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Title: The Black Dog, and Other Stories

Author: A. E. Coppard

Release date: December 25, 2019 [eBook #61016]
                Most recently updated: June 17, 2020

Language: English

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Transcriber’s note:

      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).





THE BLACK DOG

Tales


      *      *      *      *      *     

By the Same Author

ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN
HIPS AND HAWS

      *      *      *      *      *     


THE BLACK DOG

And Other Stories by

A. E. COPPARD


[Illustration; Publisher's Device]






New York
Alfred A. Knopf
1923

Made and printed in Great Britain by Charles Whittingham
and Griggs (Printers), Ltd., London.




                                 _to_
                                  GAY




I record my acknowledgments to the Editors of the following journals in
which some of these tales first appeared:

  _The Saturday Review_, _The Westminster Gazette_,
  _The Sovereign Magazine_, _The English Review_,
  _The Dial_, _The Metropolitan_, _The Double Dealer_.

  A. E. C.




_Contents_


                                                                    PAGE

  THE BLACK DOG                                                       13

  ALAS, POOR BOLLINGTON!                                              50

  THE BALLET GIRL                                                     62

  SIMPLE SIMON                                                        79

  THE TIGER                                                           91

  MORDECAI AND COCKING                                               107

  THE MAN FROM KILSHEELAN                                            113

  TRIBUTE                                                            133

  THE HANDSOME LADY                                                  139

  THE FANCY DRESS BALL                                               173

  THE CAT, THE DOG, AND THE BAD OLD DAME                             188

  THE WIFE OF TED WICKHAM                                            195

  TANIL                                                              206

  THE DEVIL IN THE CHURCHYARD                                        228

  HUXLEY RUSTEM                                                      236

  BIG GAME                                                           243

  THE POOR MAN                                                       252

  LUXURY                                                             286




                             THE BLACK DOG

                                _Tales_




                            _The Black Dog_


Having pocketed his fare the freckled rustic took himself and his
antediluvian cab back to the village limbo from which they had briefly
emerged. Loughlin checked his luggage into the care of the porter, an
angular man with one eye who was apparently the only other living being
in this remote minute station, and sat down in the platform shade. July
noon had a stark eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when
that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that Loughlin could hear
footsteps crunching in the road half a mile away. The train was late.
There were no other passengers. Nothing to look at except his trunks,
two shiny rails in the grim track, red hollyhocks against white palings
on the opposite bank.

The holiday in this quiet neighbourhood had delighted him, but its
crowning experience had been too brief. On the last day but one the
loveliest woman he had ever known had emerged almost as briefly as
that cabman. Some men are constantly meeting that woman. Not so the
Honourable Gerald Loughlin, but no man turns his back tranquilly on
destiny even if it is but two days old and already some half-dozen
miles away. The visit had come to its end, Loughlin had come to his
station, the cab had gone back to its lair, but on reflection he could
find no other reasons for going away and denying himself the delight of
this proffered experience. Time was his own, as much as he could buy of
it, and he had an income that enabled him to buy a good deal.

Moody and hesitant he began to fill his pipe when the one-eyed porter
again approached him.

“Take a pipe of that?” said Loughlin, offering him the pouch.

“Thanky, sir, but I can’t smoke a pipe; a cigarette I take now and
again, thanky, sir, not often, just to keep me from cussing and
damming. My wife buys me a packet sometimes, she says I don’t swear so
much then, but I don’t know, I has to knock ’em off soon’s they make me
feel bad, and then, dam it all, I be worsen ever....”

“Look here,” said the other, interrupting him, “I’m not going by this
train after all. Something I have forgotten. Now look after my bags and
I’ll come along later, this afternoon.” He turned and left the station
as hurriedly as if his business was really of the high importance the
porter immediately conceived it to be.

The Honourable Gerald, though handsome and honest, was not a fool.
A fool is one who becomes distracted between the claims of instinct
and common sense; the larger foolishness is the peculiar doom of
imaginative people, artists and their kind, while the smaller
foolishness is the mark of all those who have nothing but their
foolishness to endorse them. Loughlin responded to this impulse
unhesitatingly but without distraction, calmly and directly as became
a well-bred bachelor in the early thirties. He might have written
to the young beauty with the queer name, Orianda Crabbe, but that
course teemed with absurdities and difficulties for he was modest,
his romantic imagination weak, and he had only met her at old
Lady Tillington’s a couple of days before. Of this mere girl, just
twenty-three or twenty-four, he knew nothing save that they had been
immediately and vividly charming to each other. That was no excuse
for presenting himself again to the old invalid of Tillington Park,
it would be impossible for him to do so, but there had been one vague
moment of their recalled intercourse, a glimmering intimation, which
just now seemed to offer a remote possibility of achievement, and so he
walked on in the direction of the park.

Tillington was some miles off and the heat was oppressive. At the end
of an hour’s stroll he stepped into “The Three Pigeons” at Denbury and
drank a deep drink. It was quiet and deliciously cool in the taproom
there, yes, as silent as that little station had been. Empty the
world seemed to-day, quite empty; he had not passed a human creature.
Happily bemused he took another draught. Eighteen small panes of glass
in that long window and perhaps as many flies buzzing in the room. He
could hear and see a breeze saluting the bright walled ivy outside and
the bushes by a stream. This drowsiness was heaven, it made so clear
his recollection of Orianda. It was impossible to particularize but
she was in her way, her rather uncultured way, just perfection. He
had engaged her upon several themes, music, fishing (Loughlin loved
fishing), golf, tennis, and books; none of these had particularly
stirred her but she had brains, quite an original turn of mind. There
had been neither time nor opportunity to discover anything about her,
but there she was, staying there, that was the one thing certain,
apparently indefinitely, for she described the park in a witty detailed
way even to a certain favourite glade which she always visited in the
afternoons. When she had told him that, he could swear she was not
finessing; no, no, it was a most engaging simplicity, a frankness that
was positively marmoreal.

He would certainly write to her; yes, and he began to think of fine
phrases to put in a letter, but could there be anything finer, now,
just at this moment, than to be sitting with her in this empty inn. It
was not a fair place, though it was clean, but how she would brighten
it, yes! there were two long settles and two short ones, two tiny
tables and eight spittoons (he _had_ to count them), and somehow he
felt her image flitting adorably into this setting, defeating with its
native glory all the scrupulous beer-smelling impoverishment. And then,
after a while, he would take her, and they would lie in the grass under
a deep-bosomed tree and speak of love. How beautiful she would be. But
she was not there, and so he left the inn and crossed the road to a
church, pleasant and tiny and tidy, whitewalled and clean-ceilinged.
A sparrow chirped in the porch, flies hummed in the nave, a puppy was
barking in the vicarage garden. How trivial, how absurdly solemn,
everything seemed. The thud of the great pendulum in the tower had
the sound of a dead man beating on a bar of spiritless iron. He was
tired of the vapid tidiness of these altars with their insignificant
tapestries, candlesticks of gilded wood, the bunches of pale flowers
oppressed by the rich glow from the windows. He longed for an altar
that should be an inspiring symbol of belief, a place of green and
solemn walls with a dark velvet shrine sweeping aloft to the peaked
roof unhindered by tarnishing lustre and tedious linen. Holiness was
always something richly dim. There was no more holiness here than in
the tough hassocks and rush-bottomed chairs; not here, surely, the
apple of Eden flourished. And yet, turning to the lectern, he noted the
large prayer book open at the office of marriage. He idly read over
the words of the ceremony, filling in at the gaps the names of Gerald
Wilmot Loughlin and Orianda Crabbe.

What a fool! He closed the book with a slam and left the church.
Absurd! You _couldn’t_ fall in love with a person as sharply as all
that, could you? But why not? Unless fancy was charged with the
lightning of gods it was nothing at all.

Tramping away still in the direction of Tillington Park he came in the
afternoon to that glade under a screen of trees spoken of by the girl.
It was green and shady, full of scattering birds. He flung himself down
in the grass under a deep-bosomed tree. She had spoken delightfully of
this delightful spot.

When she came, for come she did, the confrontation left him very
unsteady as he sprang to his feet. (Confound that potation at “The
Three Pigeons”! Enormously hungry, too!) But he was amazed, entranced,
she was so happy to see him again. They sat down together, but he was
still bewildered and his confusion left him all at sixes and sevens.
Fortunately her own rivulet of casual chatter carried them on until he
suddenly asked: “Are you related to the Crabbes of Cotterton—I fancy I
know them?”

“No, I think not, no, I am from the south country, near the sea, nobody
at all, my father keeps an inn.”

“An inn! How extraordinary! How very ... very ...”

“Extraordinary?” Nodding her head in the direction of the hidden
mansion she added: “I am her companion.”

“Lady Tillington’s?”

She assented coolly, was silent, while Loughlin ransacked his brains
for some delicate reference that would clear him over this ... this ...
cataract. But he felt stupid—that confounded potation at “The Three
Pigeons”! Why, that was where he had thought of her so admirably, too.
He asked if she cared for the position, was it pleasant, and so on.
Heavens, what an astonishing creature for a domestic, quite positively
lovely, a compendium of delightful qualities, this girl, so frank, so
simple!

“Yes, I like it, but home is better. I should love to go back to my
home, to father, but I can’t, I’m still afraid—I ran away from home
three years ago, to go with my mother. I’m like my mother, she ran away
from home too.”

Orianda picked up the open parasol which she had dropped, closed it in
a thoughtful manner, and laid its crimson folds beside her. There was
no other note of colour in her white attire; she was without a hat. Her
fair hair had a quenching tinge upon it that made it less bright than
gold, but more rare. Her cheeks had the colour of homely flowers, the
lily and the pink. Her teeth were as even as the peas in a newly opened
pod, as clear as milk.

“Tell me about all that. May I hear it?”

“I have not seen him or heard from him since, but I love him very much
now.”

“Your father?”

“Yes, but he is stern, a simple man, and he is so just. We live at a
tiny old inn at the end of a village near the hills. ‘The Black Dog.’
It is thatched and has tiny rooms. It’s painted all over with pink,
pink whitewash.”

“Ah, I know.”

“There’s a porch, under a sycamore tree, where people sit, and an old
rusty chain hanging on a hook just outside the door.”

“What’s that for?”

“I don’t know what it is for, horses, perhaps, but it is always there,
I always see that rusty chain. And on the opposite side of the road
there are three lime trees and behind them is the yard where my father
works. He makes hurdles and ladders. He is the best hurdle maker in
three counties, he has won many prizes at the shows. It is splendid to
see him working at the willow wood, soft and white. The yard is full
of poles and palings, spars and fagots, and long shavings of the thin
bark like seaweed. It smells so nice. In the spring the chaffinches
and wrens are singing about him all day long; the wren is lovely, but
in the summer of course it’s the whitethroats come chippering, and
yellow-hammers.”

“Ah, blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales!”

“Yes, but it’s the little birds seem to love my father’s yard.”

“Well then, but why did you, why did you run away?”

