room also, seated before the fire that danced palely in the thick, coarse sunlight, and muttering at intervals. Flares of hate lit her darkness. She sensed the insolence of summer beating on the window-panes and wooing away, with its promises, all the Starkadders from Cold Comfort. Where was Amos? The sunlight answered. Where was Elfine? The ring-doves crooned in reply. Where – last blow of agony – was Seth? She did not even know where he had gone, or why. Mrs Beetle said he had gone on them there talkies. What was a talkie? Was Mrs Beetle mad? Were they all mad – all except you, who sat on here alone, in the old crumbling tower of your body? And Urk – a Starkadder – saying he was going to marry the paid slut, Meriam, and openly defying you when you forbade him, and jingling three and sixpence in his pocket which he had earned by selling water-vole skins to a furrier in Godmere …
This room was your citadel. Outside, the world you had built up so fiercely for twenty years was crumbling into fantastic ruin.
It was she, Robert Poste’s child. The wrong done to him had come back to roost. ‘Curses, like rookses, comes home to rest in bosomses and barnses.’ She had poured poison into the ears of your family and sent them out into the world, leaving you alone. They would all go: Judith, Micah, Ezra, Harkaway, Caraway, Luke and Mark and Adam Lambsbreath. Then … when they had all gone … you would be alone – at last – alone in the woodshed.
*
Flora was having quite a nice time.
It was now the second week in May, and the weather was still superb. Reuben was now looked upon by everybody as the owner of Cold Comfort, and had at once (much to Flora’s pleasure) set about making improvements in it, and had asked her if she would go into Godmere with him and help him choose fertilizers and new grinders and what not. Flora told him she did not know anything about grinders, but that she would try anything once; so, accordingly, they drove off together one Wednesday morning in the buggy, armed with a copy of the ‘Internationally Progressive Farmers’ Guide and Helpmeet’, which Flora had ordered from London, where it was printed by some Russian friends of hers living in West Kensington.
‘Where did you get the money to buy all these lovely grinders, Reuben?’ asked Flora, as they sat at lunch in the coffee-room of the Load of Beets, after a busy morning’s shopping.
‘Stole ’un,’ replied Reuben, simply.
‘Who from?’ asked Flora, who was bored by having to pretend to be shocked at things, and really wanted to know.
‘Grandmother.’
‘Oh, I say, what a sound scheme. But how did you get hold of it? I mean, did you have to get it out of her stocking, or something?’
‘Nay. I falsified th’ chicken-book, and when we sold a dozen eggs I writes down we sells two eggs, see? I been doin’ that for nigh five years. I had me eye on them grinders for five years, so I plans it all out, see?’
‘My dear, I think you’re masterly,’ said Flora. ‘Quite masterly. If you only keep on as you’ve begun you will make the farm too prosperous.’
‘Ay … if th’ old devil don’t change his mind and come back,’ said Reuben, doubtfully. ‘Happen he may think America’s a long way off – too fur for an old ’un like him to go, eh?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he won’t,’ said Flora, decidedly.
‘He seems to be – er – main set on the idea.’ And she produced from her handbag, for the tenth time that morning, a postcard showing Liverpool Cathedral. It said:
‘Praise the Lord! I go to spread the Lord’s word among the heathen Americans, with the Rev. Elderberry Shiftglass of Chicago. Praise the Lord! Tell Reuben he can have the old place. Send clean socks. Love to all except Micah.
A. STARKADDER’
‘Oh, yes, I am sure he means it,’ repeated Flora. ‘It’s a pity he says “the old place” instead of “the farm”, but if any question ever arises, we can always do a spot of forgery, and write in “the farm” instead. I wouldn’t worry, if I were you.’
So they finished their apple tart in leisurely comfort. Just as he was lifting the last spoonful to his lips, Reuben halted with it in the air and said, looking across at Flora:
‘I don’t suppose ’ee would marry me, Cousin Flora?’
