Lucifer Before Sunrise (37 page)

“Then where else can I exercise them, if not on the farm?”

“Well, that’s not my affair, surely? It’s a custom of the country not to let dogs roam at this time, or indeed at any time. Very soon young pheasants will be about.”

“Pheasants,” he sneered. “In war-time!”

“Well, I must ask you not to bring your dogs with you to work. I have to consider my shooting partner.”

The dogs stayed away for a week. Then they accompanied their master once more. On one occasion Phillip stood by while they chased hares through the wheat of the Higher Hanger, making paths through the stalks.

“I have asked you not to bring the dogs on the farm. Doesn’t it occur to you that you are being inconsiderate?”

“That comes well from you! We hear nothing but your
grouching
voice all the time. It’s hardly pleasant to be next door to it, to say the least.”

The work was exacting for one of his temperament. How well Phillip knew the clash of the two rhythms of physical work by day, and imaginative work in the evening. They were as irreconcilable as eating cake and having it. The inquiline looked harassed; but when Phillip tried to speak to him sympathetically—though this was not easy, owing to his manner—or fatigue—he uttered a short, mirthless laugh. “I’m perfectly strong. I was passed A1 at my medical. Anyway, I didn’t come here to work on the land, but to look after the stock.”

“That will be later on, when Matt gives up. The summer is the easy time, you know, when all the animals are on the meadows. But if you don’t like hoeing, you might care to lay some hedges. Can you use an axe?”

“What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?”

In silence Phillip led him to a weed-grown line of thorns felled from one of the hedges. He carried an axe, and showed the inquiline how to sever by clean, slanting cuts the heavier boughs from the trunks: to pare the lighter branches from the boughs, for burning in heaps: and to set up the lengths of stouter wood into pyramids.

The tyro broke the hickory haft of the six-and-a-half-pound axe-head Phillip had used in the woods of South Devon. Without his knowledge, Steve thereupon went into the workshop and gave him his light slasher, the ash handle of which was soon split from metal bill to haft. A slasher splits its handle easily, should its neb or point be allowed to strike a branch. Phillip found the
remains of both axe and slasher by chance, lying in the grass a day or two later. He suggested that it would have been civil to have told him of these breakages, instead of remaining mute about them. Thereupon the poorness of the tools was blamed for their breaking.

“Now look here! You’ve been asked not to bring your dogs on the farm. You persist in bringing them. When I see a pailful of slops being flung out from your cottage door, straight on to our flower garden, poor thing as it is, you reply, ‘My wife isn’t going to walk down the garden just for that’. After all, you came of your own wish, you know. Not to fall in with the farmer’s wishes is surely to impose yourself upon him.”

“The trouble with you is, you are trying to be punctilious about things that don’t matter, or shouldn’t matter. I call all the
inessential
trivia you concern yourself with mere fussiness. Anyway, I didn’t take your slasher, it was given me, so I used it. The handle was cracked, that’s why it broke. Besides, you as a farmer should supply these tools. Anyhow, rather than you should upset yourself, I don’t mind paying for a new handle.”

“I don’t want you to pay for a new handle. Surely it is a matter of ordinary courtesy to report something broken if it belongs to another? And, as a point of fact, it is a recognised custom that
farm-workers
buy their own slashers.”

“Well, I can’t waste time on discussing this sort of thing,” he said; and turning his back on Phillip, walked away. It was five o’clock, time to leave work.

*

“Perhaps he will be happier if he has charge of the stock,” Phillip said to Matt.

“He will an’ all,” replied Matt shortly. “One more for the Convalescent Home. Him? Faugh!”

It was arranged that Matt should hand over the beasts the following Friday. It was then Monday. Phillip went to London for a few days to escape, and try to get some journalism. There was still no money for the children’s education. The smaller boys went to the village school, Rosamund and Peter went by ’bus to the Council School in the coastal town.