“My mother was much younger, and different from father; she was
handsome and proud too, and in all sorts of ways superior to him. They
got to hate each other; they were so quiet about it, but I could see.
Their only common interest was me, they both loved me very much. Three
years ago she ran away from him. Quite suddenly, you know; there was
nothing at all leading up to such a thing. But I could not understand
my father, not then, he took it all so calmly. He did not mention even
her name to me for a long time, and I feared to intrude; you see, I did
not understand, I was only twenty. When I did ask about her he told me
not to bother him, forbade me to write to her. I didn’t know where she
was, but he knew, and at last I found out too.”

“And you defied him, I suppose?”

“No, I deceived him. He gave me money for some purpose—to pay a
debt—and I stole it. I left him a letter and ran away to my mother. I
loved her.”

“O well, that was only to be expected,” said Loughlin. “It was all
right, quite right.”

“She was living with another man. I didn’t know. I was a fool.”

“Good lord! That was a shock for you,” Loughlin said. “What did you
do?”

“No, I was not shocked, she was so happy. I lived with them for a
year....”

“Extraordinary!”

“And then she died.”

“Your mother died!”

“Yes, so you see I could not stop with my ... I could not stay where I
was, and I couldn’t go back to my father.”

“I see, no, but you want to go back to your father now.”

“I’m afraid. I love him, but I’m afraid. I don’t blame my mother, I
feel she was right, quite right—it was such happiness. And yet I feel,
too, that father was deeply wronged. I can’t understand that, it sounds
foolish. I should so love to go home again. This other kind of life
doesn’t seem to eclipse me—things have been extraordinary kind—I don’t
feel out of my setting, but still it doesn’t satisfy, it is polite and
soft, like silk, perhaps it isn’t barbarous enough, and I want to live,
somehow—well, I have not found what I wanted to find.”

“What did you want to find?”

“I shan’t know until I have found it. I do want to go home now, but I
am full of strange feelings about it. I feel as if I was bearing the
mark of something that can’t be hidden or disguised of what my mother
did, as if I were all a burning recollection for him that he couldn’t
fail to see. He is good, a just man. He ... he is the best hurdle maker
in three counties.”

While listening to this daughter of a man who made ladders the
Honourable Gerald had been swiftly thinking of an intriguing phrase
that leaped into his mind. Social plesiomorphism, that was it! Caste
was humbug, no doubt, but even if it was conscious humbug it was
there, really there, like the patterned frost upon a window pane,
beautiful though a little incoherent, and conditioned only by the size
and number of your windows. (Eighteen windows in that pub!) But what
did it amount to, after all? It was stuck upon your clear polished
outline for every eye to see, but within was something surprising as
the sight of a badger in church—until you got used to the indubitable
relation of such badgers to such churches. Fine turpitudes!

“My dear girl,” he burst out, “your mother and you were right,
absolutely. I am sure life is enhanced not by amassing conventions, but
by destroying them. And your feeling for your father is right, too,
rightest of all. Tell me ... let me ... may I take you back to him?”

The girl’s eyes dwelt upon his with some intensity.

“Your courage is kind,” she said, “but he doesn’t know you, nor you
him.” And to that she added, “You don’t even know me.”

“I have known you for ten thousand years. Come home to him with me, we
will go back together. Yes, you can explain. Tell him”—the Honourable
Gerald had got the bit between his teeth now—“tell him I’m your
sweetheart, will you—will you?”

“Ten thousand ...! Yes, I know; but it’s strange to think you have only
seen me just once before!”

“Does that matter? Everything grows from that one small moment into a
world of ... well of ... boundless admiration.”

“I don’t want,” said Orianda, reopening her crimson parasol, “to grow
into a world of any kind.”

“No, of course you don’t. But I mean the emotion is irresistible, ‘the
desire of the moth for the star,’ that sort of thing, you know, and I
immolate myself, the happy victim of your attractions.”

“All that has been said before.” Orianda adjusted her parasol as a
screen for her raillery.

“I swear,” said he, “I have not said it before, never to a living soul.”

Fountains of amusement beamed in her brilliant eyes. She was exquisite;
he was no longer in doubt about the colour of her eyes—though he could
not describe them. And the precise shade of her hair was—well, it was
extraordinarily beautiful.

“I mean—it’s been said to me!”

“O damnation! Of course it’s been said to you. Ah, and isn’t that my
complete justification? But you agree, do you not? Tell me if it’s
possible. Say you agree, and let me take you back to your father.”

“I think I would like you to,” the jolly girl said, slowly.


II

On an August morning a few weeks later they travelled down together to
see her father. In the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment,
and several times Gerald had met her secretly in the purlieus of
Tillington Park. The girl’s cool casual nature fascinated him not less
than her appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his happiness,
although that also increased; but the bliss had its shadow, for the
outcome of their friendship seemed mysteriously to depend on the
outcome of the proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to that
project forming the first principle, as it were, of their intercourse.
Orianda had not dangled before him the prospect of any serener
relationship; she took his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively
as a pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to be aware of a
certain force behind all her charming naivete; the beauty that exhaled
the freshness, the apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the
less a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never, least of all by
him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.

When the train reached its destination Orianda confided calmly that
she had preferred not to write to her father. Really she did not know
for certain whether he was alive or even living on at the old home she
so loved. And there was a journey of three miles or more which Orianda
proposed to walk. So they walked.

The road lay across an expanse of marshy country and approached the
wooded uplands of her home only by numerous eccentric divagations made
necessary by culverts that drained the marsh. The day was bright; the
sky, so vast an arch over this flat land, was a very oven for heat;
there were cracks in the earth, the grass was like stubble. At the mid
journey they crossed a river by its wooden bridge, upon which a boy
sat fishing with stick and string. Near the water was a long white hut
with a flag; a few tethered boats floated upon the stream. Gerald gave
a shilling to a travelling woman who carried a burden on her back and
shuffled slowly upon the harsh road sighing, looking neither to right
nor left; she did not look into the sky, her gaze was fastened upon her
dolorous feet, one two, one two, one two; her shift, if she had such a
garment, must have clung to her old body like a shrimping net.

In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon, at the top of a
sylvan slope where there was shade and cooling air, Gerald saw a sign
hung upon a sycamore tree, _The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe_. The inn
was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint, and faced across
the road a large yard encircled by hedges, trees, and a gate. The
travellers stood peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with new
ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes. Amid them stood a tall
burly man at a block, trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He
was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white shirt, and a
soft straw hat. He had mild simple features coloured, like his arms and
neck, almost to the hue of a bay horse.

“Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe looked round at her
unrecognizingly. Orianda hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she
cried.

“I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,” said the man, dropping
the axe, “such a lady you’ve grown.”

As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured hands rested on her
shoulders, her gloved ones lay against his breast. Orianda took out her
purse.

“Here is the money I stole, father.”

She dropped some coins one by one into his palm. He counted them over,
and saying simply “Thank you, my dear,” put them into his pocket.

“I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had followed the girl—“it’s exactly
how _she_ would take it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know
what reproach means. Have they no code at all?”

She went on chatting with her father, and seemed to have forgotten her
companion.

“You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed her father eagerly, “come
back here? That would be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am
to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—”

He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe, rested one foot upon the
axe-block and one arm upon his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of
the logs.

“This is how it is ... be you married?”

“Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl. As he came forward
Orianda rose and said: “This is my very dear friend, father, Gerald
Loughlin. He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the courage
to come back. I wanted to for so long. O, a long time, father, a long
time. And yet Gerald had to drag me here in the end.”

“What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the big man.

“Myself.”

The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell you about mother?”
asked the girl.

Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground.

“Ah, yes, you might,” he said.

“She died, did you know?”

The man looked up at the trees with their myriads of unmoving leaves;
each leaf seemed to be listening.

“She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not know she died.”

“Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if probing his mood.

“Two years!” He repeated it without emotion. “No, I did not know she
died. ’Tis a bad job.” He was quite still, his mind seemed to be
turning over his own secret memories, but what he bent forward and
suddenly said was: “Don’t say anything about it in there.” He nodded
towards the inn.

“No?” Orianda opened her crimson parasol.

“You see,” he went on, again resting one foot on the axe-block and
addressing himself more particularly to Gerald: “I’ve ... this is how
it is. When I was left alone I could not get along here, not by myself.
That’s for certain. There’s the house and the bar and the yard—I’d
to get help, a young woman from Brighton. I met her at Brighton.” He
rubbed the blade of the axe reflectively across his palm—“And she
manages house for me now, you see.”

He let the axe fall again and stood upright. “Her name’s Lizzie.”

“O, quite so, you could do no other,” Gerald exclaimed cheerfully,
turning to the girl. But Orianda said softly: “What a family we are!
He means he is living with her. And so you don’t want your undutiful
daughter after all, father?” Her gaiety was a little tremulous.

“No, no!” he retorted quickly, “you must come back, you must come
back, if so be you can. There’s nothing I’d like better, nothing on
this mortal earth. My God, if something don’t soon happen I don’t know
what _will_ happen.” Once more he stooped for the axe. “That’s right,
Orianda, yes, yes, but you’ve no call to mention to her”—he glared
uneasily at the inn doorway—“that ... that about your mother.”

Orianda stared up at him though he would not meet her gaze.

“You mean she doesn’t know?” she asked, “you mean she would want you to
marry her if she did know?”

“Yes, that’s about how it is with us.”

Loughlin was amazed at the girl’s divination. It seemed miraculous,
what a subtle mind she had, extraordinary! And how casually she took
the old rascal’s—well, what could you call it?—effrontery, shame,
misdemeanour, helplessness. But was not her mother like it too? He had
grasped nothing at all of the situation yet, save that Nathaniel Crabbe
appeared to be netted in the toils of this housekeeper, this Lizzie
from Brighton. Dear Orianda was “dished” now, poor girl. She could not
conceivably return to such a menage.

Orianda was saying: “Then I may stay, father, mayn’t I, for good with
you?”

Her father’s eyes left no doubt of his pleasure.

“Can we give Gerald a bedroom for a few days? Or do we ask Lizzie?”

“Ah, better ask her,” said the shameless man. “You want to make a stay
here, sir?”

“If it won’t incommode you,” replied Loughlin.

“O, make no doubt about that, to be sure no, I make no doubt about
that.”

“Have you still got my old bedroom?” asked Orianda, for the amount
of dubiety in his air was in prodigious antagonism to his expressed
confidence.

“Why yes, it may happen,” he replied slowly.

“Then Gerald can have the spare room. It’s all wainscot and painted
dark blue. It’s a shrimp of a room, but there’s a preserved albatross
in a glass case as big as a van.”

“I make no doubt about that,” chimed in her father, straightening
himself and scratching his chin uneasily, “you must talk to Lizzie.”

“Splendid!” said Gerald to Orianda, “I’ve never seen an albatross.”

“We’ll ask Lizzie,” said she, “at once.”

Loughlin was experiencing not a little inward distress at this turn in
the affair, but it was he who had brought Orianda to her home, and he
would have to go through with the horrid business.

“Is she difficult, father?”