Flora was much moved. She had grown to like Reuben in the last fortnight. He was worth whole sackfuls of the other male Starkadders. He was really very nice, and kind too, and ready to learn from anyone who would help him to improve the condition of the farm. He had never forgotten that it was she who suggested to Amos that he should go off on the preaching tour; a move which had resulted – after Reuben himself had worked on his father’s feelings to take Flora’s advice – in Reuben getting possession of the farm; and he was deeply grateful.
She put out her hand across the table. Wonderingly, Reuben took it in his and stared down at it, while the spoonful of apple tart wavered to and fro in his other hand.
‘Oh, Reuben, that is nice of you. But I am afraid it would never do, you know. Think a moment. I am not at all the kind of person to make a good wife for a farmer.’
‘I like yer pretty ways,’ said Reuben, gruffly.
‘That’s charming of you. I like yours, too. But, honestly, it wouldn’t do. I think somebody like Mark Dolour’s Nancy would be much nicer for you – and more useful, too.’
‘She’m not fifteen yet.’
‘All the better. In three years the farm will be doing really well, and you will have a really nice home to offer her.’ (Flora’s heart faltered as she thought of what Aunt Ada Doom might have to say to such a marriage, but she was beginning to feel a way towards a plan for coping with that old incubus. In three years – who knows? – Aunt Ada might have left the farm!)
Reuben reflected, still staring down at Flora’s hand.
‘Ay,’ he said, slowly, at last, ‘maybe I’d best have Mark Dolour’s Nancy. My chickens have been keeping her dolls in feathers for their ’ats these last two years. Reckon it’s only right she should have th’ chickens too in the end.’
And he released Flora’s hand, and finished his spoonful of apple tart. He did not seem at all offended or hurt, and they drove home together afterwards in comfortable silence.
Elfine’s visit to the Hawk-Monitors had been extended for a further week, and Flora had twice been over there to tea. Mrs Hawk-Monitor seemed quite won over to Elfine, much to Flora’s relief, and described her to Flora as ‘a dear little thing. Rather brainy, but quite a nice little thing.’ Flora congratulated Elfine in private, and warned her not to talk quite so much about Marie Laurencin and Purcell. The end was achieved; there was no point in overdoing it.
The wedding was fixed for the fourteenth of June. Mrs Hawk-Monitor had decided that it should take place in the church at Howling, which was a beauty. She then stunned Flora by suggesting that the reception should be held at Cold Comfort: ‘So much more convenient than coming all the way back here, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, I say,’ said Flora, pulling herself together in response to an agonized glance from Elfine, ‘I rather doubt if that would do, you know. I mean, old Mrs Starkadder is a bit of an invalid and what not. The – er – the noise might upset her.’
‘She need not come down. A tray of cake can be taken up to her in her room. Yes, I think that would certainly be the best thing to do. Is there a large room at the farmhouse, Miss Poste?’
‘Several,’ said Flora, faintly, thinking about them.
‘Splendid. Just the thing. I will write to old Mrs Starkadder tonight.’ And Mrs Hawk-Monitor (who was rather wanting to shift some of the botheration of the wedding on to Elfine’s family) vaguely but effectively changed the subject.
So there was a new horror on the horizon! Really (thought Flora, riding home in state in the giant Hawk-Monitor Renault) there was no end to her worries. She was beginning to think she would never get the farm tidied up in her life-time. No sooner did she get one person comfortably fixed up than somebody else began to tear up the turf about something, and she had to begin all over again.
It was true, though, that matters were better since Reuben had taken up the position of owner of the farm. Wages were paid regularly. Rooms were swept out occasionally: nay, they were even scrubbed. And though the bi-weekly inspection of the books by Aunt Ada Doom still went on, Reuben had started another set of books of his own, in which he put down the farm’s real takings. The books which Aunt Ada saw twice a week were cooked like Old Harry.
Aunt Ada had not been downstairs since the night of the Counting; and Micah, Ezra and the other Starkadders had taken advantage of her temporary set-back. They had also been encouraged by the getaway of Seth, Elfine and Amos. They realized that Aunt Ada, like the rest of us, was only human.
