Sally had watched the proceedings, sick and horrified. She had never seen men fight before, and the terror of it overwhelmed her. Her vanity received no pleasant stimulation from the thought that it was for her sake that this storm had been let loose. For the moment her vanity was dead, stunned by collision with the realities. She found herself watching in a dream. She saw Ted fall, rise, fall again, and lie where he had fallen; and then she was aware that Tom was speaking.
'Come along!'
She hung back. Ted was lying very still. Gruesome ideas presented themselves. She had just accepted them as truth when Ted wriggled. He wriggled again. Then he sat up suddenly, looked at her with unseeing eyes, and said something in a thick voice. She gave a little sob of relief. It was ghastly, but not so ghastly as what she had been imagining.
Somebody touched her arm. Tom was by her side, grim and formidable. He was wiping blood from his face.
'Come along!'
She followed him without a word. And presently, behold, in another field, whistling meditatively and regardless of impending ill, Albert Parsons.
In everything that he did Tom was a man of method. He did not depart from his chosen formula.
'Albert,' he said, 'there's been a mistake.'
And Albert gaped, as Ted had gaped.
Tom kissed Sally with the gravity of one performing a ritual.
The uglinesses of life, as we grow accustomed to them, lose their power to shock, and there is no doubt that Sally looked with a different eye upon this second struggle. She was conscious of a thrill of excitement, very different from the shrinking horror which had seized her before. Her stunned vanity began to tingle into life again. The fight was raging furiously over the trampled turf, and quite suddenly, as she watched, she was aware that her heart was with Tom.
It was no longer two strange brutes fighting in a field. It was her man battling for her sake.
She desired overwhelmingly that he should win, that he should not be hurt, that he should sweep triumphantly over Albert Parsons as he had swept over Ted Pringle.
Unfortunately, it was evident, even to her, that he was being hurt, and that he was very far from sweeping triumphantly over Albert Parsons. He had not allowed himself time to recover from his first battle, and his blows were slow and weary. Albert, moreover, was made of sterner stuff than Ted. Though now a peaceful tender of cows, there had been a time in his hot youth when, travelling with a circus, he had fought, week in, week out, relays of just such rustic warriors as Tom. He knew their methods—their headlong rushes, their swinging blows. They were the merest commonplaces of life to him. He slipped Tom, he side-stepped Tom, he jabbed Tom; he did everything to Tom that a trained boxer can do to a reckless novice, except knock the fight out of him, until presently, through the sheer labour of hitting, he, too, grew weary.
Now, in the days when Albert Parsons had fought whole families of Toms in an evening, he had fought in rounds, with the boss holding the watch, and half-minute rests, and water to refresh him, and all orderly and proper. Today there were no rounds, no rests, no water, and the peaceful tending of cows had caused flesh to grow where there had been only muscle. Tom's headlong rushes became less easy to side-step, his swinging blows more difficult than the scientific counter that shot out to check them. As he tired Tom seemed to regain strength. The tide of the battle began to ebb. He clinched, and Tom threw him off. He feinted, and while he was feinting Tom was on him. It was the climax of the battle—the last rally. Down went Albert, and stayed down. Physically, he was not finished; but in his mind a question had framed itself—the question. 'Was it worth it?'—and he was answering, 'No.' There were other girls in the world. No girl was worth all this trouble.
He did not rise.
'Come along!' said Tom.
He spoke thickly. His breath was coming in gasps. He was a terrible spectacle, but Sally was past the weaker emotions. She was back in the Stone Age, and her only feeling was one of passionate pride. She tried to speak. She struggled to put all she felt into words, but something kept her dumb, and she followed him in silence.
In the lane outside his cottage, down by the creek, Joe Blossom was clipping a hedge. The sound of footsteps made him turn.
He did not recognize Tom till he spoke.
'Joe, there's been a mistake,' said Tom.
'Been a gunpowder explosion, more like,' said Joe, a simple, practical man. 'What you been doin' to your face?'
'She's going to marry me, Joe.'
Joe eyed Sally inquiringly.
'Eh? You promised to marry me.'
'She promised to marry all of us. You, me, Ted Pringle, and Albert Parsons.'
'Promised—to—marry—all—of—us!'
'That's where the mistake was. She's only going to marry me. I—I've arranged it with Ted and Albert, and now I've come to explain to you, Joe.'
'You promised to marry—!'
The colossal nature of Sally's deceit was plainly troubling Joe Blossom. He expelled his breath in a long note of amazement. Then he summed up.
'Why you're nothing more nor less than a Joshua!'
The years that had passed since Joe had attended the village Sunday-school had weakened his once easy familiarity with the characters of the Old Testament. It is possible that he had somebody else in his mind.
Tom stuck doggedly to his point.
'You can't marry her, Joe.'
Joe Blossom raised his shears and clipped a protruding branch. The point under discussion seemed to have ceased to interest him.
'Who wants to?' he said. 'Good riddance!'
They went down the lane. Silence still brooded over them. The words she wanted continued to evade her.
They came to a grassy bank. Tom sat down. He was feeling unutterably tired.
'Tom!'
He looked up. His mind was working dizzily.
'You're going to marry me,' he muttered.
She sat down beside him.
'I know,' she said. 'Tom, dear, lay your head on my lap and go to sleep.'
If this story proves anything (beyond the advantage of being in good training when you fight), it proves that you cannot get away from the moving pictures even in a place like Millbourne; for as Sally sat there, nursing Tom, it suddenly struck her that this was the very situation with which that 'Romance of the Middle Ages' film ended. You know the one I mean. Sir Percival Ye Something (which has slipped my memory for the moment) goes out after the Holy Grail; meets damsel in distress; overcomes her persecutors; rescues her; gets wounded, and is nursed back to life in her arms. Sally had seen it a dozen times. And every time she had reflected that the days of romance are dead, and that that sort of thing can't happen nowadays.
DEEP WATERS
Historians of the social life of the later Roman Empire speak of a certain young man of Ariminum, who would jump into rivers and swim in 'em. When his friends said, 'You fish!' he would answer, 'Oh, pish! Fish can't swim like me, they've no vim in 'em.'