“No, she’s not difficult, not difficult, so to say, you must make
allowance.”

The girl was implacable. Her directness almost froze the blood of the
Hon. Loughlin.

“Are you fond of her. How long has she been here?”

“O, a goodish while, yes, let me see—no, she’s not difficult, if that’s
what you mean—three years, perhaps.”

“Well, but that’s long enough!”

(Long enough for what—wondered Loughlin?)

“Yes, it is longish.”

“If you really want to get rid of her you could tell her ...”

“Tell her what?”

“You know what to tell her!”

But her father looked bewildered and professed his ignorance.

“Take me in to her,” said Orianda, and they all walked across to “The
Black Dog.” There was no one within; father and daughter went into
the garden while Gerald stayed behind in a small parlour. Through the
window that looked upon a grass plot he could see a woman sitting in a
deck chair under a tree. Her face was turned away so that he saw only
a curve of pink cheek and a thin mound of fair hair tossed and untidy.
Lizzie’s large red fingers were slipping a sprig of watercress into a
mouth that was hidden round the corner of the curve. With her other
hand she was caressing a large brown hen that sat on her lap. Her black
skirt wrapped her limbs tightly, a round hip and a thigh being rigidly
outlined, while the blouse of figured cotton also seemed strained upon
her buxom breast, for it was torn and split in places. She had strong
white arms and holes in her stockings. When she turned to confront the
others it was easy to see that she was a foolish, untidy, but still a
rather pleasant woman of about thirty.

“How do you do, Lizzie?” cried Orianda, offering a cordial hand. The
hen fluttered away as, smiling a little wanly, the woman rose.

“Who is it, ’Thaniel?” she asked.

Loughlin heard no more, for some men came noisily into the bar and
Crabbe hurried back to serve them.


III

In the afternoon Orianda drove Gerald in the gig back to the station to
fetch the baggage.

“Well, what success, Orianda?” he asked as they jogged along.

“It would be perfect but for Lizzie—that _was_ rather a blow. But
I should have foreseen her—Lizzies are inevitable. And she _is_
difficult—she weeps. But, O I am glad to be home again. Gerald, I feel
I shall not leave it, ever.”

“Yes, Orianda,” he protested, “leave it for me. I’ll give your
nostalgia a little time to fade. I think it was a man named Pater said:
‘All life is a wandering to find home.’ You don’t want to omit the
wandering?”

“Not if I have found my home again?”

“A home with Lizzie!”

“No, not with Lizzie.” She flicked the horse with the whip. “I shall be
too much for Lizzie; Lizzie will resume her wandering. She’s as stupid
as a wax widow in a show. Nathaniel is tired of Lizzie, and Lizzie of
Nathaniel. The two wretches! But I wish she did not weep.”

Gerald had not observed any signs of tearfulness in Lizzie at the
midday dinner; on the contrary, she seemed rather a jolly creature,
not that she had spoken much beyond “Yes, ’Thaniel, No, ’Thaniel,” or
Gerald, or Orianda, as the case had been. Her use of his Christian
name, which had swept him at once into the bosom of the family,
shocked him rather pleasantly. But he did not know what had taken place
between the two women; perhaps Lizzie had already perceived and tacitly
accepted her displacement.

He was wakened next morning by unusual sounds, chatter of magpies in
the front trees, and the ching of hammers on a bulk of iron at the
smithy. Below his window a brown terrier stood on its barrel barking
at a goose. Such common simple things had power to please him, and for
a few days everything at “The Black Dog” seemed planned on this scale
of novel enjoyment. The old inn itself, the log yard, harvesting, the
chatter of the evening topers, even the village Sunday delighted him
with its parade of Phyllis and Corydon, though it is true Phyllis wore
a pink frock, stockings of faint blue, and walked like a man, while
Corydon had a bowler hat and walked like a bear. He helped ’Thaniel
with axe, hammer, and plane, but best of all was to serve mugs of beer
nightly in the bar and to drop the coins into the drawer of money. The
rest of the time he spent with Orianda whom he wooed happily enough,
though without establishing any marked progress. They roamed in
fields and in copses, lounged in lanes, looking at things and idling
deliciously, at last returning home to be fed by Lizzie, whose case
somehow hung in the air, faintly deflecting the perfect stream of
felicity.

In their favourite glade a rivulet was joined by a number of springs
bubbling from a pool of sand and rock. Below it the enlarged stream was
dammed into a small lake once used for turning a mill, but now, since
the mill was dismantled, covered with arrow heads and lily leaves,
surrounded by inclining trees, bushes of rich green growth, terraces
of willow herb, whose fairy-like pink steeples Orianda called “codlins
and cream,” and catmint with knobs of agreeable odour. A giant hornbeam
tree had fallen and lay half buried in the lake. This, and the black
poplars whose vacillating leaves underscored the solemn clamour of the
outfall, gave to it the very serenity of desolation.

Here they caught sight of the two woodpeckers bathing in the springs, a
cock and his hen, who had flown away yaffling, leaving a pretty mottled
feather tinged with green floating there. It was endless pleasure to
watch each spring bubble upwards from a pouch of sand that spread
smoke-like in the water, turning each cone into a midget Vesuvius. A
wasp crawled laboriously along a flat rock lying in the pool. It moved
weakly, as if, marooned like a mariner upon some unknown isle, it could
find no way of escape; only, this isle was no bigger than a dish in an
ocean as small as a cartwheel. The wasp seemed to have forgotten that
it had wings, it creepingly examined every inch of the rock until it
came to a patch of dried dung. Proceeding still as wearily it paused
upon a dead leaf until a breeze blew leaf and insect into the water.
The wasp was overwhelmed by the rush from the bubbles, but at last it
emerged, clutching the woodpecker’s floating feather and dragged itself
into safety as a swimmer heaves himself into a boat. In a moment it
preened its wings, flew back to the rock, and played at Crusoe again.
Orianda picked the feather from the pool.

“What a fool that wasp is,” declared Gerald, “I wonder what it is
doing?”

Orianda, placing the feather in his hat, told him it was probably
wandering to find home.

One day, brightest of all days, they went to picnic in the marshes,
a strange place to choose, all rank with the musty smell of cattle,
and populous with grasshoppers that burred below you and millions,
quadrillions of flies that buzzed above. But Orianda loved it. The
vast area of coarse pasture harboured not a single farmhouse, only a
shed here and there marking a particular field, for a thousand shallow
brooks flowed like veins from all directions to the arterial river
moving through its silent leagues. Small frills of willow curving on
the river brink, and elsewhere a temple of lofty elms, offered the only
refuge from sun or storm. Store cattle roamed unchecked from field to
field, and in the shade of gaunt rascally bushes sheep were nestling.
Green reeds and willow herb followed the watercourses with endless
efflorescence, beautiful indeed.

In the late afternoon they had come to a spot where they could see
their village three or four miles away, but between them lay the
inexorable barrier of the river without a bridge. There was a bridge
miles away to the right, they had crossed it earlier in the day; and
there was another bridge on the left, but that also was miles distant.

“Now what are we to do?” asked Orianda. She wore a white muslin frock,
a country frock, and a large straw hat with poppies, a country hat.
They approached a column of trees. In the soft smooth wind the foliage
of the willows was tossed into delicate greys. Orianda said they looked
like cockshy heads on spindly necks. She would like to shy at them, but
she was tired. “I know what we _could_ do.” Orianda glanced around the
landscape, trees, and bushes; the river was narrow, though deep, not
more than forty feet across, and had high banks.

“You can swim, Gerald?”

Yes, Gerald could swim rather well.

“Then let’s swim it, Gerald, and carry our own clothes over.”

“Can you swim, Orianda?”

Yes, Orianda could swim rather well.

“All right then,” he said. “I’ll go down here a little way.”

“O, don’t go far, I don’t want you to go far away, Gerald,” and she
added softly, “my dear.”

“No, I won’t go far,” he said, and sat down behind a bush a hundred
yards away. Here he undressed, flung his shoes one after the other
across the river, and swimming on his back carried his clothes over in
two journeys. As he sat drying in the sunlight he heard a shout from
Orianda. He peeped out and saw her sporting in the stream quite close
below him. She swam with a graceful overarm stroke that tossed a spray
of drops behind her and launched her body as easily as a fish’s. Her
hair was bound in a handkerchief. She waved a hand to him. “You’ve done
it! Bravo! What courage! Wait for me. Lovely.” She turned away like
an eel, and at every two or three strokes she spat into the air a gay
little fountain of water. How extraordinary she was. Gerald wished he
had not hurried. By and by he slipped into the water again and swam
upstream. He could not see her.

“Have you finished?” he cried.

“I have finished, yes.” Her voice was close above his head. She was
lying in the grass, her face propped between her palms, smiling down at
him. He could see bare arms and shoulders.

“Got your clothes across?”

“Of course.”

“All dry?”

She nodded.

“How many journeys? I made two.”

“Two,” said Orianda briefly.

“You’re all right then.” He wafted a kiss, swam back, and dressed
slowly. Then as she did not appear he wandered along to her humming a
discreet and very audible hum as he went. When he came upon her she
still lay upon the grass most scantily clothed.

“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily, and full of surprise and modesty
walked away. The unembarrassed girl called after him: “Drying my hair.”

“All right”—he did not turn round—“no hurry.”

But what sensations assailed him. They aroused in his decent
gentlemanly mind not exactly a tumult, but a flux of emotions,
impressions, and qualms; doubtful emotions, incredible impressions, and
torturing qualms. That alluring picture of Orianda, her errant father,
the abandoned Lizzie! Had the water perhaps heated his mind though it
had cooled his body? He felt he would have to urge her, drag her if
need be, from this “Black Dog.” The setting was fair enough and she was
fair, but lovely as she was not even she could escape the brush of its
vulgarity, its plebeian pressure.

And if all this has, or seems to have, nothing, or little enough to do
with the drying of Orianda’s hair, it is because the Honourable Gerald
was accustomed to walk from grossness with an averted mind.

“Orianda,” said he, when she rejoined him, “when are you going to give
it up. You cannot stay here ... with Lizzie ... can you?”

“Why not?” she asked, sharply tossing back her hair. “I stayed with my
mother, you know.”

“That was different from this. I don’t know how, but it must have been.”

She took his arm. “Yes, it was. Lizzie I hate, and poor stupid father
loves her as much as he loves his axe or his handsaw. I hate her
meekness, too. She has taken the heart out of everything. I must get
her away.”

“I see your need, Orianda, but what can you do?”

“I shall lie to her, lie like a libertine. And I shall tell her that my
mother is coming home at once. No Lizzie could face that.”

He was silent. Poor Lizzie did not know that there was now no Mrs.
Crabbe.

“You don’t like my trick, do you?” Orianda shook his arm caressingly.

“It hasn’t any particular grandeur about it, you know.”

“Pooh! You shouldn’t waste grandeur on clearing up a mess. This is a
very dirty Eden.”

“No, all’s fair, I suppose.”

