at the place where the road from carnaby down ends in the main western highway that goes towards bath there stands, or once stood, a strongly built stone cottage confronting, on the opposite side of the highroad, a large barn and some cattle stalls. a man named cotton lived with his wife lonely in this place, their whole horizon bounded by the hedges and fences of their farm. his christian name, for some unchristian reason, was janifex, people called him jan, possibly because it rhymed with his wife’s name, which was ann. and ann was a robust managing woman of five and thirty, childless, full of desolating cleanliness and kindly tyrannies, with no perceptions that were not determined by her domestic ambition, and no sympathies that could interfere with her diurnal energies whatever they might be. jan was a mild husbandman, prematurely aged, with large teeth and, since “forty winters had besieged his brow,” but little hair. sometimes one of the large teeth would drop out, leaving terrible gaps when he opened his mouth and turning his patient smile to a hideous leer. these evacuations, which were never restored, began with the death of queen victoria; throughout the reign[268] of her successor great events were punctuated by similar losses until at last jan could masticate, in his staid old manner, only in one overworked corner of his mouth.
he would rise of a morning throughout the moving year at five of the clock; having eaten his bread and drunk a mug of cocoa he would don a long white jacket and cross the road diagonally to the gate at the eastern corner of the sheds; these were capped by the bright figure of a golden cockerel, voiceless but useful, flaunting always to meet the challenge of the wind. sometimes in his deliberate way jan would lift his forlorn eyes in the direction of the road coming from the east, but he never turned to the other direction as that would have cost him a physical effort and bodily flexion had ceased years and years ago. do roads ever run backward—leaps not forward the eye? as he unloosed the gate of the yard his great dog would lift its chained head from some sacks under a cart, and a peacock would stalk from the belt of pines that partly encircled the buildings. the man would greet them, saying “o, ah!” in the rickyard he would pause to release the fowls from their hut and watch them run to the stubbles or spurn the chaff with their claws as they ranged between the stacks. if the day were windy the chaff would fall back in clouds upon their bustling feathers, and that delighted his simple mind. it is difficult to account for his joy in this thing for though his heart was empty of cruelty it seemed to be empty of everything else. then he would pass into the stalls[269] and with a rattle of can and churn the labour of the day was begun.
thus he lived, with no temptations, and few desires except perhaps for milk puddings, which for some reason concealed in ann’s thrifty bosom he was only occasionally permitted to enjoy. whenever his wife thought kindly of him she would give him a piece of silver and he would traipse a mile in the evening, a mile along to the huntsman’s cup, and take a tankard of beer. on his return he would tell ann of the things he had seen, the people he had met, and other events of his journey.
once, in the time of spring, when buds were bursting along the hedge coverts and birds of harmony and swiftness had begun to roost in the wood, a blue-chinned spaniard came to lodge at the farm for a few weeks. he was a labourer working at some particular contract upon the estate adjoining the cottons’ holding, and he was accommodated with a bed and an abundance of room in a clean loft behind the house. with curious shoes upon his feet, blazing check trousers fitting tightly upon his thighs, a wrapper of pink silk around his neck, he was an astonishing figure in that withdrawn corner of the world. when the season chilled him a long black cloak with a hood for his head added a further strangeness. juan da costa was his name. he was slightly round-shouldered with an uncongenial squint in his eyes; though he used but few words of english his ways were beguiling; he sang very blithely shrill spanish songs, and had a[270] pleasant courtesy of manner that presented a deal of attraction to the couple, particularly ann, whose casual heart he reduced in a few hours to kindness, and in a few days, inexplicably perhaps, to a still warmer emotion—yes, even in the dull blankness of that mind some ghostly star could glimmer. from the hour of his arrival she was an altered woman although, with primitive subtlety the transition from passivity to passion was revealed only by one curious sign, and that was the spirit of her kindness evoked for the amiable jan, who now fared mightily upon his favourite dishes.
sometimes the spaniard would follow jan about the farm. “grande!” he would say, gesturing with his arm to indicate the wide-rolling hills.
“o, ah!” jan would reply, “there’s a heap o’ land in the open air.”
the spaniard does not understand. he asks: “what?”
“o, ah!” jan would echo.
but it was the cleanly buxom ann to whom da costa devoted himself. he brought home daily, though not ostensibly to her, a bunch of the primroses, a stick of snowbudded sallow, or a sprig of hazel hung with catkins, soft caressable things. he would hold the hazel up before ann’s uncomprehending gaze and strike the lemon-coloured powder from the catkins on to the expectant adjacent buds, minute things with stiff female prongs, red like the eyes of the white rabbit which ann kept in the orchard hutch.
one day juan came home unexpectedly in mid-afternoon.[271] it was a cold dry day and he wore his black cloak and hood.
“see,” he cried, walking up to ann, who greeted him with a smile; he held out to her a posy of white violets tied up with some blades of thick grass. she smelt them but said nothing. he pressed the violets to his lips and again held them out, this time to her lips. she took them from him and touched them with the front of her bodice while he watched her with delighted eyes.
“you ... give ... me ... something ... for ... los flores?”
“piece a cake!” said ann, moving towards the pantry door.
