The Hurly-Burly

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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# chapter_title: The Hurly-Burly
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# language: en
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The Weetmans—mother, son, and daughter—lived on a thriving farm. It was small enough, God knows, but it had always been a turbulent place to live. For the servant, it was: "Phemy, do this," or "Phemy, have you done that?" from dawn to dark, and even from dark to dawn there was an atmosphere of unrest. The widow Weetman, a partial invalid, was the only figure that showed any semblance of tranquility, but it was misleading, for she sat day after day on her substantial hips, knitting and nodding, lifting her grey face only to grumble, her spectacled eyes pinning the culprit with a basilisk glare. And her daughter Alice, the housekeeper, who had a large face, a dominating face—in some respects she was all face—was like a blast in a corridor with her "Maize for the hens, Phemy!" "More firewood, Phemy!" "Who has set the trap in the harness room?" "Come along!" "Have you scoured the skimming pans?" "Why not!" "Where are you idling?"

"Come along, Phemy, I have no time to waste this morning; you really must help me." It was not only in the house that this flood of industry flowed; outside there was enough activity for a regiment. A master-farmer's work largely consists of a series of conversations with other master-farmers, a long-winded way of doing long-headed things, but Glastonbury Weetman, the son, was not like that at all; he was the embodiment of energy, always doing, chock-full of orders, urgings, rebukes, blame, and blasphemy. That was the kind of place Phemy Madigan worked at. No one could rest on their laurels there. The farm and the home possessed everyone, lock, stock, and barrel; work was like a tiger, it devoured you ruthlessly. The Weetmans didn't mind—they liked being devoured by such a tiger.

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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After six or seven years of this, Alice went back to marry an old sweetheart in Canada, where the Weetmans had originally come from, but Phemy's burden was in no way lessened. There were as many things to wash, sew, and darn; there was always a cart of churns about to dash for a train it couldn't possibly catch, or a horse to shoe that couldn't possibly be spared. Weetman hated to see his people merely walking: "Run over to the barn for that hay-fork," or "Slip across to the ricks, quick now," he would cry, and if ever an unwary hen got in his way, it did so only once—and no more. His laborers were mere flesh and blood, but they occasionally resented his relentless goading. Glas Weetman didn't like to be impeded or contradicted; one day in a rage he had smashed that lumbering fool of a carter, Gathercole. For this he was sent to jail for a month.

The day after he was sentenced, Phemy Madigan, alone in the house with Mrs. Weetman, woke at the usual early hour. It was a foggy September morning; Sampson and his boy Daniel were clattering pails in the dairy shed. The girl felt sick and gloomy as she dressed; it was a wretched house to work in, crickets in the kitchen, cockroaches in the attic, spiders and mice everywhere. It was an old, long, low house; she knew that when she descended the stairs, the walls would be stained with autumnal dampness, the banisters oozing with moisture. She wished she was a lady and married and living in a palace fifteen stories high.

She was fortunate that she was big and strong, though she had been only a charity girl taken from the workhouse by the Weetmans when she was fourteen years old. That was seven years ago. It was fortunate that she was fed well at the farm, very well indeed; it was the one virtue of the place. But her meals didn't make up for everything; the farm ate up the body and blood of people. And at times the pressure was charged with a special excitement, as if a taut elastic thong had been plucked and released with a reverberating ping.

It was so on this morning. Mrs. Weetman was dead in her bed.

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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At that crisis, a new sense descended upon the girl, a sense of responsibility. She was not in fear; she felt no grief or surprise. It concerned her somehow, but she herself was unconcerned, and she slid without effort into the position of mistress of the farm. She opened a window and looked outside. A little way off, a boy with a red scarf stood by an open gate.

"Oi... oi, kup, kup, kup!" he cried to the cows in that field. Some of the cows had got up and stared amiably at him; others sat ignoring his call, while one or two plodded deliberately towards him. "Oi... oi, kup, kup, kup!"

"Lazy rascal, that boy," remarked Phemy. "We shall have to get rid of him. Dan'l! Come here, Dan'l!" she screamed, waving her arm wildly. "Quick!"

