A Little Treachery

18

It was already spring; yet the sky darkened, the ponds lay like a plate of dark steel, and powdery snow was shaken softly through the air and gathered at the rim of the water like a curl of frozen foam. The metallic clatter of the blackbirds sounded over the frosty gardens and the coarser and deeper note of the magpies, as the birds pecked at the few abandoned apples in the topmost boughs, down the shrivelled and greasy cheeks of which the rain had dripped all through the winter.

Emmy was greatly fascinated by the destructive drama of the bonfire; she delighted in what she called ‘tidying up’, which largely meant committing to the flames anything excitingly inflammable, while dumping the rest in some obscure corner. So they spent much time in the open air, chopping and clipping. When the weather at last grew milder, they attempted to dig, and finally even succeeded in clearing again a small patch of ground where Emmy proposed to sow grass-seed later. Emmy would make a lawn. Her notion of gardening was uninstructed but vigorous. The young woman’s brown sticks of arms had a sinewy vitality, and her spirit the same. And all these labours were helped along by a merry humour. She cut down and raked up masses of winter wreckage and gathered the stuff into a great cock beside which she posed, rake in hand, wearing a plastic raincoat and bonnet, the whole effect seeming to her so funny that a dark and foggy snapshot was taken, to which she added the March date and the caption “Hay-making at Flytton Hall”, and sent it to her London friends. ‘I’ve told them I’m staying with a lady, a big land-owner. Only Greg’s got my address.’ She questioned Catherine about her neighbour across the stream – she wished Catherine had been more enterprising and got something out of the man in the way of advice or information. For Emmy was continually wondering if something could not be made out of it all. She felt in her Jewy bones that a thing so unusual could be made to fetch a fancy price, should have a high, arbitrary value, could one but bring it into the right market. ‘Would you mind if I spoke to him, supposing I saw him!’ ‘Dear, no, I don’t mind. Do as you please. Though I didn’t much like the man –’ ‘Well, I don’t know – it seems such a waste, all this gray-ound!’ For Emmy did not avoid the neighbours, whom she loved to mimic. Neither was she on mere nodding terms with them. She cheeked the old people and had soon achieved popularity of a sort with the cottagers; a relationship which was, however, deeply coloured with satire on both sides.

Long draughts of the fresh air, many hours in the open, and Emmy’s little face, more marked than it should have been, at her age, with tense hard work or strenuous living or dubious experience, began to show, rather touchingly to Catherine’s mind, that it had not after all lost all kinship with the softly rounded, healthily glowing face of childhood.

So the weeks passed and were packed with sensation, because everything round Emmy was packed with sensation, which she herself created where it was lacking. Dull? No, indeed, it was not that, Emmy might well protest.

One cold afternoon, they had been working and had stayed late at the end of the garden, attempting to deliver sundry ancient trees from the murderous clasp of the ivy, and so busy were they and full of talk and warm with their exertions that they went on till Catherine exclaimed suddenly, ‘But we must go in, Emmy, look how dark it’s getting.’

Then they picked up their tools and began to push ruminatively through the mat of rushes to the higher ground, now stopping to call each other’s attention to some natural curiosity, now to count the chimes of the church clock, to listen to cries from the hills, made aerial by the distance, or to peer after something imagined to be flitting through the bushes. One would stop and the other turn and wait. It was all calm, leisurely. Catherine stood leaning on her tool, while Emmy poked about in one of the ditches and was the next moment holding up on the end of a fork some grotesque bit of rubbish, some fragment of boot or clothing, which she was examining with busy, satiric interest, saying, ‘What have we here? Human remains? God knows what will turn up in this spot when the last trump goes.’

Catherine laughed.

She heard her own laugh, or became conscious of it after it was uttered. And that she could laugh, in this place –

Thus suddenly the comparison forced itself on her, the difference between her state of only a few weeks ago and this sense of amusement, mild but real; and without turning her eyes on Emmy she examined her image searchingly, and for a moment allowed herself to think, in the terms of light, what a quaint guise the guardian angel had taken, the one sent to save. For she dimly conceived how it might be that she owed Emmy her sanity. She smiled to herself; stood there smiling, curiously affected, between amusement and emotion.

Yet to laugh, in that place, was it as good as it seemed?

She raised her eyes. The sky was fiery, the woods blue and dark. A bonfire with clear, red flames was burning in a near-by garden. Large sparks, glowing morsels, whirled off the tips of the flames, which stretched upright. They had glimpses of the cottage in the light of the sunset.

‘Look at our little hay-oose!’ cried Emmy gaily, mocking the local pronunciation, as she loved to do. ‘I see you, little old red-face!’ She was holding aside some twigs and peering up the garden. Catherine for a few moments turned to stare at the sky and then, suddenly aware that Emmy had fallen silent, glanced round to see what she was doing. The girl was still standing peeping through the boughs. Catherine approached.

‘What is it, Emmy?’ She fancied she had made the girl start. ‘Nothing,’ Emmy answered, ‘I’m only looking;’ then in a voice of exaggerated rapture, soft and rather breathless, she exclaimed, ‘Isn’t it romantic! Isn’t it lovely!’ Catherine agreed, though wondering a little.

‘It ought to be haunted, you know, this place.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Catherine asked slowly.

‘Oh, well – so old, and all. Think what’s happened here – in olden times.’ But Emmy now had rather the air of looking round for a diversion. ‘Hark at those owls!’

‘Is it an owl? No – some creature on the lake.’

Then they went up through the dusky garden silently, Emmy lagging behind.

But the first casual idea that the girl had seen someone up there on the right of way was abruptly ousted by another of terrible intensity.

‘She knows. Of course she has heard it all. And how does she think of her. Mad and wild. And perhaps having caught a glimpse of someone up there – Oh, but could it be?’ Suddenly all disordered, she went ahead almost at a run, gasping beneath her breath the words ‘Wait, wait – I’m coming.’ Oh, yes, such pitiful bids for freedom were sometimes made! It was not utterly impossible!

But the frantic thought could not but collapse almost in its forming. She knew too well that kind of fever-dream, full of horror, full of longing, often enough suffered by those who had a loved one in that type of durance.