Phillip suggested two articles to a London evening paper, and was told it would be considered. Then he went by train to see his father in Dorset, taking butter, eggs, and a loaf of Lucy’s wheaten bread. Richard looked well and cheerful. His young friend had now left school, and came in daily to clean the house, and cook.
She seemed intelligent, she was musical, and the three spent an evening listening to Richard’s radiogram. He returned the next day, to find at his club a letter from Lucy awaited him. Matt had given notice to leave. He telephoned her to tell Matt that it had been done to give him a relief. She replied that Matt was
determined
to leave.

As a fact, some months previously Matt had made up his mind to go and work in a grain-drying plant that had been put up in one of the old malting houses down by the quay of the coastal town. It was managed by his old master on the Bad Lands who had gone bankrupt and was now doing well. Phillip knew that Matt had stayed on the farm, when he could have got any of several better jobs elsewhere, out of friendship and a sense of loyalty. There had been more work in the yards than he would admit, and the sheep as well required more attention than he could give them.

*

While the bullocks were on the meadows, feeding themselves on grass, the new man found life easier. He knew something about sheep, and tackled the foot-rot; and washed the cow, whose milk went to the house, before milking. This was the season, as Phillip had told him, when stock-work was lightest on the farm.

Phillip helped with the summer sheep-dipping. He bought some Cooper’s dip, and they carried a coffin-shape tank to the doorway between the two yards, setting it there beyond a passage of hurdles leading to the doorway. Thus every animal must be lifted into the tank of yellow liquid, soused thoroughly to kill all ticks and other parasites before being allowed to leap away into the yard beyond. It was a wet and arduous business for a couple of hours after which the inquiline appeared to be distressed, while denying this when Phillip suggested he should have a rest; but the next day, when the matter of the dogs roaming the woods came up again, he exclaimed, “Precious little thanks I get for sweating my guts out for you and your sheep!”

It was not altogether a sweating life for him, however.
Sometimes
at the end of the day he was to be seen clad in a suit of white. At other times the creased white trousers were replaced by a pair of sapphire corduroys. With his wife he seemed to be happy. She was a young and pretty woman with an open, smiling face, and the blue eyes and fresh colouring of the Irish. As for Dalua, the
supposed
sheep-dog, it lived up to its Celtic name of Shadow and fled before all things, including the ewes. On the first day as a
sheepdog
a ewe had butted it; whereupon Dalua had snapped in wild
fear and run in a wide circle to put its master between itself and the offensive herbivore.

At other times Phillip saw the little family upon the marshes of a Sunday. The baby in a large cream-coloured perambulator with ball-bearings and chromium-plated fittings was hauled among the sea-lavender, bushes of blite, and sun-cracked mud-pans of that open place, while the botanist got to work with trowel and
collecting
box. He was also a bird-watcher. There were plenty of chances to see what birds were on the marshes, for the two dogs raced about putting them up from many acres around. Redshank and dunlin, blackback-gull and dotterel, skylark and sandpiper cried from the air.

*

In September the flock of sheep went to the Wordingham Sheep Fair. The animals were in mediocre condition, and made poor prices. The inquiline, who knew nothing about the local markets, told Phillip that his ewes and hoggets had done well. There was no point in replying to this: now that they were gone, Phillip was thinking of ploughing the meadows, of re-seeding Home,
Denchman
, and Snipe with ‘mixtures’ recommended by the War Ag. Committee, and the far Galley and Teal with wheat.

In October the neat stock came off the meadows into the yards. Very soon there were complaints about the hardness of the work. Once when Phillip tried to sympathise, saying yard-work was too much for him, the inquiline replied sharply, as before, that he had been passed A1 for the Forces. Several times he remarked that he would never have come to the farm if he had been able to find anywhere better; adding candidly that he would be worse-off in the Army.

Phillip suspected that he was trying for a job elsewhere; and one morning in late November, after a professional valuer had come to assess the stock for the Michaelmas Valuation, the inquiline wrote out a month’s notice of his intention to leave.

The Annual Valuation put the cows, which had been heifers only four years before, at between ten and eighteen pounds each. The current price for a good, non-pedigree cow in full profit (milk) was between thirty-five and forty pounds. One of the cows, Cherry, an Irish roan, was said by the cowman to be tubercular. Cherry was so thin that Phillip did not like to send her to market. Her condition would have caused comment, even amusement. Also he did not believe in fobbing off a faulty beast on someone else, although this was normal practice, even with a consumptive cow. So he kept Cherry, meaning to bury her when she died.