So they had commanded Prue, Letty, Jane, Phoebe and Susan to say nothing of Rennett, to come up to Cold Comfort from the village and establish themselves and their possessions in some of the empty rooms of the farmhouse, as far away as possible from Aunt Ada’s chamber.
And there they were, all living like fighting cocks; and wherever Flora went she seemed to stumble over hen-faced female Starkadders in cotton dresses. As for Mrs Beetle, she said all them old witches fair gave her the sick, and she was quite glad to get ’ome to Urk and Meriam and the water-voles.
So, on the whole, life at the farmhouse was much pleasanter for the Starkadders than it had ever been before; and they had Flora to thank for it.
But Flora was not satisfied.
She was thinking, as she was borne homewards in the Hawk-Monitor chariot, how much yet remained to be done at Cold Comfort before she could really say that the farmhouse was in a condition to satisfy the Abbé Fausse-Maigre.
There was the problem of Judith. There was old Adam. And there was Aunt Ada Doom herself, the greatest problem of all, and the hardest.
She decided that she must tackle Judith next. Judith had been lying in her room with the window shut quite long enough. Twice had Mrs Beetle asked if she could turn out the room; and twice Flora had been forced to reply that it was not yet convenient. But now (Flora decided) things had gone far enough; and she would beard Judith as soon as she got home.
*
The evening sunlight lay across the corridor in sharp tiger-bars as she approached Judith’s room. The door was shut. It was like a forbidding hand, pressed soft and flat against the silence of the corridor. Flora tapped against it, and waited a few seconds for an answer. But there was only the indifferent silence. Oh, well … she thought, and, turning the handle, walked in.
Judith was standing at the washstand, rinsing one of the two hundred little crкpe curtains which hung over the two hundred photographs of Seth.
Her blank eyes burrowed through the foetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.
‘Oh, Cousin Judith, would you care to come up to Town with me tomorrow?’ asked Flora, pleasantly. ‘I want to do some shopping, and I hope to lunch with a very charming Austrian – a Doctor Mьdel from Vienna. Do come.’
Judith’s laugh shocked even the careless flies that circled above her head into a momentary silence.
‘I am a dead woman,’ she said, simply. Her hands lay pit eously at her sides. ‘Look … the little curtain was dusty,’ she murmured. ‘I had to rinse the dust off it.’
Flora refrained from pointing out that if you rinsed something that was dusty you merely made it worse. She said patiently that she proposed to catch the ten-thirty to Town, and that she would expect Judith to be ready by nine o’clock.
‘I think you will enjoy it, Cousin Judith, when you get there,’ she urged her. ‘You mustn’t carry on like this, you know. It – er – it depresses us all no end. I mean, all this lovely weather and what not. It’s a pity to waste it.’
‘I myself am a waste,’ said Judith, stonily. ‘I am a used husk … a rind … a skin. What use am I … now he’s gone?’
‘Well, never mind that now,’ said Flora, soothingly. ‘Just you make up your mind to be ready by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
And before she left her that evening, she managed to gain from Judith a vague half-promise that she would be ready as suggested. Judith did not seem to care what happened to her so long as she was not made to talk; and Flora took advantage of her lassitude to impose her fresh will upon her cousin’s flaccid one.
After leaving Judith, she sent Adam down into Howling with the following wire:
‘Herr Doktor Adolf Mьdel,
‘National Institute Psycho-Analysis,
‘Whitehall, S. W.
‘Interesting case for you can you lunch two of us Grimaldi’s one fifteen to-morrow Wednesday hows the baby love F. Poste.’
And at nine o’clock that night, while she was sitting at the open window of her little parlour inhaling the fragrance of a may-tree and writing to Charles, a telegram was delivered to her (by Mark Dolour’s very Nancy herself) which read:
‘But of course delighted baby has marked paranoic tendencies nurse assures me quite normal at eight months she knows much more than I do perfect treasure looking forward seeing you what weather eh … Adolf.’
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