Authors: Stella Gibbons
‘I’m afraid the poor child may be worrying,’ Mrs Smiling would say, vaguely, which was her way of indicating that Goofi had probably committed suicide, out of the depths of unrequited passion. And Bikki or Swooth, knowing from their own experience that this was indeed probably the case, would respond cheerfully, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t fret, if I were you, Mary’, and feel happier at the thought of Goofi’s sufferings.
In the afternoons the five went flying or to the Zoo or to hear music; and in the evenings they went to parties; that is, Mrs Smiling and the two Pioneers-O went to parties, where yet more young men fell in love with Mrs Smiling, and Flora who, as we know, loathed parties, dined quietly with intelligent men: a way of passing the evening which she adored, because then she could show-off a lot and talk about herself.
No letter had come by Monday evening at tea-time; and Flora thought that her departure would probably have to be postponed until Wednesday. But the last post brought her a limp postcard; and she was reading it at half-past ten on her return from one of the showing-off dinners when Mrs Smiling
came in, having wearied of a nasty party she had been attending.
‘Does it give the times of the trains, my dove?’ asked Mrs Smiling. ‘It
is
dirty, isn’t it? I can’t help rather wishing it were possible for the Starkadders to send a clean letter.’
‘It says nothing about trains,’ replied Flora, with reserve. ‘So far as I can make out, it appears to be some verses, with which I must confess I am not familiar, from the Old Testament. There is also a repetition of the assurance that there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort, though why it should be necessary to impress this upon me I am at a loss to imagine.’
‘Oh, do not say it is signed Seth or Reuben,’ cried Mrs Smiling, fearfully.
‘It is not signed at all. I gather that it is from some member of the family who does not welcome the prospect of my visit. I can distinguish a reference, among other things, to vipers. I must say that I think it would have been more to the point to give a list of the trains; but I suppose it is a little illogical to expect such attention to petty details from a doomed family living in Sussex. Well, Mary, I shall go down tomorrow, after lunch, as I planned. I will wire them in the morning to say I am coming.’
‘Shall you fly?’
‘No. There is no landing-stage nearer than Brighton. Besides, I must save money. You and Sneller can work out a route for me; you will enjoy fussing over that.’
‘Of course, darling,’ said Mrs Smiling, who was by now beginning to feel a little unhappy at the prospect of losing her friend. ‘But I wish you would not go.’
Flora put the postcard in the fire; her determination remained unmoved.
The next morning Mrs Smiling looked up trains to Howling, while Flora superintended the packing of her trunks by Riante, Mrs Smiling’s maid.
Even Mrs Smiling could not find much comfort in the timetable. It seemed to her even more confused than usual. Indeed, since the aerial routes and the well-organized road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies
had fallen into a settled melancholy; an idle and repining despair invaded their literature, and its influence was noticeable even in their time-tables.
There was a train which left London Bridge at half-past one for Howling. It was a slow train. It reached Godmere at three o’clock. At Godmere the traveller changed into another train. It was a slow train. It reached Beershorn at six o’clock. At Beershorn this train stopped; and there was no more idle chatter of the arrival and departure of trains. Only the simple sentence ‘Howling (see Beershorn)’ mocked, in its self-sufficing entity, the traveller.
So Flora decided to go to Beershorn, and try her luck.
‘I expect Seth will meet you in a jaunting-car,’ said Mrs Smiling, as they sat at an early lunch.
Their spirits were rather low by this time; and to look out of the window at Lambeth, where the gay little houses were washed by pale sunshine, and to think that she was to exchange the company of Mrs Smiling, and flying and showing-off dinners, for the rigours of Cold Comfort and the grossnesses of the Starkadders did not make Flora more cheerful.
She snapped at poor Mrs Smiling.
‘One does not have jaunting-cars in England, Mary. Do you never read
anything
but “Haussman-Haffnitz on Brassières”? Jaunting-cars are indigenous to Ireland. If Seth meets me at all, it will be in a waggon or a buggy.’