She sent him away for the police and a doctor. At the inquest, there were no relatives in England who could be called, no witnesses other than Phemy. After the funeral, she wrote a letter to Glastonbury Weetman in jail informing him of his bereavement, but he made no reply. Meanwhile, the work of the farm was pushed forward under her control, for though she was reveling in her personal release from torment, she wouldn't allow others to share her respite. She had gotten Mrs. Weetman's keys and her money box. She paid the two men and the boy their wages week by week. The last of the barley was reaped, the oats stacked, the roots hoed, the churns sent daily under her supervision. And she was always bustling the men.

"Oh dear me, these lazy rogues!" she would complain to the empty rooms. "They waste time, so it's robbery—it is robbery. You may wear yourself to the bone, and what does it matter to them? All the responsibility, too! They would take your skin if they could get it off you—and they can't!"

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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She kept such a sharp eye on the corn, meal, and eggs that Sampson grew surly. She placated him by handing him Mr. Weetman's gun and a few cartridges, saying, "Just shoot me a couple of rabbits over in the warren when you have time." At the end of the day, Mr. Sampson hadn't succeeded in killing a rabbit, so he kept the gun and cartridges for many more days. Phemy was truly happy. The gloom of the farm had disappeared. The farmhouse and everything about it looked beautiful—truly beautiful—with its yard full of ricks, the pond full of ducks, the fields full of sheep and cattle, and the trees still full of leaves and birds. She scattered maize about the yard; the hens scampered toward it and the young pigs galloped, quarreling over the grains they rooted for, grinding each one separately in their iron jaws, while the white pullets stalked delicately among them, picked up seeds one, two, three, and swallowed them like ladies.

Sometimes on cold mornings she would go outside and give an apple to the fat bay pony when he galloped back from the station. He would stand puffing with a kind of rapture, his nostrils discharging in the frosty air vague shapes like smoky trumpets. Presently, on his hide, a little ball of liquid would mysteriously appear, grow, slide, and drop from his flanks into the road. Then drops would begin to come from all parts of him until the road beneath was dampened by a shower from his sweat-soaked outline. Phemy would say:

"The wretches! They were so late they drove him near distracted, poor thing. Lazy rogues, but wait till master comes back; they'd better be careful!"

And if any friendly person in the village asked her, "How are you getting on up there, Phemy?" she would reply, "Oh, as well as you can expect with so much to be done—and such men." The questioner might hint that there was no reason in the circumstances to distress oneself, but then Phemy would be vexed. To her, honesty was as holy as the Sabbath to a little child. Behind her back they joked about her foolishness; but, after all, wisdom isn't a process—it's a result, the fruit of the tree. One can't be wise; one can only be fortunate.

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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On the last day of her Elysium, the workhouse master and the chaplain had stalked over the farm shooting partridges. In the afternoon, she met them and asked for a couple of birds for Weetman's return on the morrow. The workhouse was not far away; it was on a hill facing west, and at sunset its windows would often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained, smokeless fire. Very beautiful it looked to Phemy.

The men had come to work punctually, and Phemy herself found so much to do that she had no time to give the pony an apple. She cleared the kitchen once and for all of the pails, guns, harness, and implements that had so hampered its domestic purpose, and there were abundant signs elsewhere of a new impulse at work in the establishment. She didn't know at what hour to expect the prisoner, so she often went to the garden gate and glanced up the road. The night had been wild with wind and rain, but the morning was sparklingly clear though still breezy. Crisp leaves rustled about the road where polished chestnuts lay in numbers among the parted husks, mixed with coral buds of the yews. The sycamore leaves were black rags, but the delicate elm foliage fluttered down like yellow stars.

There was a brown field neatly adorned with white cone-shaped heaps of turnips; behind it a small upland of deeply green lucerne; behind that nothing but blue sky and rolling cloud. The turnips, washed by the rain, were creamy polished globes.

