Ross Poldark (Poldark, #1)

by Winston Graham

“Cockerels aren’t pigs. God made it their nature to fight.” She did not speak for a time. “Yes, but God didn’ give ’em steel spurs to fight with.” “You should have been a lawyer, Demelza,” he commented, and at that she had been silent again.

It seemed to him sometimes that if pleasure lay in the unsubtle sport that a harlot afforded, then he had not quite the normal appetites of a normal

man. Well, there was an odd satisfaction in asceticism, a cumulative self-knowledge and self-reliance. He thought very little about it those days. He had other interests and other concerns.

The smuggler was a clever fellow who knew how to cheat the government of its revenues and bring them brandy at half price. The poacher not only trespassed literally upon someone’s land, he trespassed metaphorically upon all the inalienable rights of personal property. He was an outlaw and a felon. Hanging was barely good enough.

“It’s mortal kind of you, Father. I’m that glad there’s been a change. But I been here so long now that this is my home. It would seem like leaving home to come back wi’ you. I learned all ’bout farming here and everything. I’m part of the house. They’d not be able to get along without me. They need me, not you. One day I’ll walk over and see ’ee—you an’ the boys and

all. But you don’t need me. You got she to look after you. There’s nought I can do ’cept eat your food.”

She couldn’t leave. Not for anything. She had come to look upon it all, quick and dead, all things alike, as owned by it and owning. She was fiercely attached to it. And of course to Ross. If it was anything for him she was being asked to do, it would be different, but instead, she was expected to desert him. Not until she went there had she lived at all. Though she did not consciously reason so, all the early part of her life was like a dark prenatal nightmare, thought and imagined and feared rather than suffered.

She looked at him. She saw for the first time how coarse and common he really was. His cheeks sagged and his nose was crossed with tiny red veins. But then all the gentlemen were not like the one she served.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps Ross would refuse to let her go. But there was no proper feeling for her on his part, not beyond a kindly interest. He would as soon become used to her not being in the parlor as he had to her being there.

Ross grunted. “To be frank, I don’t think my interference greatly altered the situation. But that is no matter for—” He stopped. He stared. That was the moment.

It couldn’t have been worse. But in the depths of horror and despair one comes to a new steadiness. There is no farther to fall.

He said angrily, “You know what

people say of you, Demelza?” She shook her head. “What?” “If you act like this, what they say of you will become true.” She looked at him candidly, without coquetry and without fear. “I live only for you, Ross.”

“Demelza,” he said, and even her name was strange. “I didn’t take you from your father—for—to—” “What do it matter what you took me for?”

Well, he had his own standards of behavior, though no one gave him credit for them. It was nothing out of the way for the younger gentry of the neighborhood to tumble their kitchen maids. They didn’t kidnap them when they were under age, that was all. Well, she was of age, age enough to know her own mind and sense enough to read his before he knew it himself. What was the matter with him? No sense of humor to leaven life? Must every act be dead serious, a weight upon his head and hands? Loving was a recreation; all the poets sang of its lightness, its levity. Only the dull clod raised barriers of creed or conscience.

In twenty-seven years he had worked out some sort of a

philosophy of behavior; did one throw it over at the first test? There was a tap on the door.

Life seemed to be teaching him that the satisfaction of most appetites carried in them the seeds of frustration, that it was the common delusion of all men to imagine otherwise.

The sense of separateness from others, of loneliness, had not often been so strong as that morning. He wondered if there was any true content

in life, if all men were as troubled as he with a sense of disillusion. It had not always been so. His childhood had been happy enough in the unthinking way that childhoods are. He had enjoyed in a measure the roughness and dangers of active service. It was since he returned home that the evil eye of discontent had been on him, making empty air of his attempts to find a philosophy of his own, turning to ashes whatever he grasped.

Demelza thought, She’s one day too late; just one day. How beautiful she is. How I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time, like the stab of a treacherous knife, it occurred to her that Ross’s desire for her the previous night was a flicker of empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his, but she could see so much in his eyes.

“I’m afraid they would droop. See, they’re drooping already. Bluebells are like that.” Elizabeth picked up her gloves and crop. I can’t come here again, she thought. After all this time, and now it’s too late. Too late for me to come here.

His decision to marry her was taken

within two days of their first sleeping together. It was not that he loved her but that such a course was the obvious way out. If one overlooked her beginnings she was a not unsuitable match for an impoverished farmer squire. She had already proved her worth about the house and farm, none better, and she had grown into his life in a way he had hardly realized.

With his ancient name, he could of course have gone into society and paid violent court to some daughter of the new rich and have settled down to a life of comfortable boredom on the marriage dowry. But he couldn’t see such an adventure seriously. He realized with a sense of half-bitter amusement that that marriage would finally damn him in the eyes of his own class. For while the man who slept with his k...

s...