“ah ... cake...!”
as she pulled open the door, still keeping a demure eye upon him, the violets fell out and down upon the floor, unseen by her. he rushed towards them with a cry of pain and a torrent of his strange language; picking them up he followed her into the pantry, a narrow place almost surrounded by shelves with pots of pickles and jam, plates, cups and jugs, a scrap of meat upon a trencher, a white bowl with cob nuts and a pair of iron crackers.
“see ... lost!” he cried shrilly as she turned to him. she was about to take them again when he stayed her with a whimsical gesture.
“me ... me,” he said, and brushing her eyes with their soft perfume he unfastened the top button of her bodice while the woman stood motionless; then the second button, then the third. he turned the corners[272] inwards and tucked the flowers between her flesh and underlinen. they stood eyeing one another, breathing uneasily, but with a pretence of nonchalance. “ah!” he said suddenly; before she could stop him he had seized a few nuts from the white bowl and holding open her bodice where the flowers rested he dropped the nuts into her warm bosom. “one ... two ... three!”
“oh...!” screamed ann mirthfully, shrinking from their tickling, but immediately she checked her laughter—she heard footsteps. beating down the grasping arms of the spaniard she darted out of the doorway and shut him in the pantry, just in time to meet jan coming into the kitchen howling for a chain he required.
“what d’ye want?” said ann.
“that chain for the well-head, gal, it’s hanging in the pantry.” he moved to the door.
“tain’t,” said ann barring his way. “it’s in the barn. i took it there yesterday, on the oats it is, you’ll find it, clear off with your dirty boots.” she “hooshed” him off much as she “hooshed” the hens out of the garden. immediately he was gone she pulled open the pantry door and was confronted by the spaniard holding a long clasp knife in his raised hand. on seeing her he just smiled, threw down the knife and took the bewildered woman into his arms.
“wait, wait,” she whispered, and breaking from him she seized a chain from a hook and ran out after her husband with it, holding up a finger of warning to the spaniard as she brushed past him. she came back[273] panting, having made some sort of explanation to jan; entering the kitchen quietly she found the spaniard’s cloak lying upon the table; the door of the pantry was shut and he had apparently gone back there to await her. ann moved on tiptoe round the table; picking up the cloak she enveloped herself in it and pulled the hood over her head. having glanced with caution through the front window to the farmyard, she coughed and shuffled her feet on the flags. the door of the pantry moved slowly open; the piercing ardour of his glance did not abash her, but her curious appearance in his cloak moved his shrill laughter. as he approached her she seized his wrists and drew him to the door that led into the orchard at the back of the house; she opened it and pushed him out, saying, “go on, go on.” she then locked the door against him. he walked up and down outside the window making lewd signs to her. he dared not call out for fear of attracting attention from the farmyard in front of the house. he stood still, shivered, pretended in dumb show that he was frozen. she stood at the window in front of him and nestled provocatively in his cloak. but when he put his lips against the pane he drew the gleam of her languishing eyes closer and closer to meet his kiss through the glass. then she stood up, took off the black cloak, and putting her hand into her bosom brought out the three nuts, which she held up to him. she stood there fronting the spaniard enticingly, dropped the nuts back into her bosom one ... two ... three ... and then went and opened the door.
in a few weeks the contract was finished, and one[274] bright morning the spaniard bade them each farewell. neither of them knew, so much was their intercourse restricted, that he was about to depart, and ann watched him with perplexity and unhappiness in her eyes.
“ah, you cotton, good-bye i say, and you se?ora, i say good-bye.”
with a deep bow he kissed the rough hand of the blushing country woman. “bueno.” he turned with his kit bag upon his shoulder, waved them an airy hand and was gone.
on the following sunday jan returned from a visit in the evening and found the house empty; ann was out, an unusual thing, for their habits were fixed and deliberate as the stars in the sky. the sunsetting light was lying in meek patches on the kitchen wall, turning the polished iron pans to the brightness of silver, reddening the string of onions, and filling glass jars with solid crystal. he had just sat down to remove his heavy boots when ann came in, not at all the workaday ann but dressed in her best clothes smelling of scent and swishing her stiff linen.
“hullo,” said jan, surprised at his wife’s pink face and sparkling eyes, “bin church?”
“yes, church,” she replied, and sat down in her finery. her husband ambled about the room for various purposes and did not notice her furtive dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief. tears from ann were inconceivable.
the year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown, the corn stooked in rows; ann was[275] with child and the ridge of her stays was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. fruit dropped from the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the hunt swept over the field. christmas came and went, and then a child was born to the cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened juan.
“he was a kind chap, that man,” said ann, “and we’ve no relations to please, and it’s like your name—and your name is outlandish!”
jan’s delight was now to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever mused upon chickens, lambs and calves. “o, ah!” he would say, popping a great finger into the babe’s mouth, “o, ah!” but when, as occasionally happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of suspicion.
snow, when it falls near spring upon those cotswold hills, falls deeply and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. sickness, when it comes, comes with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. contagious and baffling, disease had stricken the district; in mid march great numbers of the country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were harried from one dawn to another. jan would come in of an evening and recite the calendar of the day’s dooms gathered from men of the adjacent fields.