‘Well, I do hope he won’t be called Seth,’ said Mrs Smiling, earnestly. ‘If he
is
, Flora, mind you wire me at once, and about gum-boots, too.’
Flora had risen, for the car was at the door, and was adjusting her hat upon her dark gold hair. ‘I will wire, but do not see what good it will do,’ she said.
She was feeling downright morbid, and her sensations were unpleasingly complicated by the knowledge that it was entirely due to her own obstinacy that she was setting out at all upon this absurd and disagreeable pilgrimage.
‘Oh, but it will, because then I can send things.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh, proper clothes and cheerful fashion papers.’
‘Is Charles coming to the station?’ asked Flora, as they took their seats in the car.
‘He said he might. Why?’
‘Oh – I don’t know. He rather amuses me, and I quite like him.’
The journey through Lambeth was unmarked by any incident, save that Flora pointed out to Mrs Smiling that a flower-shop named Orchidaceous, Ltd, had been opened upon the site of the old police station in Caroline Place.
Then the car drew into London Bridge yard; and there was Flora’s train, and Charles carrying a bunch of flowers, and Bikki and Swooth looking pleased because Flora was going away and Mrs Smiling (so they feverishly hoped) would have more time to spend in their company.
‘Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired,’ reflected Flora, as she leaned out of the carriage window and observed the faces of Bikki and Swooth. ‘Shall I tell them that Mig is expected home from Ontario tomorrow? No, I think not. It would be downright sadistic.’
‘Goodbye, darling!’ cried Mrs Smiling, as the train began to move.
‘Goodbye,’ said Charles, putting his daffodils, which he had forgotten until that moment, into Flora’s hands. ‘Don’t forget to ’phone me if it gets too much for you, and I will come and take you away in Speed Cop II.’
‘I won’t forget, Charles dear. Thank you very much – though I am quite sure I shall find it very amusing and not at all too much for me.’
‘Goodbye,’ cried Bikki and Swooth, falsely composing their faces into some semblance of regret.
‘Goodbye. Don’t forget to feed the parrot!’ shrieked Flora, who disliked this prolongation of the ceremony of saying farewell, as every civilized traveller must.
‘What parrot?’ they all shrieked back from the fast-receding platform, just as they were meant to do.
But it was too much trouble to reply. Flora contented herself with muttering ‘Oh, any parrot, bless you all’, and with a final
affectionate wave of her hand to Mrs Smiling, she drew back into the carriage and, opening a fashion journal, composed herself for the journey.
**Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.
The farm was crouched on a bleak hillside, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away. Its stables and outhouses were built in the shape of a rough octangle surrounding the farmhouse itself, which was built in the shape of a rough triangle. The left point of the triangle abutted on the farthest point of the octangle, which was formed by the cowsheds, which lay parallel with the big barn. The outhouses were built of roughcast stone, with thatched roofs, while the farm itself was built partly of local flint, set in cement, and partly of some stone brought at great trouble and enormous personal expense from Perthshire.
The farmhouse was a long, low building, two-storied in parts. Other parts of it were three-storied. Edward the Sixth had originally owned it in the form of a shed in which he housed his swineherds, but he had grown tired of it, and had had it rebuilt in Sussex clay. Then he pulled it down. Elizabeth had rebuilt it, with a good many chimneys in one way and another. The Charleses had let it alone; but William and Mary had pulled it down again, and George the First had rebuilt it. George the Second, however, burned it down. George the Third added another wing. George the Fourth pulled it down again.
By the time England began to develop that magnificent blossoming of trade and imperial expansion which fell to
her lot under Victoria, there was not much of the original building left, save the tradition that it had always been there. It crouched, like a beast about to spring, under the bulk of Mockuncle Hill. Like ghosts embedded in brick and stone, the architectural variations of each period through which it had passed were mute history. It was known locally as ‘The King’s Whim’.
The front door of the farm faced a perfectly inaccessible ploughed field at the back of the house; it had been the whim of Red Raleigh Starkadder, in 1835, to have it so; and so the family always used to come in by the back door, which abutted on the general yard facing the cowsheds. A long corridor ran half-way through the house on the second storey and then stopped. One could not get into the attics at all. It was all very awkward.
