madness. You cannot tire Lettie; her feet are wings that beat the air. When at last I stayed her she laughed as fresh as ever, as she bound her hair.
“There!” she said to Leslie, in tones of extreme satisfaction. “That was lovely. Do you come and dance now.”
“Not a polka,” said he, sadly, feeling the poetry in his heart insulted by the jigging measure.
“But one cannot dance anything else on wet grass, and through shuffling dead leaves. You, George?”
“Emily says I jump,” he replied.
“Come on — come on”— and in a moment they were bounding across the grass. After a few steps she fell in with him, and they spun round the grass. It was true, he leaped, sprang with large strides, carrying her with him. It was a tremendous, irresistible dancing. Emily and I must join, making an inner ring. Now and again there was a sense of something white flying near, and wild rustle of draperies, and a swish of disturbed leaves as they whirled past us. Long after we were tired they danced on.
At the end, he looked big, erect, nerved with triumph, and she was exhilarated like a Bacchante.
“Have you finished?” Leslie asked.
She knew she was safe from his question that day.
“Yes,” she panted. “You should have danced. Give me my hat, please. Do I look very disgraceful?”
He took her hat and gave it to her.
“Disgraceful?” he repeated.
“Oh, you are solemn tonight! What is it?”
“Yes, what is it?” he repeated ironically.
“It must be the moon. Now, is my hat straight? Tell me now — you’re not looking. Then put it level. Now then! Why, your hands are quite cold, and mine so hot! I feel so impish,” and she laughed.
“There — now I’m ready. Do you notice those little chrysanthemums trying to smell sadly; when the old moon is laughing and winking through those boughs. What business have they with their sadness!” She took a handful of petals and flung them into the air: “There — if they sigh they ask for sorrow — I like things to wink and look wild.”
Chapter 6
The Education of George
As I have said, Strelley Mill lies at the north end of the long Nethermere valley. On the northern slopes lay its pasture and arable lands. The shaggy common, now closed, and the cultivated land was bounded on the east by the sharp dip of the brook course, a thread of woodland broadening into a spinney and ending at the upper pond; beyond this, on the east, rose the sharp, wild, grassy hillside, scattered with old trees, ruinous with the gaunt, ragged bones of old hedge-rows, grown into thorn trees. Along the rim of the hills, beginning in the north-west, were dark woodlands, which swept round east and south till they raced down in riot to the very edge of southern Nethermere, surrounding our house. From the eastern hill-crest, looking straight across, you could see the spire of Selsby church, and a few roofs, and the head-stocks of the pit.
So on three sides the farm was skirted by woods, the dens of rabbits, and the common held another warren.
Now the squire of the estate, head of an ancient, once even famous, but now decayed house, loved his rabbits. Unlike the family fortunes, the family tree flourished amazingly; Sherwood could show nothing comparable. Its ramifications were stupendous; it was more like a banyan than a British oak. How was the good squire to nourish himself and his lady, his name, his tradition, and his thirteen lusty branches on his meagre estates? An evil fortune discovered to him that he could sell each of his rabbits, those bits of furry vermin, for a shilling or thereabout in Nottingham; since which time the noble family subsisted by rabbits.
Farms were gnawed away; corn and sweet grass departed from the face of the hills; cattle grew lean, unable to eat the defiled herbage. Then the farm became the home of a keeper, and the country was silent, with no sound of cattle, no clink of horses, no barking of lusty dogs.
But the squire loved his rabbits. He defended them against the snares of the despairing farmer, protected them with gun and notices to quit. How he glowed with thankfulness as he saw the dishevelled hillside heave when the gnawing hosts moved on!
“Are they not quails and manna?” said he to his sporting guest, early one Monday morning, as the high meadow broke into life at the sound of his gun. “Quails and manna — in this wilderness?”
“They are, by Jove!” assented the sporting guest as he took another gun, while the saturnine keeper smiled grimly. Meanwhile, Strelley Mill began to suffer under this gangrene. It was the outpost in the wilderness. It was an understood thing that none of the squire’s tenants had a gun.
“Well,” said the squire to Mr Saxton, “you have the land for next to nothing — next to nothing — at a rent really absurd. Surely the little that the rabbits eat —”
“It’s not a little — come and look for yourself,” replied the farmer. The squire made a gesture of impatience.
“What do you want?” he inquired.
“Will you wire me off?” was the repeated request.
“Wire is — what does Halkett say — so much per yard — and it would come to — what did Halkett tell me now? — but a Harge sum. No, I can’t do it.”
“Well, I can’t live like this.”
“Have another glass of whisky? Yes, yes, I want another glass myself, and I can’t drink alone — so if I am to enjoy my glass — That’s it! Now surely you exaggerate a little. It’s not so bad.”
“I can’t go on like it, I’m sure.”
“Well, we’ll see about compensation — we’ll see. I’ll have a talk with Halkett, and I’ll come down and have a look at you. We all find a pinch somewhere — it’s nothing but humanity’s heritage.”
I was born in September, and love it best of all the months. There is no heat, no hurry, no thirst and weariness in corn harvest as there is in the hay. If the season is late, as is usual with us, then mid-September sees the corn still standing in stook. The mornings come slowly. The earth is like a woman married and fading; she does not leap up with a laugh for the first fresh kiss of dawn, but slowly, quietly, unexpectantly lies watching the waking of each new day. The blue mist, like memory in the eyes of a neglected wife, never goes from the wooded hill, and only at noon creeps from the near hedges. There is no bird to put a song in the throat of morning; only the crow’s voice speaks during the day. Perhaps there is the regular breathing hush of the scythe — even the fretful jar of the mowing-machine. But next day, in the morning, all is still again. The lying corn is wet, and when you have bound it, and lift the heavy sheaf to make the stook, the tresses of oats wreathe round each other and drop mournfully.
As I worked with my friend through the still mornings we talked endlessly. I would give him the gist of what I knew of chemistry, and botany, and psychology. Day after day I told him what the professors had told me; of life, of sex and its origins; of Schopenhauer and William James.