“But it isn’t war, you dear, if that’s what you mean. I’m only doing
for them what they are naturally loth to do for themselves.” She
pronounced the word “loth” as if it rimed with moth.

“Lizzie,” he said, “I’m sure about Lizzie. I’ll swear there is still
some fondness in her funny little heart.”

“It isn’t love, though; she’s just sentimental in her puffy kind of
way. My dear Honourable, you don’t know what love is.” He hated her to
use his title, for there was then always a breath of scorn in her tone.
Just at odd times she seemed to be—not vulgar, that was unthinkable—she
seemed to display a contempt for good breeding. He asked with a stiff
smile “What _is_ love?”

“For me,” said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, “for me it is a
compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two
ingredients is absent love is dead.”

Gerald shook his head, laughing. “It sounds like a malignant bolus that
I shouldn’t like to take. I feel that love is just self-sacrifice.
Apart from the taste of the thing or the price of the thing, why and
for what this anticipation, this gratitude?

“For the moment of passion, of course. Honour thy moments of passion
and keep them holy. But O, Gerald Loughlin,” she added mockingly, “this
you cannot understand, for you are not a lover; you are not, no, you
are not even a good swimmer.” Her mockery was adorable, but baffling.

“I do not understand you,” he said. Now why in the whole world of
images should she refer to his swimming? He _was_ a good swimmer.
He was silent for a long time and then again he began to speak of
marriage, urging her to give up her project and leave Lizzie in her
simple peace.

Then, not for the first time, she burst into a strange perverse
intensity that may have been love but might have been rage, that was
toned like scorn and yet must have been a jest.

“Lovely Gerald, you must never marry, Gerald, you are too good for
marriage. All the best women are already married, yes, they are—to all
the worst men.” There was an infinite slow caress in her tone but she
went on rapidly. “So I shall never marry you, how should I marry a kind
man, a good man? I am a barbarian, and want a barbarian lover, to crush
and scarify me, but you are so tender and I am so crude. When your soft
eyes look on me they look on a volcano.”

“I have never known anything half as lovely,” he broke in.

Her sudden emotion, though controlled, was unconcealed and she turned
away from him.

“My love is a gentleman, but with him I should feel like a wild bee in
a canary cage.”

“What are you saying!” cried Gerald, putting his arms around her.
“Orianda!”

“O yes, we do love in a mezzotinted kind of way. You could do anything
with me short of making me marry you, anything, Gerald.” She repeated
it tenderly. “Anything. But short of marrying me I could make you do
nothing.” She turned from him again for a moment or two. Then she took
his arm and as they walked on she shook it and said chaffingly, “And
what a timid swimmer my Gerald is.”

But he was dead silent. That flux of sensations in his mind had taken
another twist, fiery and exquisite. Like rich clouds they shaped
themselves in the sky of his mind, fancy’s bright towers with shining
pinnacles.

Lizzie welcomed them home. Had they enjoyed themselves—yes, the day
had been fine—and so they had enjoyed themselves—well, well, that was
right. But throughout the evening Orianda hid herself from him, so he
wandered almost distracted about the village until in a garth he saw
some men struggling with a cow. Ropes were twisted around its horns and
legs. It was flung to the earth. No countryman ever speaks to an animal
without blaspheming it, although if he be engaged in some solitary work
and inspired to music, he invariably sings a hymn in a voice that seems
to have some vague association with wood pulp. So they all blasphemed
and shouted. One man, with sore eyes, dressed in a coat of blue fustian
and brown cord trousers, hung to the end of a rope at an angle of
forty-five degrees. His posture suggested that he was trying to pull
the head off the cow. Two other men had taken turns of other rope
around some stout posts, and one stood by with a handsaw.

“What are you going to do?” asked Gerald.

“Its harns be bent, yeu see,” said the man with the saw, “they be going
into its head. ’Twill blind or madden the beast.”

So they blasphemed the cow, and sawed off its crumpled horns.

When Gerald went back to the inn Orianda was still absent. He sat down
but he could not rest. He could never rest now until he had won her
promise. That lovely image in the river spat fountains of scornful fire
at him. “Do not leave me, Gerald,” she had said. He would never leave
her, he would never leave her. But the men talking in the inn scattered
his flying fiery thoughts. They discoursed with a vacuity whose very
endlessness was transcendent. Good God! Was there ever a living person
more magnificently inane than old Tottel, the registrar. He would have
inspired a stork to protest. Of course, a man of his age should not
have worn a cap, a small one especially; Tottel himself was small, and
it made him look rumpled. He was bandy: his intellect was bandy too.

“Yes,” Mr. Tottel was saying, “it’s very interesting to see interesting
things, no matter if it’s man, woman, or a object. The most interesting
man as I ever met in my life I met on my honeymoon. Years ago. He made
a lifelong study of railways, that man, knew ’em from Alpha to ... to
... what is it?”

“Abednego,” said someone.

“Yes, the trunk lines, the fares, the routs, the junctions of
anywheres in England or Scotland or Ireland or Wales. London, too,
the Underground. I tested him, every station in correct order from
South Kensington to King’s Cross. A strange thing! Nothing to do with
railways in ’imself, it was just his ’obby. Was a Baptist minister,
really, but still a most interesting man.”

Loughlin could stand it no longer, he hurried away into the garden. He
could not find her. Into the kitchen—she was not there. He sat down
excited and impatient, but he must wait for her, he wanted to know, to
know at once. How divinely she could swim! What was it he wanted to
know? He tried to read a book there, a ragged dusty volume about the
polar regions. He learned that when a baby whale is born it weighs at
least a ton. How horrible!

He rushed out into the fields full of extravagant melancholy and stupid
distraction. That! All that was to be her life here! This was your
rustic beauty, idiots and railways, boors who could choke an ox and
chop off its horns—maddening doubts, maddening doubts—foul-smelling
rooms, darkness, indecency. She held him at arm’s length still, but she
was dovelike, and he was grappled to her soul with hoops of steel, yes,
indeed.

But soon this extravagance was allayed. Dim loneliness came
imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped
oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one
way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils;
the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely
permanence.

When he came to the inn Orianda was gone to bed.


IV

The next morning an air of uneasy bustle crept into the house after
breakfast, much going in and out and up and down in restrained
perturbation.

Orianda asked him if he could drive the horse and trap to the station.
Yes, he thought he could drive it.

“Lizzie is departing,” she said, “there are her boxes and things. It is
very good of you, Gerald, if you will be so kind. It is a quiet horse.”

Lizzie, then, had been subdued. She was faintly affable during the
meal, but thereafter she had been silent; Gerald could not look at her
until the last dreadful moment had come and her things were in the trap.

“Good-bye, ’Thaniel,” she said to the innkeeper, and kissed him.

“Good-bye, Orianda,” and she kissed Orianda, and then climbed into the
trap beside Gerald, who said “Click click,” and away went the nag.

Lizzie did not speak during the drive—perhaps she was in tears. Gerald
would have liked to comfort her, but the nag was unusually spirited and
clacked so freshly along that he did not dare turn to the sorrowing
woman. They trotted down from the uplands and into the windy road
over the marshes. The church spire in the town ahead seemed to change
its position with every turn of that twisting route. It would have a
background now of high sour-hued down, now of dark woodland, anon of
nothing but sky and cloud; in a few miles further there would be the
sea. Hereabout there were no trees, few houses, the world was vast and
bright, the sky vast and blue. What was prettiest of all was a windmill
turning its fans steadily in the draught from the sea. When they
crossed the river its slaty slow-going flow was broken into blue waves.

At the station Lizzie dismounted without a word and Gerald hitched the
nag to a tree. A porter took the luggage and labelled it while Gerald
and Lizzie walked about the platform. A calf with a sack over its
loins, tied by the neck to a pillar, was bellowing deeply; Lizzie let
it suck at her finger for a while, but at last she resumed her walk and
talked with her companion.

“She’s a fine young thing, clever, his daughter; I’d do anything for
her, but for him I’ve nothing to say. What can I say? What could I do?
I gave up a great deal for that man, Mr. Loughlin—I’d better not call
you Gerald any more now—a great deal. I knew he’d had trouble with his
wicked wife, and now to take her back after so many years, eh! It’s
beyond me, I know how he hates her. I gave up everything for him, I
gave him what he can’t give back to me, and he hates her; you know?”

“No, I did not know. I don’t know anything of this affair.”

“No, of course, you would not know anything of this affair,” said
Lizzie with a sigh. “I don’t want to see him again. I’m a fool,
but I got my pride, and that’s something to the good, it’s almost
satisfactory, ain’t it?”

As the train was signalled she left him and went into the booking
office. He marched up and down, her sad case affecting him with sorrow.
The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her
trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life—that was
what life demanded of you—surrender. For reward it gave you love, this
swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties. What German
philosopher was it who said Woman pays the debt of life not by what
she does, but by what she suffers? The train rushed in. Gerald busied
himself with the luggage, saw that it was loaded, but did not see its
owner. He walked rapidly along the carriages, but he could not find
her. Well, she was sick of them all, probably hiding from him. Poor
woman. The train moved off, and he turned away.

But the station yard outside was startlingly empty, horse and trap were
gone. The tree was still there, but with a man leaning against it, a
dirty man with a dirty pipe and a dirty smell. Had he seen a horse and
trap?

“A brown mare?”

“Yes.”

“Trap with yaller wheels?”

“That’s it.”

“O ah, a young ooman druv away in that....”

“A young woman!”

“Ah, two minutes ago.” And he described Lizzie. “Out yon,” said the
dirty man, pointing with his dirty pipe to the marshes.

Gerald ran until he saw a way off on the level winding road the trap
bowling along at a great pace; Lizzie was lashing the cob.

“The damned cat!” He puffed large puffs of exasperation and felt almost
sick with rage, but there was nothing now to be done except walk back
to “The Black Dog,” which he began to do. Rage gave place to anxiety,
fear of some unthinkable disaster, some tragic horror at the inn.

“What a clumsy fool! All my fault, my own stupidity!” He groaned
when he crossed the bridge at the half distance. He halted there:
“It’s dreadful, dreadful!” A tremor in his blood, the shame of his
foolishness, the fear of catastrophe, all urged him to turn back to the
station and hasten away from these miserable complications.

But he did not do so, for across the marshes at the foot of the uplands
he saw the horse and trap coming back furiously towards him. Orianda
was driving it.

“What has happened?” she cried, jumping from the trap. “O, what fear I
was in, what’s happened?” She put her arms around him tenderly.

“And I was in great fear,” he said with a laugh of relief. “What has
happened?”

“The horse came home, just trotted up to the door and stood still.
Covered with sweat and foam, you see. The trap was empty. We couldn’t
understand it, anything, unless you had been flung out and were
bleeding on the road somewhere. I turned the thing back and came on
at once.” She was without a hat; she had been anxious and touched him
fondly. “Tell me what’s the scare?”

He told her all.

“But Lizzie was not in the trap,” Orianda declared excitedly. “She has
not come back. What does it mean, what does she want to do? Let us find
her. Jump up, Gerald.”

