The Freelands

“I am Mr. Derek’s cousin, going to be married to him. He’s been ill, but he’s getting well again now. We knew you’d like to hear.” And she thought: ‘Oh! What a tragic face! I can’t bear to look at his eyes!’

He took her hand, said, “Thank you, miss,” and stood as still as ever.

“Please come and sit down, and we can talk.”

Tryst moved to a form and took his seat thereon, with his hands between his knees, as if playing with an imaginary cap. He was dressed in an ordinary suit of laborer’s best clothes, and his stiff, dust-colored hair was not cut particularly short. The cheeks of his square-cut face had fallen in, the eyes had sunk back, and the prominence thus given to his cheek and jawbones and thick mouth gave his face a savage look – only his dog-like, terribly yearning eyes made Nedda feel so sorry that she simply could not feel afraid.

“The children are such dears, Mr. Tryst. Billy seems to grow every day. They’re no trouble at all, and quite happy. Biddy’s wonderful with them.”

“She’s a good maid.” The thick lips shaped the words as though they had almost lost power of speech.

“Do they let you see the newspapers we send? Have you got everything you want?”

For a minute he did not seem to be going to answer; then, moving his head from side to side, he said:

“Nothin’ I want, but just get out of here.”

Nedda murmured helplessly:

“It’s only a month now to the assizes. Does Mr. Pogram come to see you?”

“Yes, he comes. He can’t do nothin’!”

“Oh, don’t despair! Even if they don’t acquit you, it’ll soon be over. Don’t despair!” And she stole her hand out and timidly touched his arm. She felt her heart turning over and over, he looked so sad.

He said in that stumbling, thick voice:

“Thank you kindly. I must get out. I won’t stand long of it – not much longer. I’m not used to it – always been accustomed to the air, an’ bein’ about, that’s where ‘tis. But don’t you tell him, miss. You say I’m goin’ along all right. Don’t you tell him what I said. ‘Tis no use him frettin’ over me. ‘Twon’ do me no good.”

And Nedda murmured:

“No, no; I won’t tell him.”

Then suddenly came the words she had dreaded:

“D’you think they’ll let me go, miss?”

“Oh, yes, I think so – I hope so!” But she could not meet his eyes, and hearing him grit his boot on the floor knew he had not believed her.

He said slowly:

“I never meant to do it when I went out that mornin’. It came on me sudden, lookin’ at the straw.”

Nedda gave a little gasp. Could that man outside hear?

Tryst went on: “If they don’t let me go, I won’ stand it. ‘Tis too much for a man. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, nor nothin’. I won’ stand it. It don’ take long to die, if you put your mind to it.”

Feeling quite sick with pity, Nedda got up and stood beside him; and, moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she lifted one of his great hands and clasped it in both her own. “Oh, try and be brave and look forward! You’re going to be ever so happy some day.”

He gave her a strange long stare.

“Yes, I’ll be happy some day. Don’ you never fret about me.”

And Nedda saw that the warder was standing in the doorway.

“Sorry, miss, time’s up.”

Without a word Tryst rose and went out.

Nedda was alone again with the little sandy cat. Standing under the high-barred window she wiped her cheeks, that were all wet. Why, why must people suffer so? Suffer so slowly, so horribly? What were men made of that they could go on day after day, year after year, watching others suffer?

When the warder came back to take her out, she did not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She walked with hands tight clenched, and eyes fixed on the ground. Outside the prison door she drew a long, long breath. And suddenly her eyes caught the inscription on the corner of a lane leading down alongside the prison wall – “Love’s Walk”!

