Joanna Godden Part 32

"I don't care about children, Jo, and I'm over young to have one of my own."

"Young! You're rising twenty, and mother was but eighteen when I was born."

"Well, anyhow, I don't see why I should have a child just because you want one."

"I don't want one. For shame to say such things, Ellen Alce."

"You want me to have one, then, for your benefit."

"Don't you want one yourself?"

"No--not now. I've told you I don't care for children."

"Then you should ought to! Dear little mites! It's a shame to talk like that. Oh, what wouldn't I give, Ellen, to have a child of yours in my arms."

"Why don't you marry and have one of your own?"

Joanna coloured.

"I don't want to marry."

"But you ought to marry if that's how you feel. Why don't you take a decent fellow like, say, Sam Turner, even if you don't love him, just so that you may have a child of your own? You're getting on, you know, Joanna--nearly thirty-four--you haven't much time to waste."

"Well it ain't my fault," said Joanna tearfully, "that I couldn't marry the man I wanted to. I'd have been married more'n five year now if he hadn't been took. And it's sorter spoiled the taste for me, as you might say. I don't feel inclined to get married--it don't take my fancy, and I don't see how I'm ever going to bring myself to do it. That's why it ud be so fine for me if you had a little one, Ellen--as I could hold and kiss and care for and feel just as if it was my own."

"Thanks," said Ellen.

--21

The winding up of her plans for her sister made it necessary that Joanna should cast about for fresh schemes to absorb her energies. The farm came to her rescue in this fresh, more subtle collapse, and she turned to it as vigorously as she had turned after Martin's death, and with an increase of that vague feeling of bitterness which had salted her relations with it ever since.

A strong rumour was blowing on the Marsh that shortly Great Ansdore would come into the market. Joanna's schemes at once were given their focus. She would buy Great Ansdore if she had the chance. She had always resented its presence, so inaptly named, on the fringe of Little Ansdore's greatness. If she bought it, she would be adding more than fifty acres to her own, but it was good land--p.r.i.c.kett was a fool not to have made more of it--and the possession carried with it manorial rights, including the presentation of the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge. When Joanna owned Great Ansdore in addition to her own thriving and established patrimony, she would be a big personage on the Three Marshes, almost "county." No tenant or yeoman from Dymchurch to Winchelsea, from Romney to the coast, would dare withhold his respect--she might even at last be admitted a member of the Farmers'

Club....

It was characteristic of her that, with this purchase in view, she made no efforts to save money. She set out to make it instead, and her money-making was all of the developing, adventurous kind--she ploughed more gra.s.s, and decided to keep three times the number of cows and open a milk-round.

As a general practice only a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for, owing to the shallowness of the d.y.k.es, it was difficult to prevent their straying. However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further Innings. She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought Great Ansdore, she expected to make more money out of the milk and dairy produce--she might even in time open a dairy business in Rye. This would involve the engaging of an extra girl for the dairy and chickens, and an extra man to help Broadhurst with the cows, but Joanna was undaunted.

She enjoyed a gamble, when it was not merely a question of luck, but also in part a matter of resource and planning and hard driving pace.

"There's Joanna G.o.dden saving her tin to buy Great Ansdore," said Bates of Picknye Bush to Cobb of Slinches, as they watched her choosing her shorthorns at Romney. She had Arthur Alce beside her, and he was, as in the beginning, trying to persuade her to be a little smaller in her ideas, but, as in the beginning, she would not listen.

"Setting up cow-keeping now, is she?--Will she make as much a valiant wonder of that as she did with her sheep? Ha! ha!"

"Ha! ha!" The two men laughed and winked and rubbed their noses, for they liked to remember the doleful tale of Joanna's first adventure at Ansdore; it made them able to survey more equably her steady rise in glory ever since.

It was obvious to Walland Marsh that, on the whole, her big ideas had succeeded where the smaller, more cautious ones of her neighbours had failed. Of course she had been lucky--luckier than she deserved--but she was beginning to make men wonder if after all there wasn't policy in paying a big price for a good thing, rather than in obeying the rules of haggle which maintained on other farms. Ansdore certainly spent half as much again as Birdskitchen or Beggar's Bush or Misleham or Yokes Court, but then it had nearly twice as much to show for it. Joanna was not the woman who would fail to keep pace with her own prosperity--her swelling credit was not recorded merely in her pa.s.s-book; it was visible, indeed dazzling, to every eye.

She had bought a new trap and mare--a very smart turn-out, with rubber tires and chocolate-coloured upholstery, while the mare herself had blood in her, and a bit of the devil too, and upset the sleepy, chumbling rows of farmers' horses waiting for their owners in the streets of Lydd or Rye. Old Stuppeny had died in the winter following Ellen's marriage, and had been lavishly buried, with a tombstone, and an obituary notice in the _Rye Observer_, at Joanna's expense. In his place she had now one of those good-looking, rather saucy-eyed young men, whom she liked to have about her in a menial capacity. He wore a chocolate-coloured livery made by a tailor in Marlingate, and sat on the seat behind Joanna with his arms folded across his chest, as she spanked along the Straight Mile.

