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Samuel Richardson - "Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8"

Various - "Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870"

George W. Cable - "Kincaid's Battery"

Walter de la Mare - "Collected Poems 1901 1918 in Two Volumes"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




Some half-mile further is Horny Cross where, as the name indicates, four
roads meet. That from Deadham to the edge of the forest runs north; the
other, from Beaupres-on-Sea to Marychurch, Stourmouth and Barryport, due
west. Damaris, having a fancy to keep the coast-line out of sight, chose
the former, following the valley of the Arne, between great flat meadows
where herds of dairy cows, of red Devons and black Welsh runts, feed in
the rich deep grass. In one place a curve of the river brings it, for
three hundred yards or more, close under the hanging woods, only the
width of the roadway between the broad stream and living wall of trees.
Here transparent bluish shadow haunted the undergrowth, and the air grew
delicately chill, charged with the scent of fern, of moist earth, leaf
mould, and moss.

Such traffic as held the road was leisurely, native to the scene and
therefore pleasing to the sight.--For the age of self-moving machines on
land had barely dawned yet; while the sky was still wholly inviolate.--A
white tilted miller's wagon, a brewer's dray, each drawn by well-favoured
teams with jingling bells and brass-mounted harness, rumbling farm carts,
a gypsy van painted in crude yellow, blue, and red and its accompanying
rabble of children, donkeys and dogs, a farmer's high-hung, curtseying
gig, were in turn met or passed. For the black horse, Damaris driving it,
gave place to none, covering the mounting tale of miles handsomely at an
even, swinging trot.

At Lady's Oak, a noble tree marking some ancient forest boundary and
consequently spared when the needs of the British Navy, during the French
wars of the early years of the century, condemned so many of its fellows
to the axe--the flattened burnished dome of which glinted back the
sunlight above a maze of spreading branches and massive powder-grey
trunk--the main road forks. Damaris turned to the left, across the
single-arch stone bridge spanning the Arne, and drove on up the long
winding ascent from the valley to the moorland and fir plantations which
range inland behind Stourmouth. This constituted the goal of her journey,
for once the high-lying plateau reached, leagues of country open out far
as the eye carries to the fine, bare outline of the Wiltshire downs.

She checked the horse, letting it walk, while she took stock of her
surroundings.

It may be asserted that there are two ways of holding converse with
Nature. The one is egotistic and sentimental, an imposing of personal
tastes and emotions which betrays the latent categoric belief that the
existence of external things is limited to man's apprehension of them--a
vilely conceited if not actually blasphemous doctrine! The other is that
of the seeker and the seer, who, approaching in all reverence, asks no
more than leave to listen to the voice of external things--recognizing
their independent existence, knowing them to be as real as he is, as
wonderful, in their own order as permanent, possibly as potent even for
good and evil as himself. And it was, happily, according to this latter
reading of the position, instinctively, by the natural bent of her mind,
that Damaris attempted converse with the world without.

The glory of the heather had passed, the bloom now showing only as
silver-pink froth upon an ocean of warm brown. But the colouring was
restful, the air here on the dry gravel soil light and eager, and the
sense of height and space exhilarating. A fringe of harebells, of orange
hawkweed and dwarf red sorrel bordered the road. Every small oasis of
turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of
centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil.
Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning
note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the
distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark
trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear
and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl
welcomed. It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings,
involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The
Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, past passions,
were prone to breed in her. No reek off the mud-flats, any more than over
luscious garden scents, tainted the atmosphere. It was virgin as the soil
of the moorland--a soil as yet untamed and unfertilized by the labour of
man. And this effect of virginity, even though a trifle _farouche_,
harsh, and barren in the perfection of its purity, appealed to Damaris'
present mood. Her spirit leapt to meet it in proud fellowship. For it
routed forebodings. Discounted introspective broodings. Discounted even
the apparently inevitable--since nobody and nothing, so the young girl
told herself with a rush of gladly resolute conviction, is really
inevitable unless you permit or choose to have them so.--Gallant this,
and the mother of brave doings; though--as Damaris was to discover later,
to the increase both of wisdom and of sorrow--a half-truth only. For man
is never actually master of people or of things; but master, at most, of
his own attitude towards them. In this alone can he claim or exercise
free-will.