Jud and Prudie were inclined to take it badly at first, resenting, so far as they dared show it, the fact that the child who had arrived there as a waif and stray, infinitely beneath themselves, should suddenly be able to call herself their mistress.

But in the end she talked them or hypnotized them into the view that she was in part their protégée and so her advancement reflected a certain glory on them.

But her vitality was so abundant that gradually it overcame the barriers that custom and subservience had set up.

They were a man and a woman, with no inequality between them. She was older than her years and he younger, and they walked home hand in hand through the slanting shadows of the new darkness. I am happy, he thought again. Something is happening to me, to us, transmuting our shabby little love affair. Keep this mood, hold on to it. No slipping back.

eyes, and several others were weeping quietly. Yes, it was a “beautiful” sermon, tugging at the emotions and conjuring up pictures of greatness and peace. But were they talking about the decent peppery ordinary old man he knew, or had the subject strayed to the story of some saint of the past? Or

were there two men being buried under the same name? One

But Charles himself would surely have been amused. Or would he have shed a tear with the rest for the manner of man who had passed away?

“Before I found you,” he said, “when I came home from America, things looked black for me. You know why—because I’d hoped to marry Elizabeth and returned to find her with other plans. That winter it was Verity alone who saved me from… Well, I was a fool to take it so to heart—nothing is really worth that—but I couldn’t fight it at the time, and Verity came and kept me going.

your room’s ready.” She wondered if the lameness of the excuse was as plain to them as it was to her.

The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and—and to love in return. People who haven’t got it—or had it—don’t believe that, but it’s the truth. So long as life doesn’t touch that you’re safe against the rest—”

What is there in us, Ross, that makes us so uncomfortable to live with?” “You malign us, my dear. It is only that, like most families, we are never all happy at one time.”

If they would but settle themselves like two cats in a basket, without outside interference, all might yet be well.

“Did I say you were the most inconsequent of women? It was an understatement. When I suggest Verity coming here you almost weep. And for half a week and more since she came you have been as stiff as an old gander. Now you choose this unseasonable hour to take Verity’s side in a long-buried contention and to lecture me on my shortcomings. Go to sleep before I box your ears!”

Demelza pressed his hand against her mouth. “You have never hit me when I deserved

it, so I am not scared now when I do not.” “That is the difference between dealing with a man and dealing with a woman.” “But a man,” Demelza said, “even a kind one, can sometimes be cruel wi’out knowing it.” “And a woman,” Ross said, pulling her down again, “never knows when a subject must b...

Demelza, unasked, would explain to Verity. There was, too, more laughter than there had been at Nampara for years; sometimes it seemed not so much at the wit of the conversation as born of a relief common to them all.

“Dolts that you are,” said Ross. “Why didn’t you send for Jud and Cobbledick?” “Oh, Jud,” said Demelza. “He’s not so strong as we, is he, Verity?” “Not so strong as you are,” said Verity. “Your wife is self-willed, Ross.” “You waste your breath in telling me the obvious,” he replied, but went away content.

“You won’t sleep sitting up like that. Have you a pain?” “Me? No. I been thinking.” “A bad habit. Take a nip of brandy and you’ll settle off.”

The brightest light had drained from the sky, leaving the clouds flushed with a rich plum-colored afterglow. All the sparse countryside stood out in the warm light, the goats pasturing in numbers on the moorland, the scanty ricks of gathered corn, the wooden huts of the mines, the gray slate and cob cottages; the girls’ faces under their wide hats were lit with it, the horses’ noses gleamed.

Autumn lingered on as if fond of its own perfection. The November gales did not develop, and leaves of the tall elms were drifting down the stream, yellow and brown and withered crimson, until Christmas. And life at Nampara drifted down the stream with the same undisturbed calm. They lived together, those dissimilar lovers, in harmony and good will, working and sleeping and eating, loving and laughing and agreeing, creating about themselves a fine shell of preoccupation that the outside world made no serious attempt to breach. The routine of their lives was part of their daily contentment.

Demelza’s views were naturally different. Elizabeth was behind it; Elizabeth had invited them in order to examine her, Demelza, to see how she had developed as Ross’s wife, to get Ross into an atmosphere where he would see what a mistake he had made in marrying a low-class girl, and humiliate her by a display of fine manners.

He was not in the least ashamed of Demelza. The Trenwith Poldarks had never been sticklers for the agrémens, and Demelza had a curious charm that all the tuition in the world could

not bring.

In argument Ross always carried guns too big for her. She saw, she felt, but she could not reason it out to prove him wrong.