Away they drove again, but nobody had seen anything of Lizzie. She had
gone, vanished, dissolved, and in that strong warm air her soul might
indeed have been blown to Paradise. But they did not know how or why.
Nobody knew. A vague search was carried on in the afternoon, guarded
though fruitless enquiries were made, and at last it seemed clear,
tolerably clear, that Lizzie had conquered her mad impulse or intention
or whatever it was, and walked quietly away across the fields to a
station in another direction.


V

For a day or two longer time resumed its sweet slow delightfulness,
though its clarity was diminished and some of its enjoyment dimmed.
A village woman came to assist in the mornings, but Orianda was now
seldom able to leave the inn; she had come home to a burden, a happy,
pleasing burden, that could not often be laid aside, and therefore a
somewhat lonely Loughlin walked the high and the low of the country by
day and only in the evenings sat in the parlour with Orianda. Hope too
was slipping from his heart as even the joy was slipping from his days,
for the spirit of vanished Lizzie, defrauded and indicting, hung in the
air of the inn, an implacable obsession, a triumphant forboding that
was proved a prophecy when some boys fishing in the mill dam hooked
dead Lizzie from the pool under the hornbeam tree.

Then it was that Loughlin’s soul discovered to him a mass of
feelings—fine sympathy, futile sentiment, a passion for righteousness,
morbid regrets—from which a tragic bias was born. After the dread
ordeal of the inquest, which gave a passive verdict of Found Drowned,
it was not possible for him to stem this disloyal tendency of his mind.
It laid that drowned figure accusatively at the feet of his beloved
girl, and no argument or sophistry could disperse the venal savour that
clung to the house of “The Black Dog.” “To analyse or assess a person’s
failings or deficiencies,” he declared to himself, “is useless, not
because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass
of beholders in divers ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant
figures in the same being. To Brown Robinson is a hero, to Jones a
snob, to Smith a fool. Who then is right? You are lucky if you can put
your miserable self in relation at an angle where your own deficiencies
are submerged or minimized, and wise if you can maintain your vision of
that interesting angle.” But embedded in Loughlin’s modest intellect
there was a stratum of probity that was rock to these sprays of the
casuist; and although Orianda grew more alluring than ever, he packed
his bag, and on a morning she herself drove him in the gig to the
station.

Upon that miserable departure it was fitting that rain should fall. The
station platform was piled with bushel baskets and empty oil barrels.
It rained with a quiet remorselessness. Neither spoke a word, no one
spoke, no sound was uttered but the faint flicking of the raindrops.
Her kiss to him was long and sweet, her good-bye almost voiceless.

“You will write?” she whispered.

“Yes, I will write.”

But he does not do so. In London he has not forgotten, but he cannot
endure the thought of that countryside—to be far from the madding crowd
is to be mad indeed. It is only after some trance of recollection,
when his fond experience is all delicately and renewingly there, that
he wavers; but time and time again he relinquishes or postpones his
return. And sometimes he thinks he really will write a letter to his
friend who lives in the country.

But he does not do so.




                       _Alas, Poor Bollington!_


“I walked out of the hotel, just as I was, and left her there. I never
went back again. I don’t think I intended anything quite so final, so
dastardly; I had not intended it, I had not thought of doing so, but
that is how it happened. I lost her, lost my wife purposely. It was
heartless, it was shabby, for she was a nice woman, a charming woman,
a good deal younger than I was, a splendid woman, in fact she was very
beautiful, and yet I ran away from her. How can you explain that,
Turner?”

Poor Bollington looked at Turner, who looked at his glass of whiskey,
and that looked irresistible—he drank some. Bollington sipped a little
from his glass of milk.

I often found myself regarding Bollington as a little old man. Most of
the club members did so too, but he was not that at all, he was still
on the sunny side of fifty, but _so_ unassertive, no presence to speak
of, no height, not enough hair to mention—if he had had it would surely
have been yellow. So mild and modest he cut no figure at all, just a
man in glasses that seemed rather big for him. Turner was different,
though he was just as bald; he had stature and bulk, his very pince-nez
seemed twice the size of Bollington’s spectacles. They had not met each
other for ten years.

“Well, yes,” Turner said, “but that was a serious thing to do.”

“Wasn’t it!” said the other, “and I had no idea of the enormity of the
offence—not at the time. She might have been dead, poor girl, and her
executors advertising for me. She had money you know, her people had
been licensed victuallers, quite wealthy. Scandalous!”

Bollington brooded upon his sin until Turner sighed: “Ah well, my dear
chap.”

“But you have no idea,” protested Bollington, “how entirely she
engrossed me. She was twenty-five and I was forty when we married. She
was entrancing. She had always lived in a stinking hole in Balham, and
it is amazing how strictly some of those people keep their children;
licensed victuallers, did I tell you? Well I was forty, and she was
twenty-five; we lived for a year dodging about from one hotel to
another all over the British Isles, she was a perfect little nomad. Are
you married, Turner?”

No, Turner was not married, he never had been.

“O, but you should be,” cried little Bollington, “it’s an extraordinary
experience, the real business of the world is marriage, marriage. I was
deliriously happy and she was learning French and Swedish—that’s where
we were going later. She was an enchanting little thing, fair, with
blue eyes; Phoebe her name was.”

Turner thoughtfully brushed his hand across his generous baldness, then
folded his arms.

“You really should,” repeated Bollington, “you ought to, really. But
I remember we went from Killarney to Belfast, and there something
dreadful happened. I don’t know, it had been growing on her I suppose,
but she took a dislike to me there, had strange fancies, thought I
was unfaithful to her. You see she was popular wherever we went, a
lively little woman, in fact she wasn’t merely a woman, she was a
little magnet, men congregated and clung to her like so many tacks
and nails and pins. I didn’t object at all—on the contrary, ‘Enjoy
yourself, Phoebe,’ I said, ‘I don’t expect you always to hang around
an old fogey like me.’ Fogey was the very word I used; I didn’t mean
it, of course, but that was the line I took, for she was so charming
until she began to get so bad tempered. And believe me, that made her
angry, furious. No, not the fogey, but the idea that I did not object
to her philandering. It was fatal, it gave colour to her suspicions of
me—Turner, I was as innocent as any lamb—tremendous colour. And she
had such a sharp tongue! If you ventured to differ from her—and you
couldn’t help differing sometimes—she’d positively bludgeon you, and
you couldn’t help being bludgeoned. And she had a passion for putting
me right, and I always seemed to be so very wrong, always. She would
not be satisfied until she had proved it, and it was so monstrous to
be made feel that because you were rather different from other people
you were an impertinent fool. Yes, I seemed at last to gain only the
pangs and none of the prizes of marriage. Now there was a lady we met
in Belfast to whom I paid some attention....”

“O, good lord!” groaned Turner.

“No, but listen,” pleaded Bollington, “it was a very innocent
friendship—nothing was further from my mind—and she was very much
like my wife, very much, it was noticeable, everybody spoke of it— I
mean the resemblance. A Mrs. Macarthy, a delightful woman, and Phoebe
simply loathed her. I confess that my wife’s innuendoes were so mean
and persistent that at last I hadn’t the strength to deny them, in fact
at times I wished they were true. Love is idolatry if you like, but it
cannot be complete immolation—there’s no such bird as the phœnix, is
there, Turner?”

“What, what?”

“No such bird as the phœnix.”

“No, there is no such bird, I believe.”

“And sometimes I had to ask myself quite seriously if I really hadn’t
been up to some infidelity! Nonsense, of course, but I assure you that
was the effect it was having upon me. I had doubts of myself, frenzied
doubts! And it came to a head between Phoebe and me in our room one
day. We quarrelled, O dear, how we quarrelled! She said I was sly,
two-faced, unfaithful, I was a scoundrel, and so on. Awfully untrue,
all of it. She accused me of dreadful things with Mrs. Macarthy and she
screamed out: ‘I hope you will treat her better than you have treated
me.’ Now what did she mean by that, Turner?”

Bollington eyed his friend as if he expected an oracular answer, but
just as Turner was about to respond, Bollington continued: “Well, I
never found out, I never knew, for what followed was too terrible. ‘I
shall go out,’ I said, ‘it will be better, I think.’ Just that, nothing
more. I put on my hat and I put my hand on the knob of the door when
she said most violently: ‘Go with your Macarthys, I never want to see
your filthy face again!’ Extraordinary you know, Turner. Well, I went
out, and I will not deny I was in a rage, terrific. It was raining
but I didn’t care, and I walked about in it. Then I took shelter in
a bookseller’s doorway opposite a shop that sold tennis rackets and
tobacco, and another one that displayed carnations and peaches on wads
of coloured wool. The rain came so fast that the streets seemed to
empty, and the passers-by were horridly silent under their umbrellas,
and their footsteps splashed so dully, and I tell you I was very sad,
Turner, there. I debated whether to rush across the road and buy a lot
of carnations and peaches and take them to Phoebe. But I did not do so,
Turner, I never went back, never.”

“Why, Bollington, you, you were a positive ruffian, Bollington.”

“O, scandalous,” rejoined the ruffian.

“Well, out with it, what about this Mrs. Macarthy?”

“Mrs. Macarthy? But, Turner, I never saw her again, never, I ... I
forgot her. Yes, I went prowling on until I found myself at the docks
and there it suddenly became dark; I don’t know, there was no evening,
no twilight, the day stopped for a moment—and it did not recover. There
were hundreds of bullocks slithering and panting and steaming in the
road, thousands; lamps were hung up in the harbour, cabs and trollies
rattled round the bullocks, the rain fell dismally and everybody
hurried. I went into the dock and saw them loading the steamer, it was
called s.s. _Frolic_, and really, Turner, the things they put into the
belly of that steamer were rather funny: tons and tons of monstrous big
chain, the links as big as soup plates, and two or three pantechnicon
vans. Yes, but I was anything but frolicsome, I assure you, I was full
of misery and trepidation and the deuce knows what. I did not know
what I wanted to do, or what I was going to do, but I found myself
buying a ticket to go to Liverpool on that steamer, and, in short, I
embarked. How wretched I was, but how determined. Everything on board
was depressing and dirty, and when at last we moved off the foam slewed
away in filthy bubbles as if that dirty steamer had been sick and was
running away from it. I got to Liverpool in the early morn, but I did
not stay there, it is such a clamouring place, all trams and trollies
and teashops. I sat in the station for an hour, the most miserable man
alive, the most miserable ever born. I wanted some rest, some peace,
some repose, but they never ceased shunting an endless train of goods
trucks, banging and screeching until I almost screamed at the very
porters. Criff was the name on some of the trucks, I remember, Criff,
and everything seemed to be going criff, criff, criff. I haven’t
discovered to this day what Criff signifies, whether it’s a station
or a company, or a manufacture, but it was Criff, I remember. Well, I
rushed to London and put my affairs in order. A day or two later I went
to Southampton and boarded another steamer and put to sea, or rather we
were ignominiously lugged out of the dock by a little rat of a tug that
seemed all funnel and hooter. I was off to America, and there I stopped
for over three years.”