*** Growing with the viscuous light that was invading the sky, there came the solemn, tortured-snake voice of the sea, two miles away, falling in sharp folds upon the mirror-expanses of the beach.
Under the ominous bowl of the sky a man was ploughing the sloping field immediately below the farm, where the flints shone bone-sharp and white in the growing light. The ice-cascade of the wind leaped over him, as he guided the plough over the flinty runnels. Now and again he called roughly to his team:
‘Upidee, Travail! Ho, there, Arsenic! Jug-jug!’ But for the most part he worked in silence, and silent were his team. The light showed no more of his face than a grey expanse of flesh, expressionless as the land he ploughed, from which looked out two sluggish eyes.
Every now and again, when he came to the corner of the field and was forced to tilt the scranlet of his plough almost on to its axle to make the turn, he glanced up at the farm where it squatted on the gaunt shoulder of the hill, and something like a possessive gleam shone in his dull eyes. But he only turned his team again, watching the crooked passage of the scranlet through the yeasty earth, and muttered: ‘Hola, Arsenic! Belay there, Travail!’ while the bitter light wanned into full day.
Because of the peculiar formation of the outhouses surrounding the farm, the light was always longer in reaching the yard than the rest of the house. Long after the sunlight was shining through the cobwebs on the uppermost windows of the old house the yard was in damp blue shadow.
It was in shadow now, but sharp gleams sprang from the ranged milk-buckets along the ford-piece outside the cowshed.
Leaving the house by the back door, you came up sharply against a stone wall running right across the yard, and turning abruptly, at right angles, just before it reached the shed where the bull was housed, and running down to the gate leading out into the ragged garden where mallows, dog’s-body and wild turnip were running riot. The bull’s shed abutted upon the right corner of the dairy, which faced the cowsheds. The cowsheds faced the house, but the back door faced the bull’s shed. From here a long-roofed barn extended the whole length of the octangle until it reached the front door of the house. Here it took a quick turn, and ended. The dairy was awkwardly placed; it had been a thorn in the side of old Fig Starkadder, the last owner of the farm, who had died three years ago. The dairy overlooked the front door, in face of the extreme point of the triangle which formed the ancient buildings of the farmhouse.
From the dairy a wall extended which formed the right-hand boundary of the octangle, joining the bull’s shed and the pigpens at the extreme end of the right point of the triangle. A staircase, put in to make it more difficult, ran parallel with the octangle, half-way round the yard, against the wall which led down to the garden gate.
The spurt and regular ping! of milk against metal came from the reeking interior of the sheds. The bucket was pressed between Adam Lambsbreath’s knees, and his head was pressed deep into the flank of Feckless, the big Jersey. His gnarled hands mechanically stroked the teat, while a low crooning, mindless as the Down wind itself, came from his lips.
He was asleep. He had been awake all night, wandering in thought over the indifferent bare shoulders of the Downs after his wild bird, his little flower …
Elfine. The name, unspoken but sharply musical as a glittering
bead shaken from a fountain’s tossing necklace, hovered audibly in the rancid air of the shed.
The beasts stood with heads lowered dejectedly against the wooden hoot-pieces of their stalls. Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless awaited their turn to be milked. Sometimes Aimless ran her dry tongue, with a rasping sound sharp as a file through silk, awkwardly across the bony flank of Feckless, which was still moist with the rain that had fallen upon it through the roof during the night, or Pointless turned her large dull eyes sideways as she swung her head upwards to tear down a mouthful of cobwebs from the wooden runnet above her head. A lowering, moist, steamy light, almost like that which gleams below the eyelids of a man in fever, filled the cowshed.
Suddenly a tortured bellow, a blaring welter of sound that shattered the quiescence of the morning, tore its way across the yard, and died away in a croak that was almost a sob. It was Big Business, the bull, wakening to another day, in the clammy darkness of his cell.