He had been forced to engage a woman to help Caro in the house, and also a shepherd for Richard\'s work. His family had been whittled down to almost nothing. Only Caro, Pete, and Jemmy were left out of his eight splendid boys and girls. Caro, Pete, Jemmy, and hideous, mumbling Harry—he surveyed the four of them with contemptuous scowls. Pete was the only one who was worth anything—Caro and Jemmy would turn against him if they had the slightest chance and forsake him with the rest. As for Harry, he was a grotesque, an image, a hideous fum—"Reuben himself as he really was." He! He!

The weeks wore on and it dawned on him that he must pull himself together for a fresh campaign. He must have more warriors—he could not fight Boarzell with only traitors and hirelings. He must marry again.

It was some time since the abstract idea of marriage had begun to please him, but lately the abstract of marriage had always led to the concrete of Alice Jury, so he had driven it from his thoughts. Now, more and more clearly, he saw that he must marry. He wanted a woman and he wanted children, so he must marry. But he must not marry Alice.

Of late he had resumed his visits to Cheat Land, discontinued for a while at Tilly\'s marriage. The attraction of Alice Jury was as strong, unfathomable, and unaccountable as ever. Since the stormy interview after Richard\'s desertion they had not discussed his ambitions[Pg 238] for Odiam and Boarzell, but that meeting was none the less stamped on Reuben\'s memory with a gloomy significance. It was not that Alice\'s arguments had affected him at all—she had not penetrated to the springs of his enterprise, she had not touched or conjured the hidden part of him in which his ambition\'s roots were twined round all that was vital and sacred in the man. But somehow she had expressed her own attitude with an almost sinister clearness—"It\'s I who am fighting Boarzell." What should she fight it for?—imagine that she fought it, rather, for a woman could not really fight Boarzell. She was fighting it for him. She wanted him.

He knew that Alice wanted him, and he knew that he wanted Alice. He did not know why he wanted Alice any more than he knew why Alice wanted him. "Wot is she?—a liddle stick of a creature. And I like big women."

There was something in the depths of him that cried for her, something which had never moved or cried in him before. In spite of her lack of beauty and beguilement, in spite of her hostility to all his darling schemes, there was something in him to which Alice actually and utterly belonged. He did not understand it, he could not analyse it, he scarcely indeed realised it—all he felt was the huge upheaval, the conflict that it brought, all the shouting and the struggling of the desperate and motiveless craving that he felt for her—a hunger in him calling through days and nights, in spite of her insignificance, her aloofness, her silences, her antagonism.

"I reckon as how I must be in love."

That was the conclusion he came to after much heavy pondering. He had never been truly in love before. He had wanted women for various reasons, either for their charm and beauty, or because, as in Naomi\'s case, of their practical use to him. Alice had no beauty, and a charm too subtle for him to realise, though as a matter of fact[Pg 239] the whole man was plastic to it—as for practical usefulness, she was poor, delicate, unaccustomed to country life, and hostile to all his most vital ambitions. She would not bring him wealth or credit, she was not likely to bear him healthy children—and yet he loved her.

Sometimes, roaming through murky dusks, he realised in the dim occasional flashes which illuminate the non-thinking man, that he was up against the turning-point of his fight with Boarzell. If he married Alice it would be the token of what had always seemed more unimaginable than his defeat—his voluntary surrender. Sometimes he told himself fiercely that he could fight Boarzell with Alice hanging, so to speak, over his arm; but in his heart he knew that he could not. He could not have both Alice and Boarzell.

Yet, in spite of all this, one day at Cheat Land he nearly fell at her feet and asked her to be his ruin.

It was a March twilight, cold and rustling, and tart with the scents of newly turned furrows. Reuben sat with Alice in the kitchen, and every now and then Jury\'s wretched house-place would shake as the young gale swept up rainless from the east and poured itself into cracks and chimneys. Alice was sewing as usual—it struck Reuben that she was very quick and useful with her fingers, whatever might be her drawbacks in other ways. Sometimes she had offered to read poetry to him, and had once bored him horribly with In Memoria............