When at last he appeared, she scarcely recognized him. Glas Weetman was a big, though not fleshy, man of thirty with a large boyish face and a flat bald head. Now he had a thick dark beard. He was hungry, but his first desire was to be shaved. He stood before the kitchen mirror, first clipping the beard away with scissors, and as he lathered the remainder, he said:

"Well, it's a bad state of things this, my sister dead and my mother gone to America. What shall we do?"

He saw in the glass that she was smiling.

"There's nothing funny in that, my comic girl," he bawled indignantly. "What are you laughing at?"

"I wasn't laughing. It's your mother that's dead."

"My mother that's dead. I know."

# book_id: global-gutenberg-story-603508b4641d40b7835ee7d85ac84000
# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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"And Miss Alice that's gone to America."

"To America, I know, I know, so you can stop making your cow eyes and get me something to eat. What's been going on here?"

She gave him an outline of affairs. He looked at her sternly when he asked about his sweetheart.

"Has Rosa Beauchamp been along here?"

"No," said Phemy, and he was silent. She was surprised at the question. The Beauchamps were such respectable, high-up people that to Phemy's simple mind they couldn't possibly favor an alliance now with a man who had been in prison; it was absurd, but she didn't say so to him. And she was bewildered to find that her conviction was wrong, for Rosa came along later in the day and everything between her master and his sweetheart was just as before; Phemy hadn't divined so much love and forgiveness in high-up people.

It was the same with everything else. The old harsh rushing life resumed; Weetman turned to his farm with an increased vigor to make up for lost time, and the girl's golden week or two of ease became an unforgotten dream. The pails, guns, and harness crept back into the kitchen. Spiders, cockroaches, and mice were more noticeable than ever before, and Weetman himself seemed embittered, harsher. Time alone could never still him; there was a force in his frame, a buzzing in his blood. But there was a difference between them now; Phemy no longer feared him. She obeyed him, it was true, with eagerness; she worked in the house like a woman and in the fields like a man. They ate their meals together, and from this dissonant comradeship the girl, in a dumb kind of way, began to love him.

One April evening, coming in from the fields, he found her lying on the couch beneath the window, fast asleep, with no meal ready at all. He flung his bundle of harness to the floor and bawled angrily at her. To his surprise, she didn't stir. He was somewhat abashed; he stepped over to look at her. She was lying on her side. There was a large tear in her bodice between sleeve and shoulder; her flesh looked soft and agreeable to him. Her shoes had slipped off onto the floor; her lips were folded in a sleepy pout.

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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"Why, she's quite a pretty colt," he murmured. "She's all right, she's just tired—the Lord above knows what for."

But he couldn't rouse the sleepyhead. Then a fancy moved him to lift her in his arms; he carried her from the kitchen and, staggering up the stairs, laid the sleeping girl on her own bed. He then went downstairs and ate pie and drank beer in the candlelight, chuckling once or twice, "A pretty colt, rather." As he stretched after the meal, a new notion amused him: he put a plateful of food on a tray, along with a mug of beer and the candle. Taking off his heavy boots and leggings, he carried the tray into Phemy's room. And he stopped there.

The new circumstance that thus slipped into her life didn't cause any noticeable change in its general shape or progress; Weetman didn't change toward her. Phemy accepted his mastery not only because she loved him but because her powerful sense of loyalty covered all possible disgrace. She didn't seem to mind his continued relations with Rosa.

Towards midsummer, one evening Glastonbury came in late in the dusk. Phemy was there in the darkened kitchen. "Master," she said as soon as he entered. He stopped before her. She continued: "Something's happened."

"Huh, while the world goes spinning round, something shall always happen."

"It's me—I'm with child, master," she said. He stood stock-still. His face was toward the light; she couldn't see his expression. Perhaps he wanted to embrace her.

"Let's have a light, quick," he said in his brusque way. "The supper smells good, but I can't see what I'm smelling, and I can only guess what I'm looking at."

She lit the candles, and they ate supper in silence. Afterwards, he sat away from the table with his legs stretched out and crossed, hands sunk in pockets, pondering while the girl cleared the table. Soon he put his powerful arm around her waist and drew her to sit on his knees.

