him when he felt sure that his order was going to be reasonable.

Everything he said was non-committal, every movement was expostulatory.
Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he always had such
meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor. Monasticism had found, in a
countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple. If Vessons
ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never
said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he
thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his tolerance of
her ways. Ruminative and critical, he went to and fro in the darkly
lovely domain, with pig buckets or ash buckets or barrows full of
manure. The lines of his face were always etched in dirt, and he always
had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister. He was a lonely soul,
as he once said himself when unusually mellow at the Hunter's Arms; he
was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.' He preferred it to
the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin because they never
spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite indifferent to
Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.

But to Undern itself he was not indifferent. Ties deep as the tangled
roots of the bindweed, strong as the great hawsers of the beeches that
reached below the mud of Undern Pool, held him to it, the bondslave of
a beauty he could not understand, a terror he could not express. When
he trudged the muddy paths, 'setting taters' or earthing up; when he
scythed the lawn, looking, with a rose in his hat, weirder and more
ridiculous than ever; and when he shook the apples down with a kind of
sour humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having
apples!'--at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind
force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was
stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the