Turner sighed. A waiter brought him another glass of spirit.

“I can’t help thinking, Bollington, that it was all very fiery and
touchy. Of course, I don’t know, but really it was a bit steep, very
squeamish of you. What did your wife say?”

“I never communicated with her, I never heard from her, I just dropped
out. My filthy face, you know, she did not want to see it again.”

“Oh come, Bollington! And what did Mrs. Macarthy say?”

“Mrs. Macarthy! I never saw or heard of her again. I told you that.”

“Ah, yes, you told me. So you slung off to America.”

“I was intensely miserable there for a long while. Of course I loved
Phoebe enormously, I felt the separation, I.... O, it is impossible to
describe. But what was worst of all was the meanness of my behaviour,
there was nothing heroic about it, I soon saw clearly that it was a
shabby trick, disgusting, I had bolted and left her to the mercy of
... well, of whatever there was. It made such an awful barrier—you’ve
no idea of my compunction—I couldn’t make overtures—‘Let us forgive
and forget.’ I was a mean rascal, I _was_ filthy. That was the
barrier—myself; I was too bad. I thought I should recover and enjoy
life again, I began to think of Phoebe as a cat, a little cat. I went
everywhere and did everything. But America is a big country, I couldn’t
get into contact, I was lonely, very lonely, and although two years
went by I longed for Phoebe. Everything I did I wanted to do with
Phoebe by my side. And then my cousin, my only relative in the world—he
lived in England—he died. I scarcely ever saw him, but still he was my
kin. And he died. You’ve no comprehension, Turner, of the truly awful
sensation such a bereavement brings. Not a soul in the world now would
have the remotest interest in my welfare. O, I tell you, Turner, it was
tragic, tragic, when my cousin died. It made my isolation complete. I
was alone, a man who had made a dreadful mess of life. What with sorrow
and remorse I felt that I should soon die, not of disease, but disgust.”

“You were a great ninny,” ejaculated his friend. “Why the devil didn’t
you hurry back, claim your wife, bygones be bygones; why bless my
conscience, what a ninny, what a great ninny!”

“Yes, Turner, it is as you say. But though conscience is a good
servant it is a very bad master, it overruled me, it shamed me, and
I hung on to America for still another year. I tell you my situation
was unbearable, I was tied to my misery, I was a tethered dog, a duck
without water—even dirty water. And I hadn’t any faith in myself or
in my case; I knew I was wrong, had always been wrong, Phoebe had
taught me that. I hadn’t any faith, I wish I had had. Faith can move
mountains, so they say, though I’ve never heard of it actually being
done.”

“No, not in historical times,” declared Turner.

“What do you mean by that?”

“O well, time is nothing, it’s nothing, it comes and off it goes.
Has it ever occurred to you, Bollington, that in 5,000 years or so
there will be nobody in the world speaking the English language,
our very existence even will be speculated upon, as if we were the
Anthropophagi? O good lord, yes.”

And another whiskey.

“You know, Bollington, you were a perfect fool. You behaved like one of
those half-baked civil service hounds who lunch in a dairy on a cup of
tea and a cream horn. You wanted some beef, some ginger. You came back,
you must have come back because there you are now.”

“Yes, Turner, I came back after nearly four years. Everything was
different, ah, how strange! I could not find Phoebe, it is weird how
people can disappear. I made enquiries, but it was like looking for a
lost umbrella, fruitless after so long.”

“Well, but what about Mrs. Macarthy?”

Mr. Bollington said, slowly and with the utmost precision: “I did not
see Mrs. Macarthy again.”

“O, of course, you did not see her again, not ever.”

“Not ever. I feared Phoebe had gone abroad too, but at last I found her
in London....”

“No,” roared Turner, “why the devil couldn’t you say so and done with
it? I’ve been sweating with sympathy for you. O, I say, Bollington!”

“My dear Turner, listen. Do you know, she was delighted to see me, she
even kissed me, straight off, and we went out to dine and had the very
deuce of a spread and we were having the very deuce of a good time.
She was lovelier than ever, and I could see all her old affection for
me was returning, she was so ... well, I can’t tell you, Turner, but
she had no animosity whatever, no grievance, she would certainly have
taken me back that very night. O dear, dear ... and then! I was anxious
to throw myself at her feet, but you couldn’t do that in a public café,
I could only touch her hands, beautiful, as they lay on the white linen
cloth. I kept asking: ‘Do you forgive me?’ and she would reply: ‘I have
nothing to forgive, dear, nothing.’ How wonderful that sounded to my
truly penitent soul—I wanted to die.

“‘But you don’t ask me where I’ve been!’ she cried gaily, ‘or what I’ve
been doing, you careless old Peter. I’ve been to France, and Sweden
too!’

“I was delighted to hear that, it was so very plucky.

“‘When did you go?’ I asked.

“‘When I left you,’ she said.

“‘You mean when I went away?’

“‘Did you go away? O, of course, you must have. Poor Peter, What a sad
time he has had.’

“I was a little bewildered, but I was delighted; in fact, Turner, I was
hopelessly infatuated again, I wanted to wring out all the dregs of my
detestable villainy and be absolved. All I could begin with was: ‘Were
you not very glad to be rid of me?’

“‘Well,’ she said, ‘my great fear at first was that you would find me
again and make it up. I didn’t want that then, at least, I thought I
didn’t.’

“‘That’s exactly what I felt,’ I exclaimed, ‘but how could I find you?’

“‘Well,’ Phoebe said, ‘you might have found out and followed me. But I
promise never to run away again, Peter dear, never.’

“Turner, my reeling intelligence swerved like a shot bird.

“‘Do you mean, Phoebe, that you ran away from _me_?’

“‘Yes, didn’t I?’ she answered.

“‘But I ran away from _you_,’ I said. ‘I walked out of the hotel on
that dreadful afternoon we quarrelled so, and I never went back. I went
to America. I was in America nearly four years.’

“‘Do you mean you ran away from me?’ she cried.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘didn’t I?’

“‘But that is exactly what I did—I mean, I ran away from you. _I_
walked out of the hotel directly you had gone—_I_ never went back, and
I’ve been abroad thinking how tremendously I had served you out, and
wondering what you thought of it all and where you were.’

“I could only say ‘Good God, Phoebe, I’ve had the most awful four years
of remorse and sorrow, all vain, mistaken, useless, thrown away.’ And
she said: ’And I’ve had four years—living in a fool’s paradise after
all. How dared you run away, it’s disgusting!’

“And, Turner, in a moment she was at me again in her old dreadful way,
and the last words I had from her were: ‘Now I _never_ want to see your
face again, never, this _is_ the end!’

“And that’s how things are now, Turner. It’s rather sad, isn’t it?”

“Sad! Why you chump, when was it you saw her?”

“O, a long time ago, it must be nearly three years now.”

“Three years! But you’ll see her again!”

“Tfoo! No, no, no, Turner. God bless me, no, no, no!” said the little
old man.




                           _The Ballet Girl_


On the last night of Hilary term Simpkins left his father’s shop a
quarter before the closing hour in order to deliver personally a letter
to John Evans-Antrobus, Esq., of St. Saviour’s College. Simpkins was
a clerk to his father, and the letter he carried was inscribed on its
envelope as “Important,” and a further direction, “Wait Answer,” was
doubly underlined. Acting as he was told to act by his father, than
whom he was incapable of recognizing any bigger authority either in
this world or, if such a slight, shrinking fellow could ever project
his comprehension so far, in the next, he passed the porter’s lodge
under the archway of St. Saviour’s, and crossing the first quadrangle,
entered a small hall that bore the names J. Evans-Antrobus with half
a dozen others neatly painted on the wall. He climbed two flights of
wooden stairs, and knocking over a door whose lintel was marked “5,
Evans-Antrobus,” was invited to “Come in.” He entered a study, and
confronted three hilarious young men, all clothed immaculately in
evening dress, a costume he himself privily admired much as a derelict
might envy the harp of an angel. The noisiest young gentleman, the
tall one with a monocle, was his quarry; he handed the letter to him.
Mr. Evans-Antrobus then read the letter, which invited him to pay
instanter a four-year-old debt of some nine or ten pounds which he had
inexplicably but consistently overlooked. And there was a half-hidden
but unpleasant alternative suggested should Mr. Evans-Antrobus fail
to comply with this not unreasonable request. Mr. Evans-Antrobus said
“Damn!” In point of fact he enlarged the scope of his vocabulary far
beyond the limits of that modest expletive, while his two friends,
being invited to read the missive, also exclaimed in terms that were
not at all subsidiary.

“My compliments to Messrs. Bagshot and Buffle!” exclaimed the tall
young man with the monocle angrily; “I shall certainly call round and
see them in the morning. Good evening!”

Little Simpkins explained that Bagshot and Buffle were not in need of
compliments, their business being to sell boots and to receive payment
for them. Two of the jolly young gentlemen proposed to throw him down
the stairs, and were only persuaded not to by the third jolly young
gentleman, who much preferred to throw him out of the window. Whereupon
Simpkins politely hinted that he would be compelled to interview the
college dean and await developments in his chambers. Simpkins made it
quite clear that, whatever happened, he was going to wait somewhere
until he got the money. The three jolly young gentlemen then told
little Simpkins exactly what they thought of him, exactly, omitting no
shade of denunciation, fine or emphatic. They told him where he ought
to be at the very moment, where he would quickly be unless he took
himself off; in short, they told him a lot of prophetic things which,
as is the way of prophecy, invited a climax of catastrophic horror.

“What is your name? Who the devil are you?”

“My name is Simpkins.”

Then the three jolly young gentlemen took counsel together in whispers,
and at last Mr. Evans-Antrobus said: “Well if you insist upon waiting,
Mr. Simpkins, I must get the money for you. I can borrow it, I suppose,
boys, from Fazz, can’t I?”

Again they consulted in whispers, after which two of the young gents
said they ought to be going, and so they went.

“Wait here for me,” said Mr. Evans-Antrobus, “I shall not be five
minutes.”

But Mr. Simpkins was so firmly opposed to this course that the other
relented. “Damn you! come along with me, then; I must go and see Fazz.”
So off they went to some rooms higher up the same flight of stairs,
beyond a door that was marked “F. A. Zealander.” When they entered
Fazz sat moping in front of the fire; he was wrapped as deeply as an
Esquimaux in some plaid travelling rugs girt with the pink rope of a
dressing-gown that lay across his knees. The fire was good, but the
hearth was full of ashes. The end of the fender was ornamented with the
strange little iron face of a man whose eyes were shut but whose knobby
cheeks fondly glowed. Fazz’s eyes were not shut, they were covered by
dim glasses, and his cheeks had no more glow than a sponge.

“Hullo, Fazz. You better to-day?”

“No, dearie, I am not conscious of any improvement. This influenza’s
a thug; I am being deprived of my vitality as completely as a fried
rasher.”

“Oh, by the by,” said his friend, “you don’t know each other: Mr.
Simpkins—Mr. Zealander.”