Then--because general ideas, however inspiriting, are rather heavy diet
for the young, immature minds growing quickly tired in the efforts to
digest them--Damaris, having reached this happy, if partially erroneous,
climax of emancipation, ceased to philosophize either consciously or
unconsciously. The russet moorland and spacious landscape shut the door
on her, had no more to tell her, no more to say. Or, to be strictly
accurate, was it not rather perhaps that her power of response, power to
interpret their speech and assimilate their message had reached its term?
All her life the maturity of her brain had inclined--rather
fatiguingly--to outrun the maturity of her body, so that she failed "to
continue in one stay" and trivial hours trod close on the heels of hours
of exaltation and of insight.

With a sigh and a sense of loss--as though noble companions had withdrawn
themselves from her--she gathered up the reins and sent the horse
forward. She fell into comfortable friendly conversation with the
Napoleonic-countenanced Patch, moreover, consulting him as to the
shortest way, through the purlieus of Stourmouth, into the Marychurch
high road and so home to Deadham Hard. For, to tell the truth, she became
aware she was hungry and very badly in want of her tea.

Theresa Bilson, setting out the next morning in solitary state, contrived
to maintain the adopted attitude until the front gates were safely
passed. Then she relaxed and looked out of the brougham windows with a
fussy brightness more consonant to the joys of impending union with the
Miss Minetts and the day's impending trip. She made no further effort to
secure Damaris' participation in the social and educational advantages
which it promised. On the contrary she left the young lady severely alone
and at home, as one administering well-merited punishment. Thus
effectively demonstrating, as she wished to believe, her personal
authority; and suiting, as she would have stoutly denied, her personal
convenience. For Damaris on a string, plus the extra brake and carriage
horses, was one story; Damaris on her own, minus those animals and
much-debated vehicle, quite another. Unless the presence of her ex-pupil
could be made to redound to her own glory, Theresa much preferred
reserving representation of The Hard and its distinguished proprietor
wholly and solely to herself. So in the spirit of pretence and of
make-believe did she go forth; to find, on her return, that spirit prove
but a lying and treacherous ally--and for more reasons than one.

It happened thus. Supported by the two brindled tabby house cats,
Geraldine and Mustapha--descendants of the numerous tribe honoured,
during the last half-century of his long life, by Thomas Clarkson
Verity's politely affectionate patronage--Damaris spent the greater part
of the morning in the long writing room.

She had judged and condemned Theresa pretty roundly it is true,
nevertheless she felt a little hurt and sore at the latter's treatment
of her. Theresa need not have kept up the quarrel till the very last so
acridly. After all, as she was going out purely for own pleasure and
amusement, she might have found something nice and civil to say at
parting. And then the mere fact of being left behind, of being out of
it, however limited the charms of a party, has a certain small stab to
it somehow--as most persons, probing youthful experiences, can testify.
It is never quite pleasant to be the one who doesn't go!--The house,
moreover, when her father was absent, always reminded Damaris of an
empty shrine, a place which had lost its meaning and purpose. To-day,
though windows and doors were wide open letting in a wealth of sunshine,
it appeared startlingly lifeless and void. The maids seemed unusually
quiet. She heard no movement on the staircase or in the rooms above.
Neither gardener nor garden-boy was visible. She would have hailed the
whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn.--Oh! if
only her poor dear Nannie were still alive, safe upstairs, there in the
old nursery!

And at that the child Damaris felt a lump rise in her throat. But the
girl, the soon-to-be woman, Damaris choked it down bravely. For nobody,
nothing--so she assured herself, going back to the lesson learned
yesterday upon the open moorland--is really inevitable unless you suffer
or will it so to be. Wherefore she stiffened herself against recognition
of loneliness, stiffened herself against inclination to mourning, refused
to acquiesce in or be subjugated by either and, to the better forgetting
of them, sought consolation among her great-great uncle's books.

