It showed him in the centre of the Beershorn Wanderers Football Club. His young man’s limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.
‘He is a thought too fat, but really very handsome,’ mused Flora, following Judith’s glance. ‘I don’t suppose he plays football any more – probably mollocks, instead.’
‘Ay,’ suddenly whispered Judith, ‘look at him – the shame of our house. Cursed be the day I brought him forth and the nourishment he drew from my bosom, and the wooing tongue God gave him to bring disgrace upon weak women.’
She stood up, and looked out into the drizzling rain.
**The cries from the little hut had stopped. An exhausted silence, brimmed with the enervating weakness which follows a stupendous effort, mounted from the stagnant air in the yard, like a miasma. All the surrounding surface of the countryside – the huddled Downs lost in rain, the wet fields fanged abruptly with flints, the leafless thorns thrust sideways by the eternal pawing of the wind, the lush breeding miles of meadow through which the lifeless river wandered – seemed to be folding inwards upon themselves. Their dumbness said: ‘Give up. There is no answer to the riddle; only that bodies return exhausted, hour by hour, minute by minute, to the all-forgiving and all-comprehending primaeval slime.’
‘Well, Cousin Judith, if you really think she will be about again in a few days, perhaps I might look in at her hut this morning, and arrange about the curtains,’ said Flora, preparing to go. Judith did not answer at first.
‘The fourth time,’ she whispered at last. ‘Four of them. Love-children. Pah! That animal, and love! And he—’
Here Flora realized that the conversation was not likely to take a turn in which she could join with any benefit, so she went quickly away.
‘So they all belong to Seth,’ she thought, while putting on her mackintosh in her bedroom. ‘Really, it is too bad. I suppose on any other farm one would say that it set a bad example, but of course that does not apply here. I must see, I think, what can be done about Seth …’
She picked her way through the mud and rancid straw which carpeted the yard without encountering anyone except a person whom she took from his employment to be Reuben himself. He was feverishly collecting the feathers dropped by the chickens straying about the yard, and comparing them in number with the empty feather-sockets on the bodies of the chickens; this, she supposed, must be a precautionary measure, to prevent anyfeathers being taken away by Mark Dolour to his daughter Nancy.
Reuben (if it were he) was so engrossed that he did not observe Flora.
CHAPTER VI
Flora approached the hut in some trepidation. Her practical experience of confinements was non-existent, for such of her friends as were married had not yet any children and most of them were still too young to think of marriage as anything but a state infinitely remote.
But she had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. Their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to four or five pages of close print, or eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.
Another school dismissed confinements with a careful brightness, a ‘So-sorry-I’m-late-darling-I’ve-just-been-having-a-baby-where-shall-we-go-for-supper-afterwards?’ sangfroid which Flora, curiously enough, found equally alarming.
She sometimes wondered whether the old-fashioned, though doubtless lazy, method of describing the event in the phrase, ‘She was brought to bed of a fine boy’, was not the best way of putting it.
A third type of
‘He is a thought too fat, but really very handsome,’ mused Flora, following Judith’s glance. ‘I don’t suppose he plays football any more – probably mollocks, instead.’
‘Ay,’ suddenly whispered Judith, ‘look at him – the shame of our house. Cursed be the day I brought him forth and the nourishment he drew from my bosom, and the wooing tongue God gave him to bring disgrace upon weak women.’
She stood up, and looked out into the drizzling rain.
**The cries from the little hut had stopped. An exhausted silence, brimmed with the enervating weakness which follows a stupendous effort, mounted from the stagnant air in the yard, like a miasma. All the surrounding surface of the countryside – the huddled Downs lost in rain, the wet fields fanged abruptly with flints, the leafless thorns thrust sideways by the eternal pawing of the wind, the lush breeding miles of meadow through which the lifeless river wandered – seemed to be folding inwards upon themselves. Their dumbness said: ‘Give up. There is no answer to the riddle; only that bodies return exhausted, hour by hour, minute by minute, to the all-forgiving and all-comprehending primaeval slime.’
‘Well, Cousin Judith, if you really think she will be about again in a few days, perhaps I might look in at her hut this morning, and arrange about the curtains,’ said Flora, preparing to go. Judith did not answer at first.
‘The fourth time,’ she whispered at last. ‘Four of them. Love-children. Pah! That animal, and love! And he—’
Here Flora realized that the conversation was not likely to take a turn in which she could join with any benefit, so she went quickly away.
‘So they all belong to Seth,’ she thought, while putting on her mackintosh in her bedroom. ‘Really, it is too bad. I suppose on any other farm one would say that it set a bad example, but of course that does not apply here. I must see, I think, what can be done about Seth …’
She picked her way through the mud and rancid straw which carpeted the yard without encountering anyone except a person whom she took from his employment to be Reuben himself. He was feverishly collecting the feathers dropped by the chickens straying about the yard, and comparing them in number with the empty feather-sockets on the bodies of the chickens; this, she supposed, must be a precautionary measure, to prevent anyfeathers being taken away by Mark Dolour to his daughter Nancy.
Reuben (if it were he) was so engrossed that he did not observe Flora.
CHAPTER VI
Flora approached the hut in some trepidation. Her practical experience of confinements was non-existent, for such of her friends as were married had not yet any children and most of them were still too young to think of marriage as anything but a state infinitely remote.
But she had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. Their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to four or five pages of close print, or eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.
Another school dismissed confinements with a careful brightness, a ‘So-sorry-I’m-late-darling-I’ve-just-been-having-a-baby-where-shall-we-go-for-supper-afterwards?’ sangfroid which Flora, curiously enough, found equally alarming.
She sometimes wondered whether the old-fashioned, though doubtless lazy, method of describing the event in the phrase, ‘She was brought to bed of a fine boy’, was not the best way of putting it.
A third type of
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