CHAPTER XXXIII

Peremptorily ordered by the doctor to the sea, but with instructions to avoid for the present all excitement, sunlight, and color, Derek and his grandmother repaired to a spot well known to be gray, and Nedda went home to Hampstead. This was the last week in July. A fortnight spent in the perfect vacuity of an English watering-place restored the boy wonderfully. No one could be better trusted than Frances Freeland to preserve him from looking on the dark side of anything, more specially when that thing was already not quite nice. Their conversation was therefore free from allusion to the laborers, the strike, or Bob Tryst. And Derek thought the more. The approaching trial was hardly ever out of his mind. Bathing, he would think of it; sitting on the gray jetty looking over the gray sea, he would think of it. Up the gray cobbled streets and away on the headlands, he would think of it. And, so as not to have to think of it, he would try to walk himself to a standstill. Unfortunately the head will continue working when the legs are at rest. And when he sat opposite to her at meal-times, Frances Freeland would gaze piercingly at his forehead and muse: ‘The dear boy looks much better, but he’s getting a little line between his brows – it IS such a pity!’ It worried her, too, that the face he was putting on their little holiday together was not quite as full as she could have wished – though the last thing in the world she could tolerate were really fat cheeks, those signs of all that her stoicism abhorred, those truly unforgivable marks of the loss of ‘form.’ He struck her as dreadfully silent, too, and she would rack her brains for subjects that would interest him, often saying to herself: ‘If only I were clever!’ It was natural he should think of dear Nedda, but surely it was not that which gave him the little line. He must be brooding about those other things. He ought not to be melancholy like this and let anything prevent the sea from doing him good. The habit – hard-learned by the old, and especially the old of her particular sex – of not wishing for the moon, or at all events of not letting others know that you are wishing for it, had long enabled Frances Freeland to talk cheerfully on the most indifferent subjects whether or no her heart were aching. One’s heart often did ache, of course, but it simply didn’t do to let it interfere, making things uncomfortable for others. And once she said to him: “You know, darling, I think it would be so nice for you to take a little interest in politics. They’re very absorbing when you once get into them. I find my paper most enthralling. And it really has very good principles.”

“If politics did anything for those who most need things done, Granny – but I can’t see that they do.”

She thought a little, then, making firm her lips, said:

“I don’t think that’s quite just, darling, there are a great many politicians who are very much looked up to – all the bishops, for instance, and others whom nobody could suspect of self-seeking.”

“I didn’t mean that politicians were self-seeking, Granny; I meant that they’re comfortable people, and the things that interest them are those that interest comfortable people. What have they done for the laborers, for instance?”

“Oh, but, darling! they’re going to do a great deal. In my paper they’re continually saying that.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t say so if they weren’t. There’s quite a new plan, and it sounds most sensible. And so I don’t think, darling, that if I were you I should make myself unhappy about all that kind of thing. They must know best. They’re all so much older than you. And you’re getting quite a little line between your eyes.”

Derek smiled.

“All right, Granny; I shall have a big one soon.”

Frances Freeland smiled, too, but shook her head.

“Yes; and that’s why I really think you ought to take interest in politics.”

“I’d rather take interest in you, Granny. You’re very jolly to look at.”

Frances Freeland raised her brows.

“I? My dear, I’m a perfect fright nowadays.”

Thus pushing away what her stoicism and perpetual aspiration to an impossibly good face would not suffer her to admit, she added:

“Where would you like to drive this afternoon?”

For they took drives in a small victoria, Frances Freeland holding her sunshade to protect him from the sun whenever it made the mistake of being out.

On August the fourth he insisted that he was well and must go back home. And, though to bring her attendance on him to an end was a grief, she humbly admitted that he must be wanting younger company, and, after one wistful attempt, made no further bones. The following day they travelled.

On getting home he found that the police had been to see little Biddy Tryst, who was to be called as a witness. Tod would take her over on the morning of the trial. Derek did not wait for this, but on the day before the assizes repacked his bag and went off to the Royal Charles Hostel at Worcester. He slept not at all that night, and next morning was early at the court, for Tryst’s case would be the first. Anxiously he sat watching all the queer and formal happenings that mark the initiation of the higher justice – the assemblage of the gentlemen in wigs; the sifting, shifting, settling of clerks, and ushers, solicitors, and the public; the busy indifference, the cheerful professionalism of it all. He saw little Mr. Pogram come in, more square and rubbery than ever, and engage in conclave with one of the bewigged. The smiles, shrugs, even the sharp expressions on that barrister’s face; the way he stood, twisting round, one hand wrapped in his gown, one foot on the bench behind; it was all as if he had done it hundreds of times before and cared not the snap of one of his thin, yellow fingers. Then there was a sudden hush; the judge came in, bowed, and took his seat. And that, too, seemed so professional. Haunted by the thought of him to whom this was almost life and death, the boy was incapable of seeing how natural it was that they should not all feel as he did.

