§11

Dinner on Christmas Day was always in the kitchen at Ansdore. When Joanna reached home with Martin, the two tables, set end to end, were laid—with newly ironed cloths and newly polished knives, but with the second-best china only, since many of the guests were clumsy. Joanna wished there had been time to get out the best china, but there was not.

Ellen came flying to meet them, in a white serge frock tied with a red sash.

"Arthur Alce has come, Jo—we're all waiting. Is Mr. Trevor coming too?" and she put her head on one side, looking up at him through her long fringe.

"Yes, duckie. Mr. Trevor's dropped in to taste our turkey and plum pudding—to see if they ain't better than his own to-night."

"Is he going to have another turkey and plum pudding to-night? How greedy!"

"Be quiet, you sassy little cat"—and Joanna's hand swooped, missing Ellen's head only by the sudden duck she gave it.

"Leave me alone, Joanna—you might keep your temper just for Christmas Day."

"I won't have you sass strangers."

"I wasn't sassing."

"You was."

"I wasn't."

Martin felt scared.

"I hope you don't mean me by the stranger," he said, taking up lightness as a weapon, "I think I know you well enough to be sassed—not that I call that sassing."

"Well, it's good of you not to mind," said Joanna, "personally I've great ideas of manners, and Ellen's brought back some queer ones from her school, though others she's learned are beautiful. Fancy, she never sat down to dinner without a serviette."

"Never," said Ellen emphatically.

Martin appeared suitably impressed. He thought Ellen a pretty little thing, strangely exotic beside her sister.

Dinner was ready in the kitchen, and they all went in, Joanna having taken off her coat and hat and smoothed her hair. Before they sat down there were introductions to Arthur Alce and to Luck and Broadhurst and Stuppeny and the other farm people. The relation between employer and employed was at once more patriarchal and less sharply defined at Ansdore than it was at North Farthing—Martin tried to picture his father sitting down to dinner with the carter and the looker and the housemaid ... it was beyond imagination, yet Joanna did it quite naturally. Of course there was a smaller gulf between her and her people—the social grades were inclined to fuse on the Marsh, and the farmer was only just better than his looker—but on the other hand, she seemed to have far more authority....

"Now, hold your tongues while I say grace," she cried.

Joanna carved the turkeys, refusing to deputise either to Martin or to Alce. At the same time she led a general kind of conversation. The Christmas feast was to be communal in spirit as well as in fact—there were to be no formalities above the salt or mutterings below it. The new harmonium provided a good topic, for everyone had heard it, except Mrs. Tolhurst who had stayed to keep watch over Ansdore, cheering herself with the prospect of carols in the evening.

"It sounded best in the psalms," said Wilson, Joanna's looker since Socknersh's day—"oh, the lovely grunts it made when it said—'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee!"

"So it did," said Broadhurst, "but I liked it best in the Herald Angels."

"I liked it all through," said Milly Pump, the chicken-girl. "And I thought Mr. Elphick middling clever to make it sound as if it wur playing two different tunes at the same time."

"Was that how it sounded?" asked Mrs. Tolhurst wistfully, "maybe they'll have it for the carols to-night."

"Surelye," said old Stuppeny, "you'd never have carols wudout a harmonister. I'd lik myself to go and hear it, but doubt if I ull git so far wud so much good victual inside me."

"No, you won't—not half so far," said Joanna briskly, "you stop at home and keep quiet after this, or you'll be having bad dreams to-night."

"I never do but have one kind o' dream," said old Stuppeny, "I dream as I'm setting by the fire and a young gal brings me a cup of cocoa. 'Tis but an old dream, but reckon the Lord God sends the old dreams to the old folk—all them new dreams that are about on the Marsh, they goes to the young uns."

"Well, you've no call to complain of your dreams, Stuppeny," said Wilson, "'tisn't everyone who has the luck to dream regular of a pretty young gal. Leastways, I guess she's pretty, though you äun't said it."

"I döan't take much count on her looks—'tis the cocoa I'm after, though it äun't often as the Lord God lets the dream stay till I've drunk my cup. Sometimes 'tis my daughter Nannie wot brings it, but most times 'tis just some unacquainted female."

"Oh, you sorry old dog," said Wilson, and the table laughed deep-throatedly, or giggled, according to sex. Old Stuppeny looked pleased. His dream, for some reason unknown to himself, never failed to raise a laugh, and generally produced a cup of cocoa sooner or later from one of the girls.

Martin did not join in the discussion—he felt that his presence slightly damped the company, and for him to talk might spoil their chances of forgetting him. He watched Miss Godden as she ate and laughed and kept the conversation rolling—he also watched Arthur Alce, trying to use this man's devotion as a clue to what was left of Joanna's mystery. Alce struck him as a dull fellow, and he put down his faithfulness to the fact that having once fallen into love as into a rut he had lain there ever since like a sheep on its back. He could see that Alce did not altogether approve of his own choice—her vigour and flame, her quick temper, her free airs—she was really too big for these people; and yet she was so essentially one of them ... their roots mingled in the same soil, the rich, damp, hardy soil of the Marsh.