“amos green ’ave gone then, pore o’ chap.”
“pore amos,” the pitying ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.
“and buttifant’s coachman.”
“dear, dear, what ’ull us all come to!”
[276]
“mrs. jocelyn was worse ’en bad this morning.”
“never, jan! us’ll miss ’er.”
“ah, and they do say parson rudwent won’t last out the night.”
“and whom’s to bury us then?” asked ann.
the invincible sickness came to the farm. ann one morning was weary, sickly, and could not rise from her bed. jan attended her in his clumsy way and kept coming in from the snow to give her comforts and food, but at eve she was in fever and lay helpless in the bed with the child at her breast. jan went off for the doctor, not to the nearest village for he knew that quest to be hopeless, but to a tiny town high on the wolds two miles away. the moon, large, sharp and round, blazed in the sky and its light sparkled upon the rolling fields of snow; his boots were covered at every muffled step; the wind sighed in the hedges and he shook himself for warmth. he came to the hill at last; halfway up was a church, its windows glowing with warm-looking light and its bells pealing cheerfully. he passed on and higher up met a priest trotting downwards in black cassock and saintly hat, his hands tucked into his wide sleeves, trotting to keep himself warm and humming as he went. jan asked a direction of the priest, who gave it with many circumstances of detail, and after he had parted he could hear the priest’s voice call still further instructions after him as long as he was in sight. “o, ah!” said jan each time, turning and waving his hand. but after all his mission was a vain one; the doctor was out and away, it was improbable that he would be able to[277] come, and the simple man turned home with a dull heart. when he reached the farm ann was delirious but still clung to the dusky child, sleeping snugly at her bosom. the man sat up all night before the fire waiting vainly for the doctor, and the next day he himself became ill. and strangely enough as he worked among his beasts the crude suspicion in his mind about the child took shape and worked without resistance until he came to suspect and by easy degrees to apprehend fully the time and occasion of ann’s duplicity.
“nasty dirty filthy thing!” he murmured from his sick mind. he was brushing the dried mud from the hocks of an old bay horse, but it was not of his horse he was thinking. later he stood in the rickyard and stared across the road at the light in their bedroom. throwing down the fork with which he had been tossing beds of straw he shook his fist at the window and cried out: “i hate ’er, i does, nasty dirty filthy thing!”
when he went into the house he replenished the fire but found he could take no further care for himself or the sick woman; he just stupidly doffed his clothes and in utter misery and recklessness stretched himself in the bed with ann. he lay for a long while with aching brows, a snake-strangled feeling in every limb, an unquenchable drouth in his throat, and his wife’s body burning beside him. outside the night was bright, beautiful and still sparkling with frost; quiet, as if the wind had been wedged tightly in some far corner of the sky, except for a cracked insulator on the telegraph pole just near the window, that rattled and hummed[278] with monstrous uncare. that, and the ticking of the clock! the lighted candle fell from its sconce on the mantelpiece; he let it remain and it flickered out. the glow from the coals was thick upon the ceiling and whitened the brown ware of the teapot on the untidy hearth. falling asleep at last he began dreaming at once, so it seemed, of the shrill cry of lambs hailing him out of wild snow-covered valleys, so wild and prolonged were the cries that they woke him, and he knew himself to be ill, very ill indeed. the child was wailing piteously, the room was in darkness, the fire out, but the man did not stir, he could not care, what could he do with that flame behind his eyes and the misery of death consuming him? but the child’s cries were unceasing and moved even his numbed mind to some effort. “ann!” he gasped. the poor wife did not reply. “ann!” he put his hand out to nudge her; in one instant the blood froze in his veins and then boiled again. ann was cold, her body hard as a wall, dead ... dead. stupor returned upon him; the child, unhelped, cried on, clasped to that frozen breast until the man again roused himself to effort. putting his great hands across the dead wife he dragged the child from her arms into the warmth beside him, gasping as he did so, “nasty ... dirty ... thing.” it exhausted him but the child was still unpacified and again he roused himself and felt for a biscuit on the table beside the bed. he crushed a piece in his mouth and putting the soft pap upon his finger fed thus the hungry child until it was stilled. by now the white counterpane spread vast like a sea, heaving and rocking with a million[279] waves, the framework of the bedstead moving like the tackle of tossed ships. he knew there was only one way to stem that sickening movement. “i hate ’er, i does,” rose again upon his lips, and drawing up his legs that were at once chilly and streaming with sweat, full of his new hatred he urged with all his might his wife’s cold body to the edge of the bed and withdrew the bedclothes. dead ann toppled and slid from him and her body clumped upon the floor with a fall that shook the room; the candle fell from the mantelpiece, bounced from the teapot and rolled stupidly along the bare boards under the bed. “hate ’er!” groaned the man; he hung swaying above the woman and tried to spit upon her. he sank back again to the pillow and the child, murmuring “o, ah!” and gathering it clumsily to his breast. he became tranquil then, and the hollow-sounding clock beat a dull rhythm into his mind, until that sound faded out with all light and sound, and jan fell into sleep and died, with the dusky child clasped in his hard dead arms.