The case was called and Tryst brought in. Derek had once more to undergo the torture of those tragic eyes fixed on him. Round that heavy figure, that mournful, half-brutal, and half-yearning face, the pleadings, the questions, the answers buzzed, bringing out facts with damning clearness, yet leaving the real story of that early morning as hidden as if the court and all were but gibbering figures of air. The real story of Tryst, heavy and distraught, rising and turning out from habit into the early haze on the fields, where his daily work had lain, of Tryst brooding, with the slow, the wrathful incoherence that centuries of silence in those lonely fields had passed into the blood of his forebears and himself. Brooding, in the dangerous disproportion that enforced continence brings to certain natures, loading the brain with violence till the storm bursts and there leap out the lurid, dark insanities of crime. Brooding, while in the air flies chased each other, insects crawled together in the grass, and the first principle of nature worked everywhere its sane fulfilment. They might talk and take evidence as they would, be shrewd and sharp with all the petty sharpness of the Law; but the secret springs would still lie undisclosed, too natural and true to bear the light of day. The probings and eloquence of justice would never paint the picture of that moment of maniacal relief, when, with jaw hanging loose, eyes bulging in exultation of revenge, he had struck those matches with his hairy hands and let them flare in the straw, till the little red flames ran and licked, rustled and licked, and there was nothing to do but watch them lick and burn. Nor of that sudden wildness of dumb fear that rushed into the heart of the crouching creature, changing the madness of his face to palsy. Nor of the recoil from the burning stack; those moments empty with terror. Nor of how terror, through habit of inarticulate, emotionless existence, gave place again to brute stolidity. And so, heavily back across the dewy fields, under the larks’ songs, the cooings of pigeons, the hum of wings, and all the unconscious rhythm of ageless Nature. No! The probings of Justice could never reach the whole truth. And even Justice quailed at its own probings when the mother-child was passed up from Tod’s side into the witness-box and the big laborer was seen to look at her and she at him. She seemed to have grown taller; her pensive little face and beautifully fluffed-out corn-brown hair had an eerie beauty, perched up there in the arid witness-box, as of some small figure from the brush of Botticelli.

“Your name, my dear?”

“Biddy Tryst.”

“How old?”

“Ten next month, please.”

“Do you remember going to live at Mr. Freeland’s cottage?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you remember the first night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you sleep, Biddy?”

“Please, sir, we slept in a big room with a screen. Billy and Susie and me; and father behind the screen.”

“And where was the room?”

“Down-stairs, sir.”

“Now, Biddy, what time did you wake up the first morning?”

“When Father got up.”

“Was that early or late?”

“Very early.”

“Would you know the time?”

“No, sir.”

“But it was very early; how did you know that?”

“It was a long time before we had any breakfast.”

“And what time did you have breakfast?”

“Half past six by the kitchen clock.”

“Was it light when you woke up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When Father got up, did he dress or did he go to bed again?”

“He hadn’t never undressed, sir.”

“Then did he stay with you or did he go out?”

“Out, sir.”

“And how long was it before he came back?”

“When I was puttin’ on Billy’s boots.”

“What had you done in between?”

“Helped Susie and dressed Billy.”

“And how long does that take you generally?”

“Half an hour, sir.”

“I see. What did Father look like when he came in, Biddy?”

The mother-child paused. For the first time it seemed to dawn on her that there was something dangerous in these questions. She twisted her small hands before her and gazed at her father.

The judge said gently:

“Well, my child?”

“Like he does now, sir.”

“Thank you, Biddy.”

That was all; the mother-child was suffered to step down and take her place again by Tod. And in the silence rose the short and rubbery report of little Mr. Pogram blowing his nose. No evidence given that morning was so conclusive, actual, terrible as that unconscious: “Like he does now, sir.” That was why even Justice quailed a little at its own probings.