For at this period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form
of literature and every description of knowledge--whether clearly
comprehended or not--which the beloved printed page has to give. An
eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions
with Theresa, and at this particular juncture all the more agreeable to
gratify on that very account. For Theresa would have had her walk only in
the narrow, sheltered, neatly bordered paths of history and fiction
designed, for the greater preservation of female innocence, by such
authors as Miss Sewell, Miss Strickland, and Miss Yonge. Upon Damaris,
however, perambulation of those paths palled too soon. Her intellect and
heart alike demanded wider fields of drama, of religion and of science,
above all wider and less conventional converse with average human nature,
than this triumvirate of Victorian sibyls was willing or capable to
supply. It is undeniable that, although words and phrases, whole episodes
indeed, were obscure even unintelligible to her, she found the memoirs of
Benvenuto Cellini and Saint Simon more interesting than the "Lives of the
Queens of England; Vathek," more to her taste than "Amy Herbert"; and,
if the truth must be told, "The Decameron," and "Tristram Shandy" more
satisfying to her imagination than "The Heir of Redcliffe" or "The Daisy
Chain." To Damaris it seemed, just now, that a book the meaning of which
was quite clear to her and could be grasped at sight, hardly repaid the
trouble of reading, since it afforded no sense of adventure, no
excitement of challenge or of pursuit, no mirage of wonder, no delightful
provocation of matters outside her experience and not understood. About
these latter she abstained from asking questions, having much faith in
the illuminating power of the future. Given patience, all in good time
she would understand everything worth understanding.--That there are
things in life best not understood, or understood only at your peril, she
already in some sort divined.--Hence her reading although of the order
obnoxious to pedants, as lacking in method and accurate scholarship, went
to produce a mental atmosphere in which honest love of letters and of
art, along with generous instincts of humanity quicken and thrive.

On this particular morning Damaris elected to explore to the Near East,
in the vehicle of Eoethen's virile and luminous prose. She sat in one of
the solid wide seated arm-chairs at the fire-place end of a long room,
near a rounded window, the lower sash, of which she raised to its full
height. Outside the row of geranium beds glowed scarlet and crimson in
the calm light. Beyond them the turf of the lawn was overspread by
trailing gossamers, and delicate cart-wheel spider's webs upon which the
dew still glittered. In the shrubberies robins sang; and above the river
great companies of swallows swept to and fro, with sharp twitterings,
restlessly gathering for their final southern flight.

No sooner had Damaris fairly settled down with her book, than Mustapha
jumped upon her knees; and after, preliminary buttings and tramplings,
curled himself round in gross comfort, his soft lithe body growing warmer
and heavier, on her lap, as his sleep deepened. Where a bar of sunshine
crossed the leather inset of the writing-table, just beside her in the
window, Geraldine--his counterpart as to markings and colouring, but
finer made, more slender of barrel and of limb--fitted herself into the
narrow space between a silver inkstand and a stack of folded newspapers,
her fore-paws tucked neatly under her chest, furry elbows outward. Her
muzzle showed black, as did the rims of her eyelids which enhanced the
brightness and size of her clear, yellow-green eyes. Her alert, observant
little head was raised, as, with gently lashing tail, she watched an
imprisoned honey-bee buzzing angrily up and down between the
window-sashes.

An elfin creature, Geraldine,--repaying liberal study. Scornfully secure
of the potency of her own charms where mankind, or Tomcat-kind, might be
concerned, royally devoid of morals, past-mistress in all sprightly,
graceful, feline devilries, she was yet a fond mother, solicitous to the
point of actual selflessness regarding the safety and well-being of her
successive and frequently recurrent litters. She suckled, washed, played
with and educated those of her kittens who escaped the rigours of
stable-bucket and broom, until such time as they were three to four
months old. After which she sent them flying, amid cuffings and spittings
extraordinary, whenever they attempted to approach her; and, oblivious of
their orphaned and wistful existence, yielded herself with bewitching
vivacity, to fresh intrigues and amours new.

The long quiet morning indoors, with cats and books for company, at once
soothed Damaris and made her restless. After luncheon she put on hat,
gloves, and walking shoes, and went down across the lawn to the sea-wall.
Waylaying her in the hall, Mary had essayed to learn her programme, and
anchor her as to time and place by enquiring when and where tea should be
served. But Damaris put the kindly woman off.--She couldn't say
exactly--yet--would ring and let Mary know when she came in. If any one
called, she was not at home.

In truth her active young body asked for movement and exercise, while
scenes and phrases from the pages of Eoethen still filled her mind. She
longed for travel. Not via Marychurch to Harchester, well understood,
shepherded by Theresa Bilson, the members of the Deadham Church choir and
their supporters; but for travel upon the grand scale, with all its
romance and enlargement of experience, its possible dangers and certain
hardships, as the author of Eoethen had known it and her father, for that
matter, had known it in earlier days too. She suffered the spell of the
East--always haunting the chambers of her memory and ready to be stirred
in active ascendency, as by her morning's reading to-day--suffered the
spell not of its mysterious cities and civilizations alone, but of its
vast solitudes and silences, desert winds and desert sands.

