Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/329

 where guts come in, old chap. The first time that you are the central figure, wholly responsible."

"If it would not worry you I would like to see your first."

"Will you?"

"Yes. Because I know, Sorrell, that you won't funk it."

In the winter and the spring Stephen Sorrell slept with the blind up and the curtains undrawn, and when he woke to see blue smoke drifting through and over the flower buds of the old pear tree, he knew that the under-porter had lit the sitting-room fire, and that the wind was in the north. Therefore, he began the day feeling combative. His mellowness was not proof against a raw north-easter in the late days of March or the first week in April, and however seasonable this wind might be he resented its ugly interference. It was a bitter wind, the enemy of his flowers, making the grass look a starved yellow, and the soil like grey ash, a wind that combed unsuspected rubbish out of hedge bottoms and corners and distributed it over the lawns and the flower beds. So, Sorrell would feel combative, and as likely as not cut himself when he was shaving, for a bleak north wind blowing when his hyacinths and hepaticas and polyanthus were in bloom, and his wallflowers were showing red and gold, reminded him that man is born to suffer interference. This north wind said "Yah, I'll show you! Talk of teleology! What about me?" And even though there were soft things to be said of this north wind, how it pulverized and prepared the heavy soil ridged up in the vegetable garden, and helped towards granulation, Sorrell scowled at it as at an enemy over whom he had no control.

He would go out to see that the protecting bracken had not been blown away from sheltering some delicate child, or that the osier hurdles were standing up to that blustering beast of a wind. He would find Bowden looking black as thunder, glowering like some old English archer lusting to lant an arrow in the deeps of the north-wind's midriff.

"Pretty beastly, Bowden. Good for the soil."