From this moment the boy knew that Tryst’s fate was sealed. What did all those words matter, those professional patterings one way and the other; the professional jeers: ‘My friend has told you this’ and ‘My friend will tell you that.’ The professional steering of the impartial judge, seated there above them all; the cold, calculated rhapsodies about the heinousness of arson; the cold and calculated attack on the characters of the stone-breaker witness and the tramp witness; the cold and calculated patter of the appeal not to condemn a father on the evidence of his little child; the cold and calculated outburst on the right of every man to be assumed innocent except on overwhelming evidence such as did not here exist. The cold and calculated balancing of pro and con; and those minutes of cold calculation veiled from the eyes of the court. Even the verdict: ‘Guilty’; even the judgment: ‘Three years’ penal servitude.’ All nothing, all superfluity to the boy supporting the tragic gaze of Tryst’s eyes and making up his mind to a desperate resort.

“Three years’ penal servitude!” The big laborer paid no more attention to those words than to any others spoken during that hour’s settlement of his fate. True, he received them standing, as is the custom, fronting the image of Justice, from whose lips they came. But by no single gesture did he let any one see the dumb depths of his soul. If life had taught him nothing else, it had taught him never to express himself. Mute as any bullock led into the slaughtering-house, with something of a bullock’s dulled and helpless fear in his eyes, he passed down and away between his jailers. And at once the professional noises rose, and the professional rhapsodists, hunching their gowns, swept that little lot of papers into their pink tape, and, turning to their neighbors, smiled, and talked, and jerked their eyebrows.

CHAPTER XXXIV

The nest on the Spaniard’s Road had not been able to contain Sheila long. There are certain natures, such as that of Felix, to whom the claims and exercise of authority are abhorrent, who refuse to exercise it themselves and rage when they see it exercised over others, but who somehow never come into actual conflict with it. There are other natures, such as Sheila’s, who do not mind in the least exercising authority themselves, but who oppose it vigorously when they feel it coming near themselves or some others. Of such is the kingdom of militancy. Her experience with the police had sunk deep into her soul. They had not, as a fact, treated her at all badly, which did not prevent her feeling as if they had outraged in her the dignity of woman. She arrived, therefore, in Hampstead seeing red even where red was not. And since, undoubtedly, much real red was to be seen, there was little other color in the world or in her cheeks those days. Long disagreements with Alan, to whom she was still a magnet but whose Stanley-like nature stood firm against the blandishments of her revolting tongue, drove her more and more toward a decision the seeds of which had, perhaps, been planted during her former stay among the breezy airs of Hampstead.

Felix, coming one day into his wife’s study – for the house knew not the word drawing-room – found Flora, with eyebrows lifted up and smiling lips, listening to Sheila proclaiming the doctrine that it was impossible not to live ‘on one’s own.’ Nothing else – Felix learned – was compatible with dignity, or even with peace of mind. She had, therefore, taken a back room high up in a back street, in which she was going to live perfectly well on ten shillings a week; and, having thirty-two pounds saved up, she would be all right for a year, after which she would be able to earn her living. The principle she purposed to keep before her eyes was that of committing herself to nothing which would seriously interfere with her work in life. Somehow, it was impossible to look at this girl, with her glowing cheeks and her glowing eyes, and her hair frizzy from ardor, and to distrust her utterances. Yes! She would arrive, if not where she wanted, at all events somewhere; which, after all, was the great thing. And in fact she did arrive the very next day in the back room high up in the back street, and neither Tod’s cottage nor the house on the Spaniard’s Road saw more than flying gleams of her, thenceforth.

Another by-product, this, of that little starting episode, the notice given to Tryst! Strange how in life one little incident, one little piece of living stress, can attract and gather round it the feelings, thoughts, actions of people whose lives run far and wide away therefrom. But episodes are thus potent only when charged with a significance that comes from the clash of the deepest instincts.

During the six weeks which had elapsed between his return home from Joyfields and the assizes, Felix had much leisure to reflect that if Lady Malloring had not caused Tryst to be warned that he could not marry his deceased wife’s sister and continue to stay on the estate – the lives of Felix himself, his daughter, mother, brother, brother’s wife, their son and daughter, and in less degree of his other brothers, would have been free of a preoccupation little short of ludicrous in proportion to the face value of the cause. But he had leisure, too, to reflect that in reality the issue involved in that tiny episode concerned human existence to its depths – for, what was it but the simple, all-important question of human freedom? The simple, all-important issue of how far men and women should try to rule the lives of others instead of trying only to rule their own, and how far those others should allow their lives to be so ruled? This it was which gave that episode its power of attracting and affecting the thoughts, feelings, actions of so many people otherwise remote. And though Felix was paternal enough to say to himself nearly all the time, ‘I can’t let Nedda get further into this mess!’ he was philosopher enough to tell himself, in the unfatherly balance of his hours, that the mess was caused by the fight best of all worth fighting – of democracy against autocracy, of a man’s right to do as he likes with his life if he harms not others; of ‘the Land’ against the fetterers of ‘the Land.’ And he was artist enough to see how from that little starting episode the whole business had sprung – given, of course, the entrance of the wilful force called love. But a father, especially when he has been thoroughly alarmed, gives the artist and philosopher in him short shrift.