Joanna was now thirty-three years old, and in some ways looked older than her age, in others younger. Her skin, richly weather-beaten into reds and browns, and her strong, well-developed figure in its old-fashioned stays, made her look older than her eyes, which had an expectant, childish gravity in their brightness, and than her mouth, which was still a young woman's mouth, large, eager, full-lipped, with strong, little, white teeth. Her hair was beautiful--it had no sleekness, but, even in its coils, looked rough and abundant, and it had the same rich, apple-red colours in it as her skin.

She still had plenty of admirers, for the years had made her more rather than less desirable in herself, and men had grown used to her independence among them. Moreover, she was a "catch," a maid with money, and this may have influenced the decorous, well-considered offers she had about this time from farmers inland as well as on the Marsh. She refused them decidedly--nevertheless, it was obvious that she was well pleased to have been asked; these solid, estimable proposals testified to a quality in her life which had not been there before.

Yes--she had done well for herself on the whole, she thought. Looking back over her life, over the ten years she had ruled at Ansdore, she saw success consistently rewarding hard work and high ambition. She saw, too, strange gaps--parts of the road which had grown dim in her memory, parts where probably there had been a turning, where she might have left this well-laid, direct and beaten highway for more romantic field-paths.

It was queer, when she came to think of it, that nothing in her life had been really successful except Ansdore, that directly she had turned off her high-road she had become at once as it were bogged and lantern-led.

Socknersh ... Martin ... Ellen ... there had been by-ways, dim paths leading into queer unknown fields, a strange beautiful land, which now she would never know.

--22

Ellen watched her sister's thriving. "She's almost a lady," she said to herself, "and it's wasted on her." She was inclined to be dissatisfied with her own position in local society. When she had first married she had not thought it would be difficult to get herself accepted as "county" in the new neighbourhood, but she had soon discovered that she had had far more consequence as Joanna G.o.dden's sister than she would ever have as Arthur Alce's wife. Even in those days Little Ansdore had been a farm of the first importance, and Joanna was at least notorious where she was not celebrated; but Donkey Street held comparatively humble rank in a district overshadowed by Dungemarsh Court, and Arthur was not the man to push himself into consideration, though Ellen had agreed that half her marriage portion should be spent on the improvement of his farm.

No one of any consequence had called upon her, though her drawing-room, with its black cushions and Watts pictures, was more fit to receive the well-born and well-bred than Joanna's disgraceful parlour of oleographs and aspidistras and stuffed owls. The Parson had "visited" Mrs. Alce a few weeks after her arrival, but a "visit" is not a call, and when at the end of three months his wife still ignored her existence, Ellen made Arthur come over with her to Brodnyx and Pedlinge on the Sundays she felt inclined to go to church, saying that she did not care for their ways at Romney, where they had a lot of ceremonial centering round the alms-dish.

It was bitter for her to have to watch Joanna's steady rise in importance--the only respect in which she felt bitter towards her sister, since it was the only respect in which she felt inferior to her.

After a time, Joanna discovered this. At first she had enjoyed pouring out her triumphs to Ellen on her visits to Donkey Street, or on the rarer occasions when Ellen visited Ansdore.

"Yes, my dear, I've made up my mind. I'm going to give a dinner-party--a late dinner-party. I shall ask the people to come at seven, and then not have dinner till the quarter, so as there'll be no chance of the food being kept waiting. I shall have soup and meat and a pudding, and wine to drink."

"Who are you going to invite?" asked Ellen, with a curl of her lip.

"Why, didn't I tell you? Sir Harry Trevor's coming back to North Farthing next month. Mrs. Tolhurst got it from Peter Crouch, who had it from the Woolpack yesterday. He's coming down with his married sister, Mrs. Williams, and I'll ask Mr. Pratt, so as there'll be two gentlemen and two ladies. I'd ask you, Ellen, only I know Arthur hasn't got an evening suit."

"Thanks. I don't care about dinner-parties. Who's going to do your waiting?"

"Mene Tekel. She's going to wear a cap, and stand in the room all the time."

"I hope that you'll be able to hear yourselves talk through her breathing."

It struck Joanna that Ellen was not very cordial.

"I believe you want to come," she said, "and I tell you, duckie, I'll try and manage it. It doesn't matter about Arthur not having proper clothes--I'll put 'evening dress optional' on the invitations."

"I shouldn't do that," said Ellen, and laughed in a way that made Joanna feel uncomfortable. "I really don't want to come in the least--it would be very dreary driving to and fro."

"Then what's the matter, dearie?"

"Matter? There's nothing the matter."

But Joanna knew that Ellen felt sore, and failing to discover the reason herself at last applied to Arthur Alce.

"If you ask me," said Arthur, "it's because she's only a farmer's wife."

"Why should that upset her all of a sudden?"