"Are you sure of that?" he demanded.

She was sure.

"Quite?"

She was quite sure.

"Ah, well then," he sighed conclusively, "we'll be married."

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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# chapter_title: The Hurly-Burly
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The girl sprang to her feet. "No, no, no—how can you be married—you don't mean that—not married—there's Miss Beauchamp!" She paused and added, a little unsteadily: "She's your true love, master."

"Ay, but I won't wed her," he cried sternly. "If there's no denying this that's come upon you, I'll stand by my word. It's right and proper for us to have a marriage."

His thick-fingered hands rested on his knees; the candles threw a pool of light on his polished leggings; he stared into the empty grate.

"But we don't want to do that," said the girl, dully and doubtfully. "You've given your ring to her; you've given her your word. I don't want you to do this for me. It's all right, master, it's all right."

"Are you daft?" he cried. "I tell you we'll marry. Don't keep talking about Rosa. I'll keep my word." He paused before adding: "She'd refuse me now—don't you see, stupid—but I won't give her the chance."

Her eyes were lowered. "She's your true love, master."

"What would happen to you and your child? You couldn't stay here!"

"No," said the trembling girl.

"I'm telling you what we must do, modest and proper; there's nothing else to be done, and I'm rather glad of it. Life's a seesaw affair. I'm rather glad of this."

So, soon, without a warning to anyone, least of all to Rosa Beauchamp, they were married by the registrar. The change in her domestic status produced no other change; in marrying Weetman, she had married all his ardor, she was swept into its current. She helped milk cows, boiled revolting mixtures for the pigs, chopped mangolds, mixed meal, and sometimes drove a harrow in his windy fields. Though they slept together, she was still his servant. Sometimes he called her his "pretty little colt," and then she knew he was fond of her. But in general, his habit was disillusioning. His way with her was his way with his beasts; he knew what he wanted, and it was easy to get. If for a brief space a little romantic flower began to bud in her breast, it was frozen as a bud, and the vague longing disappeared at length from her eyes.

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# book_title: The Hurly-Burly
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# chapter_title: The Hurly-Burly
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And she became aware that Rosa Beauchamp was not yet finished with; somewhere in the darkness of the fields, Glastonbury still met her. Phemy didn't mind.

In the new year, she bore him a son who died as he came to life. Glas was angry at that, as angry as if he had lost a horse. He felt duped, that the marriage had been a stupid sacrifice, and in this he was savagely supported by Rosa. And yet Phemy didn't mind; the farm had its grip on her, consuming her body and blood.

Weetman was just about to drive into town; he sat fuming in the trap behind the fat bay pony.

"Bring me that whip from the passage," he shouted. "There's never a darn thing handy!"

Phemy appeared with the whip. "Take me with you," she said.

"God-a-mighty! What for? I'll be back in an hour. Those ducks need looking after, and you have all the potatoes to grade."

She stared at him irresolutely.

"And who's to look after the house? You know it won't lock up—the key's lost. Get back up there!"

He cracked his whip in the air as the pony dashed away.

In the summer, Phemy fell sick; her arm swelled enormously. The doctor came again and again. It was blood poisoning, caught from a diseased cow that she had milked with a cut finger. A nurse arrived, but Phemy knew she was doomed, and though tortured with pain, she was for once vexed and protestant. For it was a June night, soft and tender, with a marvelous moon; a nightingale threw its impetuous garland of song into the air. She lay listening to it, thinking with sad pleasure of the time when Glastonbury was in prison, how grand she had been in her solitude, ordering everything for the best and working superbly. She wanted to go on and on forever, though she knew she had never known peace in maidenhood or marriage. The troubled waters of the world never ceased to flow; in the night, there was no rest—only darkness. Nothing could emerge now. She was leaving it all to Rosa Beauchamp.

Glastonbury was out somewhere—perhaps to meet Rosa in the fields. There was the nightingale, and it was very bright outside.

"Nurse," moaned the dying girl, "what was I born into the world at all for?"