Nedda came home soon after Sheila went, and to the eyes of Felix she came back too old and thoughtful altogether. How different a girl from the Nedda who had so wanted ‘to know everything’ that first night of May! What was she brooding over, what planning, in that dark, round, pretty head? At what resolve were those clear eyes so swiftly raised to look? What was going on within, when her breast heaved so, without seeming cause, and the color rushed up in her cheeks at a word, as though she had been so far away that the effort of recall was alone enough to set all her veins throbbing. And yet Felix could devise no means of attack on her infatuation. For a man cannot cultivate the habit of never interfering and then suddenly throw it over; least of all when the person to be interfered with is his pet and only daughter.

Flora, not of course in the swim of those happenings at Joyflelds, could not be got to take the matter very seriously. In fact – beyond what concerned Felix himself and poetry – the matter that she did take seriously had yet to be discovered. Hers was one of those semi-detached natures particularly found in Hampstead. When exhorted to help tackle the question, she could only suggest that Felix should take them all abroad when he had finished ‘The Last of the Laborers.’ A tour, for instance, in Norway and Sweden, where none of them had ever been, and perhaps down through Finland into Russia.

Feeling like one who squirts on a burning haystack with a garden syringe, Felix propounded this scheme to his little daughter. She received it with a start, a silence, a sort of quivering all over, as of an animal who scents danger. She wanted to know when, and being told – ‘not before the middle of August’, relapsed into her preoccupation as if nothing had been said. Felix noted on the hall table one afternoon a letter in her handwriting, addressed to a Worcester newspaper, and remarked thereafter that she began to receive this journal daily, obviously with a view to reports of the coming assizes. Once he tried to break through into her confidence. It was August Bank Holiday, and they had gone out on to the heath together to see the people wonderfully assembled. Coming back across the burnt-up grass, strewn with paper bags, banana peel, and the cores of apples, he hooked his hand into her arm.

“What is to be done with a child that goes about all day thinking and thinking and not telling anybody what she is thinking?”

She smiled round at him and answered:

“I know, Dad. She IS a pig, isn’t she?”

This comparison with an animal of proverbial stubbornness was not encouraging. Then his hand was squeezed to her side and he heard her murmur:

“I wonder if all daughters are such beasts!”

He understood well that she had meant: ‘There is only one thing I want – one thing I mean to have – one thing in the world for me now!’

And he said soberly:

“We can’t expect anything else.”

“Oh, Daddy!” she answered, but nothing more.

Only four days later she came to his study with a letter, and a face so flushed and troubled that he dropped his pen and got up in alarm.

“Read this, Dad! It’s impossible! It’s not true! It’s terrible! Oh! What am I to do?”

The letter ran thus, in a straight, boyish handwriting:

“ROYAL CHARLES HOSTEL,

“WORCESTER, Aug. 7th.

“MY NEDDA,

“I have just seen Bob tried. They have given him three years’ penal. It was awful to sit there and watch him. He can never stand it. It was awful to watch him looking at ME. It’s no good. I’m going to give myself up. I must do it. I’ve got everything ready; they’ll have to believe me and squash his sentence. You see, but for me it would never have been done. It’s a matter of honour. I can’t let him suffer any more. This isn’t impulse. I’ve been meaning to do it for some time, if they found him guilty. So in a way, it’s an immense relief. I’d like to have seen you first, but it would only distress you, and I might not have been able to go through with it after. Nedda, darling, if you still love me when I get out, we’ll go to New Zealand, away from this country where they bully poor creatures like Bob. Be brave! I’ll write to-morrow, if they let me.