They reined in their horses and sat staring, a little further up the road, down into the orchard. They had ought to be told what was going on down there. Puts white powder into the cider along o’ the sugar. The Quality ought to be told. … But you do not speak to the Quality. Better if they do not notice you. You never know. They sticks together. Might be friends of Tietjenses for all you know. You don’t know Tietjenses ain’t Quality. Better git a move on or something might ’appen to you. You hear!
The boy in the shiny leggings and clothes—bareheaded he was, with shiny fair hair and shiny cheeks—exclaimed in a high voice:
“I say, mother, I don’t like this spying!” And the horses started and jostled.
You see. They don’t like this spying. Get a move on. And all that peasantry got a move on whilst the horses went slowly up hill. Queer things the Gentry can do to you still if they notice you. It is all very well to say this is a land fit for whatever the word is that stands for simple folk. They have the police and the keepers in their hands and your cottages and livings.
Gunning went out at the garden gate beside the stable and shouted objurgations at Young Hogben.
“Hey, don’t you drive that sow. She’s as much right on Common as you.”
The great sow was obstinately preceding the squat figure of Young Hogben, who hissed and squeaked behind her. She flapped her great ears and sniffed from side to side, a monument of black imperturbability.
“You keep your ’ogs out of our swedes!” Young Hogben shouted amidst objurgations. “In our forty-acre she is all day ’n’ all night too!”
“You keep your swedes outen our ’ogs,” Gunning shouted back, swinging his gorilla arms like a semaphore. He advanced on to the Common. Young Hogben descended the slope.
“You fence your ’ogs in same’s other folks ’as to do,” Young Hogben menaced.
“Folks as abuts on Commons ’as to fence out, not fence in,” Gunning menaced. They stood foot to foot on the soft sward menacing each other with their chins.
“ ’Is Lordship sold Tietjens’s to the Cahptn without Common rights,” the farmer said. “Ask Mr. Fuller.”
“ ’Is Lordship could no more sell Tietjens’s ’thout Common rights ’n’ you could milk without drinking rights. Ast Lawyer Sturgis!” Gunning maintained. Put arsenic in among ’is roots, Young Hogben maintained that he would. Spend seven years up to Lewes Jail if ’e did, Gunning maintained. They continued for long the endless quarrel that obtains between tenant-farmer who ’is not Quality but used to brutalizing his hinds and gentlemen’s henchman who ’is used to popularity amongst his class and the peasantry. The only thing upon which they agreed was that you wouldn’t think there adn’t been no war. The war ought to have given tenant-farmers the complete powers of local tyrants; it should have done the same for gentlemen’s bailiffs. The sow grunted round Gunning’s boots, looking up for grains of maize that Gunning usually dropped. In that way sows come to heel when you call them however far away they may be on the Common.
From the hard road up the hill—Tietjens’s went up the slope to the hedge there—descended the elderly lady who was singularly attired in the eyes of the country people. She considered that she was descended, not by blood, but by moral affinity from Madame de Maintenon, therefore she wore a long grey riding skirt with panniers, and a three-cornered, grey felt hat, and carried a riding switch of green shagreen. Her thin grey face was tired but authoritative, her hair which she wore in a knot beneath her hat was luminously grey, her pince-nez rimless.
Owing to the steepness of the bank on which the garden rose, the path of sea-pebbles zigzagged across most of its width, orange-coloured because it had been lately sanded. She went furtively between quince-trunks, much like the hedge-sparrow, flitting a stretch and then stopping for the boy with the shining leggings stolidly to overtake her.
She said that it was dreadful to think that the sins of one’s youth could so find one out. It ought to make her young companion think. To come at the end of one’s life to inhabiting so remote a spot. You could not get there with automobiles. Her own Delarue-Schneider had broken down on the hill-road in the attempt to get there yesterday.
The boy, slim in the body, but heavy in the bright red cheeks, with brown hair, truly shiny leggings and a tie of green, scarlet and white stripes, had a temporarily glum expression. He said, nevertheless, with grumbling determination, that he did not think this was playing the game. Moreover hundreds of motors got up that hill; how else would people come to buy the old furniture? He had already told Mrs. de Bray Pape that the carburetters of Delarue-Schneiders were a washout.
It was just that, Mrs. Pape maintained, that was so dreadful a thought. She went swiftly down another zigzag of the path and then faltered.
It was that that was dreadful in these old countries, she said. Why could they never learn? Take example? Here were the descendants of a great family, the Tietjens of Groby, a haunt of ancient peace, the one reduced to a no doubt dreadful state by the sins of his youth, the other to making a living by selling old furniture.
The youth said she was mistaken.
