Free Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons Page A

is anyone to meet her. Be off wi’ you,’ and she struck the gelding upon his hocks.
    The great beast bounded forward into the gloom before Adam could check him. They were gone. Darkness fell, a clouded bell of dark glass, eclipsing the soggy landscape.
    *
    By the time the buggy reached Beershorn, which was a good seven miles from Howling, Adam had forgotten what he was going there for. The reins lay between his knotted fingers, and his face, unseeing, was lifted to the dark sky. ***From the stubborn interwoven strata of his sub-conscious, thought seeped up into his dim conscious; not as an integral part of that consciousness, but more as an impalpable emanation, a crepuscular addition, from the unsleeping life in the restless trees and fields surrounding him. The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed. Frond leapt on root and hare on hare. Beetle and finch-fly were not spared. The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think. But Adam’s deafness and blindness came from within, as well as without; earthy calm seeped up from his sub-conscious and met descending calm in his conscious. Twice the buggy was pulled out of hedges by a passing farm-hand, and once narrowly shaved the vicar, driving home from tea at the Hall.
    ‘Where are you, my birdling?’ Adam’s blind lips asked the unanswering darkness and the loutish shapes of the unbudded trees. ‘Did I cowdle thee as a mommet for this?’
    He knew that Elfine was out on the Downs, striding on her unsteady colt’s legs towards the Hall and the bright, sardonic hands of Richard Hawk-Monitor. Adam’s mind playeduneasily, in bewildered pain, with the vision of his nurseling between those casual fingers …
    But the buggy reached Beershorn at last, and safely: there was only one road, and that led to the station.
    Adam pulled Viper up on his haunches just as the great gelding was about to canter through the entrance to the booking-hall, and knotted the reins on the rennet-post near the horse-trough.
    Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough. Humanity left him abruptly.
    For some time he brooded, but time conveyed to him nothing of itself. It spun endlessly upon a bright point in space, repeating the names of Elfine and Richard Hawk-Monitor. If time passed (and presumably it did, for a train came in, and its passengers got out, and were driven away) there was no time for Adam.
    He was at last roused by an obscure agitation which seemed to be taking place on the floor of the buggy.
    The straw which had lain upon the floor for the past twenty-five years was being energetically kicked out into the road by a small foot shod in a stout but shapely shoe. The light of the lantern showed nothing above this save a slender ankle and a green skirt, considerably agitated by the movements of the leg which it covered.
    A voice from the darkness above his head was remarking, ‘How revolting!’
    ‘Eh … eh,’ muttered Adam, peering blindly up into the vague air beyond the lantern’s rays. ‘Nay, niver do that, soul. That straw was good enough for Miss Judith’s wedding-trip to Brighton, and it must serve. Straw or chaff, leaf or fruit, we mun’ all come to’t.’
    ‘Not while I can prevent myself,’ the voice assured him. ‘And I can believe
most
things about Sussex and Cold Comfort, but not that Cousin Judith ever went to Brighton. Now, shall we be getting along, if you have finished brooding? My trunk is coming up to the farm by the carrier’s van