The former bowed awkwardly and unexpectedly shook Mr. Zealander’s
hot limp hand. At that moment a man hurried in, exclaiming: “Mr.
Evans-Antrobus, sir, the Dean wants to see you in his rooms at once,
sir!”

“That is deuced awkward,” said that gentleman blandly. “Just excuse me
for a moment or two, Fazz.”

He hurried out, leaving Simpkins confronting Mr. Zealander in some
confusion. Fazz poked his flaming coal. “This fire! Did you ever see
such a morbid conflagration?”

“Rather nice, I thought,” replied Simpkins affably; “quite cool
to-night, outside, rather.”

The host peered at him through those dim glasses. “There’s a foggy
humidity about everything, like the inside of a cream tart. But sit
down,” said Fazz, With the geniality of a man who was about to be
hung and was rather glad that he was no longer to be exposed to the
fraudulent excess of life, “and tell me a bawdy story.”

Simpkins sank into an armchair and was silent.

“Perhaps you don’t care for bawdy stories?” continued Fazz. “I do, I
do. I love vulgarity; there is certainly a niche in life for vulgarity.
If ever I possess a house of my own I will arrange—I will, upon my
soul—one augustly vulgar room, divinely vulgar, upholstered in sallow
pigskin. Do tell me something. You haven’t got a spanner on you, I
suppose? There is something the matter with my bed. Once it was full
of goose feathers, but now I sleep, as it were, on the bulge of a
barrel; I must do something to it with a spanner. I hate spanners—such
dreadful democratic tools; they terrify me, they gape at you as if they
wanted to bite you. Spanners are made of iron, and this is a funny
world, for it is full of things like spanners.”

Simpkins timidly rose up through the waves of this discourse and asked
if he could “do” anything. He was mystified, amused, and impressed by
this person; he didn’t often meet people like that, he didn’t often
meet anybody; he rather liked him. On each side of the invalid there
were tables and bottles of medicine.

“I am just going to take my temperature,” said Fazz. “Do have a
cigarette, dearie, or a cigar. Can you see the matches? Yes; now do
you mind surrounding me with my medicines? They give such a hopeful
air to the occasion. There’s a phial of sodium salicylate tabloids, I
must take six of them in a minute or two. Then there are the quinine
capsules; the formalin, yes; those lozenges I suck—have one?—they are
so comforting, and that depressing laxative; surround me with them.
Oh, glorious, benignant, isn’t it? Now I shall take my temperature; I
shall be as stolid as the sphinx for three minutes, so do tell me that
story. Where is my thermometer, oh!” He popped the thermometer into
his mouth, but pulled it out again. “Do you know L. G.? He’s a blithe
little fellow, oh, very blithe. He was in Jacobsen’s rooms the other
day—Jacobsen’s a bit of an art connoisseur, you know, and draws and
paints, and Jacobsen drew attention to the portrait of a lady that was
hanging on the wall. ‘Oh, dear,’ said L. G., ‘what a hag! Where did
you get that thing?’ just like that. Such a perfect fool, L. G. ‘It’s
my mother,’ says Jacobsen. ‘Oh, of course,’ explained L. G., ‘I didn’t
mean _that_, of course, my dear fellow; I referred to the horrible
treatment, entirely to the horrible treatment; it is a wretched daub.’
‘I did it myself!’ said Jacobsen. You don’t know L. G.? Oh, he is very
blithe. What were you going to tell me? I am just going to take my
temperature; yesterday it was ninety odd point something. I do hope it
is different now. I can’t bear those points, they seem so equivocal.”

Fazz sat with the tube of the thermometer projecting from his mouth.
At the end of the test he regarded it very earnestly before returning
it disconsolately to the table. Then he addressed his visitor with
considerable gloom.

“Pardon me, I did not catch your name.”

“Simpkins.”

“Simpkins!” repeated Fazz, with a dubious drawl. “Oh, I’m sorry, I
don’t like Simpkins, it sounds so minuscular. What are you taking?”

“I won’t take anything, sir, thank you,” replied Simpkins.

“I mean, what schools are you taking?”

“Oh, no school at all.”

Fazz was mystified: “What college are you?”

“I’m not at a college,” confessed the other. “I came to see Mr.
Evans-Antrobus with a note. I’m waiting for an answer.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From Bagshot and Buffle’s.” After a silence he added: “Bespoke boots.”

“Hump, you are very young to make bespoke boots, aren’t you, Simpkins,
surely? Are you an Agnostic? Have a cigar? You must, you’ve been very
good, and I am so interested in your career; but tell me now what it
exactly is that you are sitting in my room for?”

Simpkins told him all he could.

“It’s interesting, most fascinating,” declared Fazz, “but it is a
little beyond me all the same. I am afraid, Simpkins, that you have
been deposited with me as if I were a bank and you were something
not negotiable, as you really are, I fear. But you mustn’t tell the
Dean about Evans-Antrobus, no, you mustn’t, it’s never done. Tell
me, why do you make bespoke boots? It’s an unusual taste to display.
Wouldn’t you rather come to college, for instance, and study ... er ...
anthropology—nothing at all about boots in anthropology?”

“No,” said Simpkins. He shuffled in his chair and felt uneasy. “I’d be
out of my depth.” Fazz glared at him, and Simpkins repeated: “Out of my
depth, that would be, sure.”

“This is very shameful,” commented the other, “but it’s interesting,
most fascinating. You brazenly maintain that you would rather study
boots than ... than books and brains!”

“A cobbler must stick to his last,” replied Simpkins, recalling a
phrase of his father’s.

“Bravo!” cried Fazz, “but not to an everlasting last!”

“And I don’t know anything about all this; there’s nothing about it I’d
want to know, it wouldn’t be any good to me. It’s no use mixing things,
and there’s a lot to be learnt about boots—you’d be surprised. You
got to keep yourself to yourself and not get out of your depth—take a
steady line and stick to it, and not get out of your depth.”

“But, dearie, you don’t sleep with a lifebelt girt about your loins, do
you now? I’m not out of my depth; I shouldn’t be even if I started to
make boots....”

“Oh, wouldn’t you?” shouted Simpkins.

“I should find it rather a shallow occupation; mere business is the
very devil of a business; business would be a funny sort of life.”

“Life’s a funny business; you look after your business and that will
look after you.”

“But what in the world are we in the world at all for, Simpkins?
Isn’t it surely to do just the things we most intensely want to do?
And you do boots and boots and boots. Don’t you ever get out and
about?—theatres—girls—sport—or do you insist on boot, the whole boot,
and nothing but boot?”

“No, none of them,” replied Simpkins. “Don’t care for theatres, I’ve
never been. Don’t care for girls, I like a quiet life. I keep myself to
myself—it’s safer, don’t get out of your depth then. I do go and have
a look at the football match sometimes, but it’s only because we make
the boots for some of your crack players, and you want to know what you
are making them for. Work doesn’t trouble me, nothing troubles me, and
I got money in the bank.”

“Damme, Simpkins, you have a terrible conviction about you; if I listen
to you much longer I shall bind myself apprentice to you. I feel sure
that you make nice, soft, watertight, everlasting boots, and then
we should rise in the profession together. Discourse, Simpkins; you
enchant mine ears—both of them.”

“What I say is,” concluded Simpkins, “you can’t understand everything.
I shouldn’t want to; I’m all right as it is.”

“Of course you are, you’re simply too true. This is a place flowing
with afternoon tea, tutors, and clap-trap. It’s a city in which
everything is set upon a bill. You’re simply too true, if we are not
out of our depth we are in up to our ears—I am. It’s most fascinating.”

Soon afterwards Simpkins left him. Descending the stairs to the rooms
of Evans-Antrobus he switched on the light. It was very quiet and snug
in those rooms, with the soft elegant couch, the reading-lamp with the
delicious violet shade, the decanter with whiskey, the box of chocolate
biscuits, and the gramophone. He sat down by the fire, waiting and
waiting. Simpkins waited so long that he got used to the room, he even
stole a sip of whiskey and some of the chocolate biscuits. Then to show
his independence, his contempt for Mr. Evans-Antrobus and his trickery,
he took still more of the whiskey—a drink he had never tasted before—he
really took quite a lot. He heaped coal upon the fire, and stalked
about the room with his hands in his pockets or examined the books,
most of which were about something called Jurisprudence, and suchlike.
Simpkins liked books; he began reading:

 That the Pleuronectidæ are admirably adapted by their flattened and
 asymmetrical structure for their habits of life, is manifest from
 several species, such as soles and flounders, etc., being extremely
 common.

He did not care much for science; he opened another:

 It is difficult indeed to imagine that anything can oscillate so
 rapidly as to strike the retina of the eye 831,479,000,000,000 in
 one second, as must be the case with violet light according to this
 hypothesis.

Simpkins looked at the light and blinked his eyes. That had a violet
shade. He really did not care for science, and he had an inclination to
put the book down as his head seemed to be swaying, but he continued to
turn the pages.

 Snowdon is the highest mountain in England or Wales. Snowdon is not so
 high as Ben Nevis.

 Therefore the highest mountain in England or Wales is not so high as
 Ben Nevis.

“Oh, my head!” mumbled Simpkins.

 Water must be either warm or not warm, but it does not follow that it
 must be warm or cold.

Simpkins felt giddy. He dropped the book, and tottered to the couch.
Immediately the room spun round and something in his head began to hum,
to roar like an aeroplane a long way up in the sky. He felt that he
ought to get out of the room, quickly, and get some water, either not
or cold warm—he didn’t mind which! He clapped on his hat and, slipping
into his overcoat, he reached a door. It opened into a bedroom, very
bare indeed compared with this other room, but Simpkins rolled in; the
door slammed behind him, and in the darkness he fell upon a bed, with
queer sensations that seemed to be dividing and subtracting in him.

When he awoke later—oh, it seemed much later—he felt quite well again.
He had forgotten where he was. It was a strange place he was in,
utterly dark; but there was a great noise sounding quite close to him—a
gramophone, people shouting choruses and dancing about in the adjoining
room. He could hear a lady’s voice too. Then he remembered that he
ought not to be in that room at all; it was, why, yes, it was criminal;
he might be taken for a burglar or something! He slid from the bed,
groped in the darkness until he found his hat, unbuttoned his coat, for
he was fearfully hot, and stood at the bedroom door trembling in the
darkness, waiting and listening to that tremendous row. He _had_ been
a fool to come in there! How was he to get out—how the deuce was he to
get out? The gramophone stopped. He could hear the voices more plainly.
He grew silently panic-stricken; it was awful, they’d be coming in to
him perhaps, and find him sneaking there like a thief—he must get out,
he must, he must get out; yes, but how?

The singing began again. The men kept calling out “Lulu! Lulu!” and
a lady’s gay voice would reply to a Charley or a George, and so on,
when all at once there came a peremptory knock at the outer door.
The noise within stopped immediately. Deep silence. Simpkins could
hear whispering. The people in there were startled; he could almost
feel them staring at each other with uneasiness. The lady laughed out
startlingly shrill. “Sh-s-s-sh!” the others cried. The loud knocking
began again, emphatic, terrible. Simpkins’ already quaking heart began
to beat ecstatically. Why, oh why, didn’t they open that door?—open it!
open it! There was shuffling in the room, and when the knocking was
repeated for the third time the outer door was apparently unlocked.

