The Project Gutenberg eBook, Captures, by John Galsworthy

CAPTURES

Captures

By

John Galsworthy

“Soft and fair, Gentlemen, never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.”—Don Quixote.

London: William Heinemann Ltd.

First published 1923

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER

[All rights reserved]

TO

R. H. SAUTER

CONTENTS

CAPTURES

A FEUD

Its psychic origin, like that of most human loves and hates, was obscure, and yet, like most human hates and loves, had a definite point of physical departure—the moment when Bowden’s yellow dog bit Steer’s ungaitered leg. Even then it might not have ‘got going’ as they say, but for the village sense of justice which caused Steer to bring his gun next day and solemnly execute the dog. He was the third person the dog had bitten; and not even Bowden, who was fond of his whippet, could oppose the execution, but the shot left him with an obscure feeling of lost property, a vague sense of disloyalty to his dog. Steer was a Northerner, an Easterner, a man from a part called Lincolnshire, outlandish, like the Frisian cattle he mixed with the Devons on his farm—this, Bowden could not help feeling in the bottom of his soul, was what had moved his dog. Snip had not liked, any more than his master, that thin, spry, red-grey-bearded chap’s experimental ways of farming, his habit of always being an hour, a week, a month earlier than Bowden; had not liked his lean, dry activity, his thin legs, his east-wind air. Bowden knew that he would have shot Steer’s dog if he himself had been the third person bitten by it; but then Steer’s dog had not bitten Bowden, Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer; and this seemed to Bowden to show that his dog knew what was what. While he was burying the poor brute he had muttered: “Damn the man! What did he want trapesin’ about my yard in his Sunday breeks? Seein’ what he could get, I suppose!” And with each shovel of earth he threw on the limp yellow body, a sticky resentment had oozed from his spirit and clung, undissolving, round the springs of its action.

To inter the dog properly was a long, hot job.

‘He comes and shoots my dog, of a Sunday too, and leaves me to bury ’un,’ he thought, wiping his round, well-coloured face; and he spat as if the ground in front of him were Steer.

When he had finished and rolled a big stone on to the little mound he went in, and, sitting down moodily in the kitchen, said:

“Girl, draw me a glass o’ cider.” Having drunk it, he looked up and added: “I’ve a-burried she up to Crossovers.” The dog was male, a lissome whippet unconnected with the business of the farm, and Bowden had called him ‘she’ from puppyhood. The dark-haired, broad-faced, rather sullen-looking girl whom he addressed flushed, and her grey eyes widened. “’Twas a shame!” she muttered.

“Ah!” said Bowden.

Bowden farmed about a hundred acres of half and half sort of land, some good, some poor, just under the down. He was a widower, with a mother and an only son. A broad, easy man with a dark round head, a rosy face, and immense capacity for living in the moment. Looking at him you would have said not one in whom things would rankle. But then, to look at a West Countryman you would say so many things that have their lurking negations. He was a native of the natives; his family went back in the parish to times beyond the opening of the register; his ancestors had been churchwardens in remote days. His father, ‘Daddy Bowden,’ an easy-going handsome old fellow and a bit of a rip, had died at ninety. He himself was well over fifty, but had no grey hair as yet. He took life easily, and let his farm off lightly, keeping it nearly all to pasture, with a conservative grin (Bowden was a Liberal) at the outlandish efforts of his neighbour Steer (a Tory) to grow wheat, bring in Frisian stock, and use newfangled machines. Steer had originally come to that part of the country as a gentleman’s bailiff, and this induced a sort of secret contempt in Bowden, whose forefathers in old days had farmed their own land here round about. Bowden’s mother, eighty-eight years old, was a little pocket woman almost past speech, with dark bright eyes and innumerable wrinkles, who sat all day long in any warmth there was, conserving energy. His son Ned, a youth of twenty-four, bullet-headed like all the Bowdens, was of a lighter colour in hair and eyes; and at the moment of history, when Steer shot Bowden’s dog, he was keeping company with Steer’s niece, Molly Winch, who kept house for the confirmed bachelor that Steer was. The other member of Bowden’s household, the girl Pansy, was an orphan, some said born under a rose, who came from the other side of the moor and earned fourteen pounds a year. She kept to herself, had dark fine hair, grey eyes, a pale broad face; ‘broody’ she was, given somewhat to the ‘tantrums’; now she would look quite plain; then, when moved or excited, quite pretty. Hers was all the housework, and much of the poultry-feeding, wood-cutting and water-drawing. She was hard worked and often sullen because of it.

Having finished his cider, Bowden stood in the kitchen porch looking idly at a dance of gnats. The weather was fine, and the hay was in. It was one of those intervals between harvests which he was wont to take easy, and it would amuse him to think of his neighbour always ‘puzzivantin’’ over some ‘improvement’ or other. But it did not amuse him this evening. That chap was for ever trying to sneak ahead of his neighbours, and had gone and shot his dog! He caught sight of his son Ned, who had just milked the cows and was turning them down the lane. Now the lad would ‘slick himself up’ and go courting that niece of Steer’s. The courtship seemed to Bowden suddenly unnatural. A cough made him conscious of the girl Pansy standing behind him with her sleeves rolled up.