His attitude towards her was undergoing its second and final change. Now he knew that he would never want to flirt with her. He did not want her tentatively or temporarily. He still wanted her adventurously, but her adventure was not the adventure of siege and capture but of peaceful holding. Like the earth, she would give her best not to the man who galloped over her, but to the man who chose her for his home and settlement. Thus he would hold her, or not at all. Very likely after to-day he would renounce her—he had not yet gone too far, his eyes were still undazzled, and he could see the difficulties and limitations in which he was involving himself by such a choice. He was a gentleman and a townsman—he trod her country only as a stranger, and he knew that in spite of the love which the Marsh had made him give it in the few months of his dwelling, his thoughts still worked for years ahead, when better health and circumstances would allow him to go back to the town, to a quick and crowded life. Could he then swear himself to the slow blank life of the Three Marshes, where events move deliberately as a plough? To the empty landscape, to the flat miles? He would have to love her enough to endure the empty flatness that framed her. He could never take her away, any more than he could take away Ansdore or North Farthing. He must make a renunciation for her sake—could he do so? And after all, she was common stuff—a farmer's daughter, bred at the National School. By taking her he would be making just a yokel of himself.... Yet was it worth clinging to his simulacrum of gentility—boosted up by his father's title and a few dead rites, such as the late dinner which had impressed her so much. The only real difference between the Goddens and the Trevors was that the former knew their job and the latter didn't.

All this thinking did not make either for much talk or much appetite, and Joanna was disappointed. She let fall one or two remarks on farming and outside matters, thinking that perhaps the conversation was too homely and intimate for him, but he responded only languidly.

"A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Trevor," said Ellen pertly.

"You eat your pudding," said Joanna.

It occurred to her that perhaps Martin was disgusted by the homeliness of the meal—after all, he was gentry, and it was unusual for gentry to sit down to dinner with a crowd of farm-hands.... No doubt at home he had wine-glasses, and a servant-girl to hand the dishes. She made a resolution to ask him again and provide both these luxuries. To-day she would take him into the parlour and make Ellen show off her accomplishments, which would help put a varnish of gentility on the general coarseness of the entertainment. She wished she had asked Mr. Pratt—she had thought of doing so, but finally decided against it.

So when the company had done shovelling the Stilton cheese into their mouths with their knives, she announced that she and Mr. Trevor would have their cups of tea in the parlour, and told Milly to go quick and light the fire.

Ellen was most satisfactorily equal to this part of the occasion. She recited "Curfew shall not Ring Tonight," and played Haydn's "Gipsy Rondo." Joanna began to feel complacent once more.

"I made up my mind she should go to a good school," she said when her sister had run back to what festivities lingered in the kitchen, "and really it's wonderful what they've taught her. She'll grow up to be a lady."

It seemed to Martin that she stressed the last word rather wistfully, and the next moment she added—

"There's not many of your sort on the Marsh."

"How do you mean—my sort?"

"Gentlefolk."

"Oh, we don't trouble to call ourselves gentlefolk. My father and I are just plain farmers now."

"But you don't really belong to us—you're the like of the Savilles at Dungemarsh Court, and the clergy families."

"Is that where you put us?—We'd find our lives jolly dull if we shut ourselves up in that set. I can tell you that I've enjoyed myself far more here to-day than ever at the Court or the Rectory. Besides, Miss Godden, your position on Walland Marsh is very much better than ours. You're a great personage, you know."

"Reckon folks talk about me," said Joanna proudly. "Maybe you've heard 'em."

He nodded.

"You've heard about me and Arthur Alce?"

"I've heard some gossip."

"Don't you believe it. I'm fond of Arthur, but he ain't my style—and I could do better for myself ..."

She paused—her words seemed to hang in the flickering warmth of the room. She was waiting for him to speak, and he felt a little shocked and repelled. She was angling for him—he had never suspected that.

"I must go," he said, standing up.

"So soon?"

"Yes—tradition sends one home on Christmas Day."

He moved towards the door, and she followed him, glowing and majestic in the shadows of the firelit room. Outside, the sky was washed with a strange, fiery green, in which the new kindled stars hung like lamps.

They stood for a moment on the threshold, the warm, red house behind them, before them the star-hung width and emptiness of the Marsh. Martin blocked the sky for Joanna, as he turned and held out his hand. Then, on the brink of love, she hesitated. A memory smote her—of herself standing before another man who blocked the sky, and in whose eyes sat the small, enslaved image of herself. Was she just being a fool again?—Ought she to draw back while she had still the power, before she became his slave, his little thing, and all her bigness was drowned in his eyes. She knew that whatever she gave him now could never be taken back. Here stood the master of the mistress of Ansdore.

As for Martin, his thoughts were of another kind.

"Good-bye," he said, renouncing her—for her boldness and her commonness and all that she would mean of change and of foregoing—"Good-bye, Joanna."

He had not meant to say her name, but it had come, and with it all the departing adventure of love. She seemed to fall towards him, to lean suddenly like a tree in a gale—he smelt a fresh, sweet smell of clean cotton underclothing, of a plain soap, of free unperfumed hair ... then she was in his arms, and he was kissing her warm, shy mouth, feeling that for this moment he had been born.