§15

As the year slid through the fogs into the spring, he persuaded Joanna to come with him on his rambles on the Marsh. He was astonished to find how little she knew of her own country, of that dim flat land which was once under the sea. She knew it only as the hunting ground of her importance. It was at Yokes Court that she bought her roots, and from Becket's House her looker had come; Lydd and Rye and Romney were only market-towns—you did best in cattle at Rye, but the other two were proper for sheep; Old Honeychild was just a farm where she had bought some good spades and dibbles at an auction; at Misleham they had once had foot-and-mouth disease—she had gone to Picknye Bush for the character of Milly Pump, her chicken-girl....

He told her of the smugglers and owlers who had used the Woolpack as their headquarters long ago, riding by moonlight to the cross-roads, with their mouths full of slang—cant talk of "mackerel" and "fencing" and "hornies" and "Oliver's glim."

"Well, if they talked worse there then than they talk now, they must have talked very bad indeed," was all Joanna found to say.

He told her of the old monks of Canterbury who had covered the Marsh with the altars of Thomas à Becket.

"We got shut of 'em all on the fifth of November," said Joanna, "as we sing around here on bonfire nights—and 'A halfpenny loaf to feed the Pope, a penn'orth of cheese to choke him,' as we say."

All the same he enjoyed the expeditions that they had together in her trap, driving out on some windy-skied March day, to fill the hours snatched from her activities at Ansdore and his muddlings at North Farthing, with all the sea-green sunny breadth of Walland, and still more divinely with Walland's secret places—the shelter of tall reeds by the Yokes Sewer, or of a thorn thicket making a tent of white blossom and spindled shadows in the midst of the open land.

Sometimes they crossed the Rhee Wall on to Romney Marsh, and he showed her the great church at Ivychurch, which could have swallowed up in its nave the two small farms that make the village. He took her into the church at New Romney and showed her the marks of the Great Flood, discolouring the pillars for four feet from the ground.

"Doesn't it thrill you?—Doesn't it excite you?" he teased her, as they stood together in the nave, the church smelling faintly of hearthstones.

"How long ago did it happen?"

"In the year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty seven the Kentish river changed his mouth, and after swilling out Romney Sands and drowning all the marsh from Honeychild to the Wicks, did make himself a new mouth in Rye Bay, with which mouth he swallowed the fifty taverns and twelve churches of Broomhill, and—"

"Oh, have done talking that silly way—it's like the Bible, only there's no good in it."

Her red mouth was close to his in the shadows of the church—he kissed it....

"Child!"

"Oh, Martin—"

She was faintly shocked because he had kissed her in church, so he drew her to him, tilting back her chin.

"You mustn't" ... but she had lost the power of gainsaying him now, and made no effort to release herself. He held her up against the pillar and gave her mouth another idolatrous kiss before he let her go.

"If it happened all that while back, they might at least have got the marks off by this time," she said, tucking away her loosened hair.

Martin laughed aloud—her little reactions of common sense after their passionate moments never failed to amuse and delight him.

"You'd have had it off with your broom, and that's all you think about it. But look here, child—what if it happened again?"

"It can't."

"How do you know?"

"It can't—I know it."

"But if it happened then it could happen again."

"There ain't been a flood on the Marsh in my day, nor in my poor father's day, neither. Sometimes in February the White Kemp brims a bit, but I've never known the roads covered. You're full of old tales. And now let's go out, for laughing and love-making ain't the way to behave in church."

"The best way to behave in church is to get married."

She blushed faintly and her eyes filled with tears.

They went out, and had dinner at the New Inn, which held the memory of their first meal together, in that huge, sag-roofed dining-room, then so crowded, now empty except for themselves. Joanna was still given to holding forth on such subjects as harness and spades, and to-day she gave Martin nearly as much practical advice as on that first occasion.

"Now, don't you waste your money on a driller—we don't give our sheep turnips on the Marsh. It's an Inland notion. The grass here is worth a field of roots. You stick to grazing and you'll keep your money in your pocket and never send coarse mutton to the butcher."

He did not resent her advice, for he was learning humility. Her superior knowledge and experience of all practical matters was beginning to lose its sting. She was in his eyes so adorable a creature that he could forgive her for being dominant. The differences in their natures were no longer incompatibilities, but gifts which they brought each other—he brought her gifts of knowledge and imagination and emotion, and she brought him gifts of stability and simplicity and a certain saving commonness. And all these gifts were fused in the glow of personality, in a kind bodily warmth, in a romantic familiarity which sometimes found its expression in shyness and teasing.

They loved each other.