“Butiful evenin’,” he said, “gude for the corn.” When Bowden indulged his sense of the æsthetic, he would, as it were, apologise with some comment that implied commercial benefit or loss; while Steer would pass on with only a dry ‘Fine evenin’.’ In talking with Steer one never lost consciousness of his keen ‘on-the-makeness,’ as of a progressive individualist who has nothing to cover his nature from one’s eyes. Bowden one might meet for weeks without realising that beneath his uncontradictious pleasantry was a self-preservative individualism quite as stubborn. To the casual eye Steer was much more up-to-date and ‘civilised’; to one looking deeper, Bowden had been ‘civilised’ much longer. He had grown protective covering in a softer climate or drawn it outward from an older strain of blood.

“The gnats are dancin’,” he said, “fine weather”; and the girl Pansy nodded. Watching her turn the handle of the separator, he marked her glance straying down the yard to where Ned was shutting the lane gate. She was a likely-looking wench with her shapely browned arms and her black hair, fine as silk, which she kept brushing back from her eyes with her free hand. It gave him a kind of farmyard amusement to see those eyes of hers following his son about. ‘She’s Ned’s if he wants her—young hussy!’ he thought. ‘Begad, but it would put Steer’s nose out of joint properly if that girl got in front of his precious niece.’ To say that this thought was father to a wish would too definitely express the circumambulatory mind of Bowden—a lazy and unprecise thinker; but it lurked and hovered when he took his ash-plant and browsed his way out of the yard to have a look at the young bull before supper. At the meadow of water-weed and pasture, where the young red bull was grazing, he stood leaning over the gate, with the swallows flying high. The young bull was ‘lukin’ up bravely’—in another year he would lay over that bull of Steer’s. Ah! he would that! And a dim savagery stirred in Bowden; then passed in the sensuous enjoyment—which a farmer never admits—at the scent, sight, sounds, of his fields in fine weather, at the blue above and the green beneath him, the gleam of that thread of water, half smothered in bulrushes, ‘daggers,’ and monkey flower, under the slowly sinking sun, at the song of a lark, and the murmuring in the ash-trees, at the glistening ruddy coat of the young bull and the sound of his cropping! Three rabbits ran into the hedge. So that fellow had shot his dog—his dog that had nipped up more rabbits out of corn than any dog he ever owned! He tapped his stick on the gate. The young bull raised a lazy head, gazed at his master, and, flicking his tail at the flies, resumed his pasturing.

‘Shot my dog!’ thought Bowden; ‘shot my dog! Yu wait a bit!’

II

The girl Pansy turned the handle of the separator, and its whining drone mixed with the thoughts and feelings, poignant yet formless, of one who had little say in her own career. There was an ache in her loins, for hay harvest was ever a hard week; and an ache in her heart, because she had no leisure, like Molly Winch and other girls, who could find time for the piano and to make their dresses. She touched her hard frieze skirt. She was sick of the ugly thing. And she hastened the separator. She had to feed the calves and set the supper before she could change into her Sunday frock and go to evening church—her one weekly festivity. Ned Bowden! Her fancy soared to the monstrous extravagance of herself and Ned walking across the fields to church together, singing out of one hymn-book; Ned who had given her a look when he passed just now as if he realised at last that she had been thinking of him for weeks. A dusky flush crept up in her pale cheeks. A girl must think of somebody—she wasn’t old Mother Bowden, with her hands on her lap all day, in sunlight or fire-shine, content just to be warm! And she turned the handle with a sort of frenzy. Would the milk never finish running through? Ned never saw her in her frock—her frock sprigged with cornflowers; he went off too early to his courting, Sunday evenings. In this old skirt she looked so thick and muddy. And her arms—— Gazing despairingly at arms browned and roughened her fancy took another monstrous flight. She saw herself and Molly Winch side by side ungarbed. Ah! She would make two of that Molly Winch! The thought at once pained and pleased her. It was genteel to be thin and elegant; and yet—instinct told her—strength and firmness of flesh had been desirable before ever gentility existed. She let the handle go, and, lifting the pail of ‘waste,’ hurried down with it to the dark byre, whence the young calves were thrusting their red muzzles. She pushed them back in turn—greedy little things—smacking their wet noses, scolding them. Ugh! How mucky it was in there—they ought to give that byre a good clean up! Banging down the empty pail, she ran to set out supper on the long deal table. In the last of the sunlight old Mother Bowden’s bright eyes seemed to watch her inhumanly. She would never be done in time—never be done in time!

The beef, the cider, the cheese, the bread, the pickles—what else? Lettuce! Yes, and it wasn’t washed, and Bowden loved his lettuce. But she couldn’t wait—she couldn’t! Perhaps he’d forget it—if she put some cream out! From the cool, dark dairy, down the little stone passage, she fetched the remains of the scalded cream.

“Watch the cat, Missis Bowden!” And she ran up the wriggling narrow stairs.