Chapter 16

He had been forced to engage a woman to help Caro in the house, and also a shepherd for Richard's work. His family had been whittled down to almost nothing. Only Caro, Pete, and Jemmy were left out of his eight splendid boys and girls. Caro, Pete, Jemmy, and hideous, mumbling Harry—he surveyed the four of them with contemptuous scowls. Pete was the only one who was worth anything—Caro and Jemmy would turn against him if they had the slightest chance and forsake him with the rest. As for Harry, he was a grotesque, an image, a hideous fum—"Reuben himself as he really was." He! He!

The weeks wore on and it dawned on him that he must pull himself together for a fresh campaign. He must have more warriors—he could not fight Boarzell with only traitors and hirelings. He must marry again.

It was some time since the abstract idea of marriage had begun to please him, but lately the abstract of marriage had always led to the concrete of Alice Jury, so he had driven it from his thoughts. Now, more and more clearly, he saw that he must marry. He wanted a woman and he wanted children, so he must marry. But he must not marry Alice.

Of late he had resumed his visits to Cheat Land, discontinued for a while at Tilly's marriage. The attraction of Alice Jury was as strong, unfathomable, and unaccountable as ever. Since the stormy interview after Richard's desertion they had not discussed his ambitions[Pg 238] for Odiam and Boarzell, but that meeting was none the less stamped on Reuben's memory with a gloomy significance. It was not that Alice's arguments had affected him at all—she had not penetrated to the springs of his enterprise, she had not touched or conjured the hidden part of him in which his ambition's roots were twined round all that was vital and sacred in the man. But somehow she had expressed her own attitude with an almost sinister clearness—"It's I who am fighting Boarzell." What should she fight it for?—imagine that she fought it, rather, for a woman could not really fight Boarzell. She was fighting it for him. She wanted him.

He knew that Alice wanted him, and he knew that he wanted Alice. He did not know why he wanted Alice any more than he knew why Alice wanted him. "Wot is she?—a liddle stick of a creature. And I like big women."

There was something in the depths of him that cried for her, something which had never moved or cried in him before. In spite of her lack of beauty and beguilement, in spite of her hostility to all his darling schemes, there was something in him to which Alice actually and utterly belonged. He did not understand it, he could not analyse it, he scarcely indeed realised it—all he felt was the huge upheaval, the conflict that it brought, all the shouting and the struggling of the desperate and motiveless craving that he felt for her—a hunger in him calling through days and nights, in spite of her insignificance, her aloofness, her silences, her antagonism.

"I reckon as how I must be in love."

That was the conclusion he came to after much heavy pondering. He had never been truly in love before. He had wanted women for various reasons, either for their charm and beauty, or because, as in Naomi's case, of their practical use to him. Alice had no beauty, and a charm too subtle for him to realise, though as a matter of fact[Pg 239] the whole man was plastic to it—as for practical usefulness, she was poor, delicate, unaccustomed to country life, and hostile to all his most vital ambitions. She would not bring him wealth or credit, she was not likely to bear him healthy children—and yet he loved her.

Sometimes, roaming through murky dusks, he realised in the dim occasional flashes which illuminate the non-thinking man, that he was up against the turning-point of his fight with Boarzell. If he married Alice it would be the token of what had always seemed more unimaginable than his defeat—his voluntary surrender. Sometimes he told himself fiercely that he could fight Boarzell with Alice hanging, so to speak, over his arm; but in his heart he knew that he could not. He could not have both Alice and Boarzell.

Yet, in spite of all this, one day at Cheat Land he nearly fell at her feet and asked her to be his ruin.

It was a March twilight, cold and rustling, and tart with the scents of newly turned furrows. Reuben sat with Alice in the kitchen, and every now and then Jury's wretched house-place would shake as the young gale swept up rainless from the east and poured itself into cracks and chimneys. Alice was sewing as usual—it struck Reuben that she was very quick and useful with her fingers, whatever might be her drawbacks in other ways. Sometimes she had offered to read poetry to him, and had once bored him horribly with In Memoriam, but as he had taken no trouble to hide his feelings she had to his great relief announced her intention of casting no more pearls before swine.

She was silent, and the firelight playing in her soft, lively eyes gave her a kind of mystery which for the first time allowed Reuben a glimpse into the sources of her attraction. She was utterly unlike anything there was or had been in his life, the only thing he knew that did not smell of earth. The pity of it was that he loved that strong-smelling earth so much.
 
"Alice," he said suddenly—"Do you think as how you could ever care about Boarzell?"

"No, I'm quite sure I couldn't."

"Not ever?"

"Never."

"Why?"

"Because I hate it. It's spoiling your life. It's making a beast and a maniac of you. You think of nothing—absolutely nothing—but a miserable rubbish-heap that most people would be throwing their old kettles on."

"That's just the point, my gal. Where most f?alkses 'ud be throwing old kettles, I shall be growing wheat."

"And what good will that do you?"

"Good!—when I've two hundred acres sown with grain!"

"Yes, grain that's fertilised with the rotting remains of all that ought to have made your life good and sweet."

"You w?an't understand. There's naun in the world means anything to me but my farm. Oh, Alice, if you could only see things wud my eyes and stand beside me instead of ag?unst me."

"Then there would be no more friendship between us. What unites us is the fact that we are fighting each other."

"D?an't talk rubbidge, liddle gal. It's because I see, all the fight there is in you that I'd sooner you fought for me than ag?unst me. Couldn't you try, Alice?"

His voice had sunk very low, almost to sweetness. A soft flurry of pink went over her face, and her eyelids drooped. Then suddenly she braced herself, pulled herself taut, grew combative again, though her voice shook.

"No, Reuben, I could never do anything but fight your schemes. I think you are wasting and spoiling your life, and there's no use expecting me to stand by you."
 
He now realised the full extent of his peril, because for the first time he saw her position unmasked. She would never beguile him with the thought that she could help him in his life's desire; she would not alter the essential flavour of their relationship to suit his taste—rather she would force him to swallow it, she would subdue by strength and not by stealth, and fight him to the end.

He must escape, for if he surrendered now the battle was over, and he would have betrayed Boarzell the loved to something he loved less—loved less, he knew it, though he wavered.

He rose to his feet. The kitchen was dark, with eddying sweeps of shadow in the corners which the firelight caressed—while a single star put faint ghostly romance into the window.

"I—I must be gitting back home."

Alice rose too, and for a moment he was surprised that she did not try to keep him; instead, she said:

"It's late."

He moved a step or two towards the door, and suddenly she added in a low broken voice:

"But not too late."

The floor seemed to rise towards him, and the star in the window to dance down into Castweasel woods and up again.

Alice stood in the middle of the room, her face bloomed with dusk and firelight, her hands stretched out towards him....

There was silence, in which a coal fell. She still stood with her arms outstretched; he knew that she was calling him—as no woman had ever called him—with all that of herself which was in his heart, part of his own being.

"Reuben."

"Alice."

He came a few steps back into the room....
 
It was those few steps which lost him to her, for they brought him within sight of Boarzell—framed in the window, where Castweasel woods had been. It lay in a great hush, a great solitude, a quiet beast of power and mystery. It seemed to call to him through the twilight like a love forsaken. There it lay, Boarzell—strong, beautiful, desired, untamed, still his hope, still his battle. And Alice?... He gave her a look, and left her.

"I once t?ald a boy of mine," he said to himself as he crossed the Moor, "that the sooner he found he could do wudout love the better.... Well, I reckon I'm not going to be any weaker than my words."