In due course the inquiline left to ‘manage three farms for a friend in Cornwall’. His parting remark was, “Of course you haven’t allowed me enough hay for the cows, that’s why they look like they do. A cow should have sixty-four pounds of good
clover-hay
every day.”

“Perhaps in his mind he got cows mixed up with elephants,” said Phillip to Lucy. “Fourteen pounds of clover-hay a day is about the most that an ordinary cow can get get into its system.”

The Annual Valuation, which cost five guineas, showed that about
£
200 had been lost on the Neat Stock, as the cattle were called, during the past year.

*

So with one more hard farmer to add to his long list of hard farmer-hosts, the inquiline moved to pastures new, leaving wife, baby, dogs, and furniture to follow. When the family and dogs had gone, an elderly woman came down from a London suburb to supervise the packing of the furniture. She told Lucy that she was used to doing such work for her son, an only child. During the fortnight before the furniture van arrived she walked about the village, and feeling that she might be lonely, Lucy invited her in to tea, finding her very nearly as difficult in conversation as the son had been. On the subject of mice, however, she was eloquent.

“Would you believe it now, I actually found three in my little jug of milk, all swimming around! And I only went outside for a moment. Isn’t it simply awful? All over the place, in my bedroom too! I’m not used to this sort of thing where I live, to say the very least of it! I don’t think mice ought to be allowed, especially in war time,” was her way of criticising the landlord. When the cottage was empty Lucy went inside, to find it clean and tidy, for the old lady was particular. Eric the cat came in with her, to assess the sporting possibilities, and soon mopped up a score or so of small deer. The remainder thereupon migrated through a hole in the coal-house wall to the china-cupboard in Lucy’s parlour next door. Eric, however, was ready for them. One night she sprang from Phillip’s lap, almost ripping through his utility corduroy trousers so violent was her take-off. As she flew through the air she slashed with her claw, and, landing on the pavers by the
cupboard
door, hooked a mouse about to disappear into a crack. Thereafter she waited nightly by the door until no mice were left.

“Well,” said Phillip, “I hope that’s the last of the inquilines.”

“What,” said Lucy, as they were having tea together, “is an inquiline?”

“It’s a word your father couldn’t discover when he was doing his
Morning
Post
cross-word puzzle one morning in nineteen twenty-six. That was when Tim rushed into Shakesbury and ordered an entire set of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
for Pa’s birthday. It cost forty pounds—and was paid for two years later.”

Lucy didn’t like this reference to her family’s money-
squandering
in the past. “Dear old Pa,” he went on, trying to erase from his mind that Lucy’s father had thought Wagner’s music a horrible din, that Dostoevski’s novels were bestial, and he, Phillip, was an ass for having written the Donkin books.

“Well,” said Lucy, smiling and slightly blushing, “what
is
an inquiline?”

“It wasn’t in any of the thirteen volumes of the encyclopedia, so I suggested to Tim that he look it up in the public library. Cassell’s dictionary said, ‘An animal seeking to live in the abode of another, as certain insects in the galls of others’.”

*

Seven of the ten cows were sent to market. They made between twelve and eighteen pounds apiece. A month later the purchaser asked Phillip why he had sold them. They were now splendid beasts, he said, and looked a proper picture, and gave wonderful yields. Phillip replied that he was glad to hear it, and that his loss was another man’s gain; and on making up the annual accounts later, he found that by his work for the past fifty two weeks his profit on the entire farm was just about the pay of one agricultural labourer.

“Which seems just,” he remarked to Lucy, “for that’s all I am.”

“Anyway, you’ve got a very nice foal,” said Lucy. “It was born to Sheba just as I went to feed my hens. The mare was so good, too; she let Peter put copper sulphate on its umbilical cord, to prevent germs affecting the break, just as you asked him to do.”

Phillip cheered up. “Good old Peter! He’s a real good boy!”