And hence it came about that, as her mood of yesterday sent her inland to
pacify her imagination by gazing at the peaceful English country-side, so
her present mood sent her down to the shore to satisfy, or rather further
stimulate, her nostalgia for the East by gazing out to sea.

The cause in both cases was the same, namely, the inward tumult of her
awakening womanhood, and still more, perhaps, the tumult of awakening
talent which had not as yet found its appointed means of expression. She
was driven hither and thither by the push of her individuality to
disengage itself from adventitious surroundings and circumstances, and
realize its independent existence.--A somewhat perilous crisis of
development, fruitful of escapades and unruly impulses which may leave
their mark, and that a disfiguring one, upon the whole of a woman's
subsequent career.

Immediately, however, Damaris' disposition to defy established convention
and routine took the mildest and apparently most innocuous form--merely
the making, by herself, of a little expedition which, accompanied by
others, she had made a hundred times before. From the terrace she went
down the flight of steps, built into the width of the sea-wall, whence a
tall wrought-iron gate opens direct upon the foreshore. Closing it behind
her, she followed the coastguard-path, at the base of the
river-bank--here a miniature sand cliff capped with gravel, from eight
to ten feet high--which leads to the warren and the ferry. For she would
take ship, with foxy-faced William Jennifer as captain and as crew, cross
to the broken-down wooden jetty and, landing there, climb the crown of
the Bar and look south-east, over the Channel highway, towards far
distant countries of the desert and the dawn.




CHAPTER IV

OUT ON THE BAR


All which was duly accomplished though with a difference. For on reaching
the head of the shallow sandy gully opening on the tide, where the
flat-bottomed ferry-boat lay, Damaris found not Jennifer but the withered
and doubtfully clean old lobster-catcher, Timothy Proud, in possession.
This disconcerted her somewhat. His appearance, indeed--as he stood
amongst a miscellaneous assortment of sun-bleached and weather-stained
foreshore lumber, leaning the ragged elbows of his blue jersey upon the
top of an empty petroleum barrel and smoking a dirty clay pipe--was so
far from inviting, that the young girl felt tempted to relinquish her
enterprise and go back by the way she had come.

But, as she hesitated, the old man catching sight of her and scenting
custom, first spat and then called aloud.

"Might 'e be wanting the Ferry, Miss?" Thus directly challenged, Damaris
could not but answer in the affirmative.

"Put 'e across to the Bar?" he took her up smartly. "Nat'rally I
will--bean't I here for the very purpose?--Put 'e across I will and on
the tick too."

And, after further expectoration, relinquishing the support of the oil
barrel, he joined her and shambled down the sandy track at her side,
talking. Damaris hastened her step; but bent back and creaking breath
notwithstanding, Proud kept pace with her, his speech and movements alike
animated by a certain malicious glee.

"William 'e give hisself an 'oliday," he explained, "to take the little
dorgs and ferrets up to Butcher Cleave's ratting. Powerful sight of
varmin there allers be round they sheds and places. Comes after the
innards and trimmings they do, as bold as you please."

"Oh, yes--no doubt. I understand," Damaris said, at once anxious to
arrest the flow of his unsavoury eloquence yet to appear civil, since she
was about to make use of his services.

"'Normous great rats they be," he however continued, with evident relish.
"'Normous and fierce as tigers, the rascals, what with feasting on flesh
and fatness like so many lords. So 'mind the ferry for me, will you,
Daddy,' William says, coming round where was I taking my morning pint
over at the Inn. 'You're a wonderful valorous man of your years'--and so
thank the powers, Miss, I be--'can handle the old scraw as clever as I
can myself,' William says. 'There ain't much about water, salt or fresh,
nor whatsoever moves on the face of it, nor down below in the belly of
it, any man can teach you.' Which may seem putting it a bit high yet
ain't no more than truth and justice, Miss, so you needn't fear to trust
yourself across the ferry along of me."

"I have no fear," Damaris answered curtly and loftily, holding herself
very erect, her face slightly flushed, her eyes war-like.

For he was a repulsive old man, and said repulsive things such as she had
never heard put thus plainly into words before. She felt soiled by even
this brief association with him. She wanted to hear no more of his ugly
high-coloured talk, although of his skill as a waterman she entertained
no doubt. Stepping lightly and quickly up on to the square stern of the
ferry-boat, she went forward and kept her back resolutely turned upon the
old fellow as he scrambled on board after her, shoved off and settled to
the oars. The river was low, and sluggish from the long drought with
consequently easy passage to the opposite bank. It took but a short five
minutes to reach the jetty, crawling like some gigantic, damaged,
many-legged insect out over the smooth gleaming water.

Instead of the legal twopence, Damaris dropped a couple of shillings into
Daddy Proud's eager hand--with a queenly little air; and, without
waiting for his thanks, swung herself up on to the black planking and
turned to go down the sand-strewn wooden steps.

"Pleased to fetch 'e back, Miss, any hour you like to name," Proud called
after her, standing up and fingering the shillings with one hand while
with the other he steered the boat's side away from the slippery
weed-grown piles.

"Thank you, I don't quite know when I shall be back," she answered over
her shoulder.

For her main desire was to get quit of his unpleasant neighbourhood. She
would go for a long walk by the coast-guard path across the sand-hills,
right out to Stone Horse Head. Would stay out till sundown, in the hope
that by then Jennifer might have seen fit to exchange the manly joys of
ratting for his more prosaic duties at the ferry, and so save her from
further association with his displeasing deputy.

But, the ridge of the Bar reached, other thoughts and impulses took
possession of her. For the sea this afternoon showed an infinitely
beguiling countenance. Not as highway of the nations, still less as
violent and incalculable, holding cruelties of storm and tempest in its
heart, did it present itself to her view; but rather as some gentle,
softly inviting and caressing creature decked forth in the changeful
colours of a dove's neck and breast. Opaline haze veiled the horizon,
shutting off all unrestful sense of distance. The tide was low and little
waves, as of liquid crystal, chased one another over the gleaming sands.
Out to where the haze met and covered it the smooth expanse of sea was
unbroken by passing boat or ship; nor was any person within sight upon
the long line of the beach. Damaris found herself alone--but deliciously
alone, with this enchanted dream sea for companion in the sunshine, under
the vault of tender blue sky.

And, for the present at least, she asked nothing better, humanity being
at a decided discount with her, thanks first to the extreme tiresomeness
of Theresa Bilson and later the extreme unsavouriness of Timothy Proud.
The element thus eliminated, nothing interfered, nothing jarred; so that
she could yield herself to an ecstasy of contemplation, active rather
than passive, in that imagination, breaking the bounds of personality,
made her strangely one with all she looked on. Consciousness of self was
merged in pure delight. Never could she remember to have felt so
light-hearted, so happy with the spontaneous, unconditioned happiness
which is sufficient to itself, unclouded by thought of what has been or
what may be.

Pushed by her own radiant emotion and an instinct, deriving from it, to
draw even closer to that Everlasting Beauty of Things which is uncreated
by and independent of the will and work of man, she ran down the slope,
and sitting on the shingle slipped off her shoes and stockings. Took off
her hat, too, and leaving the lot lying there, just above high-tide mark,
gathered her skirts in one hand, and, bare-headed thus and bare-footed,
danced out over the wet gleaming sands a graceful flying figure, until
the little waves played and purred about her ankles. Her action was
symbolic, born of the gay worship welling up within her, a giving of
herself to the shining infinite of Nature as just now manifest--things
divine and eternal glimmering through at her--in this fair hour of
solitude and brooding peace.

Till her mood softened, Damaris danced thus alone, unwitnessed on the
shore. Then, as she sobered, happy still though the crisis of ecstasy had
passed, smaller seeings began to charm her fancy and her eyes.--Pinkish
yellow starfish, long ribbons of madder-red or emerald seaweed, their
colours the more living and vivid for the clear water covering them.
Presently a company of five birds--their mottled brown and olive bodies
raised on stilt-like legs thin as a straw--claimed her notice. So
bewitched was she by their quaint and pretty ways, that she could not but
follow them as they chased one another in and out of the rippling waves,
ran quickly and bowed catching something eatable floating upon the tide,
scattered and then joined up into a joyous chorus of association with
gentle twittering cries. Watching them, dreaming, standing now and again
looking out over the sweet wonder of the placid sea, sometimes wading
ankle deep, sometimes walking on the firm floor of uncovered sand,
Damaris passed onward losing count of time.