“Fazz! Oh, Fazz, you brute!” cried the relieved voices in the room.
“You fool, Fazz! Come in, damn you, and shut the door.”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the apparently deliberating Fazz, “what is
that?”

“Hullo, Rob Roy!” cried the lady, “it’s me.”

“Charmed to meet you, madame. How interesting, most fascinating; yes,
I am quite charmed, but I wish somebody would kindly give me the
loose end of it all. I’m suffering, as you see, dearies, and I don’t
understand all this, I’m quite out of my depth. The noise you’ve been
making is just crushing me.”

Several voices began to explain at once: “We captured her, Fazz,
yes—Rape of the Sabines, what!—from the Vaudeville. Had a rag,
glorious—corralled all the attendants and scene-shifters—rushed the
stage—we did! we did!—everybody chased somebody, and we chased Lulu—we
did! we did!”

“Oh, shut up, everybody!” cried out Fazz.

“Yes, listen,” cried the voice of Evans-Antrobus. “This is how it
happened: they chased the eight Sisters Victoria off the stage, and we
spied dear little Lulu—she was one of those eight Victorias—bolting
down a passage to the stage entrance. She fled into the street just
as she was—isn’t she a duck? There was a taxi standing there, and
Lulu, wise woman, jumped in—and we jumped in too. (We did! We did!)
‘Where for?’ says taximan. ‘Saviour’s College,’ say we, and here you
are—Lulu—what do you think of her?”

“Charming, utterly charming,” replied Fazz. “The details are most
clarifying; but how did you manage to usher her into the college?”

“My overcoat on,” explained one voice.

“And my hat,” cried another.

“And we dazzled the porter,” said a third. There were lots of other
jolly things to explain: Lulu had not resisted at all, she had enjoyed
it; it was a lark!

“Oh, beautiful! Most fascinating!” agreed Fazz. “But how you propose
to get her out of the college I have no more notion than Satan has of
sanctity—it’s rather late, isn’t it?”

Simpkins, in his dark room, could hear someone rushing up the stairs
with flying leaps that ceased at the outer door. Then a breathless
voice hissed out: “You fellows, scat, scat! Police are in the lodge
with the proctors and that taximan!”

In a moment Evans-Antrobus began to groan. “Oh, my God, what can we
do with her? We must get her out at once—over the wall, eh, at once,
quick! Johnstone, quick, go and find a rope, quick, a rope.”

And Fazz said: “It does begin to look a little foolish. Oh, I am
feeling so damn bad—but you can’t blame a fool for anything it does,
can you? But I am bad; I am going to bed instantly, I feel quite out of
my depth here. Oh, that young friend of yours, that Simpkins, charming
young person! Very blithe he was, dear Evans-Antrobus!”

Everybody now seemed to rush away from the room except the girl Lulu
and Evans-Antrobus. He was evidently very agitated and in a bad humour.
He clumped about the room exclaiming, “Oh, damnation, do hurry up,
somebody. What am I to do with her, boozy little pig! Do hurry up!”

“Who’s a pig? I want to go out of here,” shrilled Lulu, and apparently
she made for the door.

“You can’t go like that!” he cried; “you can’t, you mustn’t. Don’t be a
fool, Lulu! Lulu! Now, isn’t this a fearful mess?”

“I’m not going to stop here with you, ugly thing! I don’t like it; I’m
going now, let go.”

“But you can’t go, I tell you, in these things, not like that. Let me
think, let me think, can’t you! Why don’t you let me think, you little
fool! Put something on you, my overcoat; cover yourself up. I shall be
ruined, damn you! Why the devil did you come here, you ...!”

“And who brought me here, Mr. Antibus? Oh yes, I know you; I shall
have something to say to the vicar, or whoever it is you’re afraid of,
baby-face! Let me go; I don’t want to be left here alone with you!” she
yelled. Simpkins heard an awful scuffle. He could wait no longer; he
flung open the door, rushed into the room, and caught up a syphon, the
first handy weapon. They saw him at once, and stood apart amazed.

“Fine game!” said the trembling Simpkins to the man, with all
the sternness at his command. As nobody spoke he repeated, quite
contemptuously: “Fine game!”

Lulu was breathing hard, with her hands resting upon her bosom. Her
appearance was so startling to the boy that he nearly dropped the
syphon. He continued to face her, hugging it with both hands against
his body. She was clad in pink tights—they were of silk, they glistened
in the sharper light from under the violet shade—a soft white tarlatan
skirt that spread around her like a carnation, and a rose-coloured
bodice. She was dainty, with a little round head and a little round
face like a briar rose; but he guessed she was strong, though her
beauty had apparently all the fragility of a flower. Her hair, of dull
dark gold, hung in loose tidiness without pin or braid, the locks cut
short to her neck, where they curved in to brush the white skin; a deep
straight fringe of it was combed upon the childish brow. Grey were her
surprised eyes, and wide the pouting lips. Her lovely naked arms—oh, he
could scarcely bear to look at them. She stood now, with one hand upon
her hip and the other lying against her cheek, staring at Simpkins.
Then she danced delightfully up to him and took the syphon away.

“Look here,” said Evans-Antrobus to Lulu—he had recovered his
nerve, and did not express any astonishment at Simpkins’ sudden
appearance—“he is just your size, you dress up in his clothes, quick,
then it’s simple.”

“No,” said the girl.

“And no for me,” said Simpkins fiercely—almost.

Just then the door was thrust partly open and a rope was flung into the
room. The bringer of it darted away downstairs again.

“Hi! here!” called Evans-Antrobus, rushing to the door; but nobody
stayed for him, nobody answered him. He came back and picked up the
rope.

“Put on that coat,” he commanded Lulu, “and that hat. Now, look here,
not a word, not a giggle even, or we are done, and I might just as well
screw your blessed neck!”

“Would you?” snorted Simpkins, with not a little animosity.

“Yes, would you!” chimed Lulu, but nevertheless she obeyed and followed
him down the stairs. When she turned and beckoned, Simpkins followed
too. They crossed a dark quadrangle, passed down a passage that was
utter darkness, through another quad, another passage, and halted in a
gloomy yard behind the chapel, where Evans-Antrobus struck a match, and
where empty boxes, bottles, and other rubbish had accumulated under a
wall about ten feet high.

“You first, and quiet, quiet,” growled Evans-Antrobus to Simpkins. No
one spoke again. Night was thickly dark, the stars were dim, the air
moist and chill. Simpkins, assisted by the other man, clambered over
rickety boxes and straddled the high thick wall. The rope was hungover,
too, and when the big man had jumped to earth again, dragging his
weight against it, Simpkins slid down on the other side. He was now
in a narrow street, with a dim lamp at one end that cast no gleam to
the spot where he had descended. There were dark high-browed buildings
looming high around him. He stood holding the end of the rope and
looking up at the stars—very faint they were. The wall was much higher
on this side, looked like a mountain, and he thought of Ben Nevis
again. This was out of your depth, if you like, out of your depth
entirely. It was all wrong somehow, or, at any rate, it was not all
right; it couldn’t be right. Never again would he mess about with a lot
of lunatics. He hadn’t done any good, he hadn’t even got the money—he
had forgotten it. He had not got anything at all except a headache.

The rope tightened. Lulu was astride the wall, quarrelling with the man
on the other side.

“Keep your rotten coat!” She slipped it off and flung it down from the
wall. “And your rotten hat, too, spider-face!” She flung that down from
the wall, and spat into the darkness. Turning to the other side, she
whispered: “I’m coming,” and scrambled down, sliding into Simpkins’
arms. And somehow he stood holding her so, embracing her quite tightly.
She was all softness and perfume, he could not let her go; she had
scarcely anything on—he would not let her go. It was marvellous and
beautiful to him; the glimmer of her white face was mysterious and
tender in the darkness. She put her arms around his neck:

“Oh ... I rather love you,” she said.




                            _Simple Simon_


This simple man lived lonely in a hut in the depths of a forest, just
underneath three hovering trees, a pine tree and two beeches. The sun
never was clear in the forest, but the fogs that rose in its unshaken
shade were neither sweet nor sour. Lonely was Simon, for he had given
up all the sweet of the world and had received none of the sweet of
heaven. Old now, and his house falling to ruin, he said he would go
seek the sweet of heaven, for what was there in the mortal world to
detain him? Not peace, certainly, for time growled and scratched at him
like a mangy dog, and there were no memories to cherish; he had had a
heavy father, a mother who was light, and never a lay-by who had not
deceived him. So he went in his tatters and his simplicity to the lord
of the manor.

“I’m bound for heaven, sir,” says Simon, “will you give me an old coat,
or an odd rag or so? There’s a hole in my shoe, sir, and good fortune
slips out of it.”

No—the lord of the manor said—he could not give him a decent suit, nor
a shoe, nor the rags neither. Had he not let him dwell all life long in
his forest? With not a finger of rent coming? Snaring the conies—(May
your tongue never vex you, sir!)—and devouring the birds—(May God see
me, sir!)—and cutting the fuel, snug as a bee in a big white hive.
(Never a snooze of sleep, with the wind howling in the latch of it and
the cracks gaping, sir!) What with the taxes and the ways of women—said
the lord—he had but a scrimping time of it himself, so he had. There
was neither malt in the kiln nor meal in the hopper, and there were
thieves in the parish. Indeed, he would as lief go with Simon, but it
was such a diggins of a way off.

So Simon went walking on until he came to the godly man who lived in
a blessed mansion, full of delights for the mind and eye as well as a
deal of comfort for his belly.

No—the godly man said—he would not give him anything, for the Lord took
no shame of a man’s covering.

“Ah, but your holiness,” said Simon, “I’ve a care to look decent when I
go to the King of All.”

“My poor man, how will you get there, my poor man?” he said.

“Maybe,” says Simon, “I’ll get a lift on my way.”

“You’ll get no lift,” the godly man said, “for it’s a hard and lonely
road to travel.”

“My sorrow! And I heard it was a good place to go to!”

“It is a good place, my simple man, but the road to it is difficult and
empty and hard. You will get no lift, you will lose your way, you will
be taken with a sickness.”

“Ah, and I heard it was a good kind road, and help in the end of it and
warmth and a snap of victuals.”

“No doubt, no doubt, but I tell you, don’t be setting yourself up for
to judge of it. Go back to your home and be at peace with the world.”

“Mine’s all walk-on,” said Simon, and turning away he looked towards
his home. Distant or near there was nothing he could see but trees, not
a glint of sea, and little of sky, and nothing of a hill or the roof
of a friendly house—just a trap of trees as close as a large hand held
before a large face, beeches and beeches, pines and pines. And buried
in the middle of it was a tiny hut, sour and broken; in the time of
storms the downpour would try to dash it into the ground, and the wind
would try to tear it out. Well, he had had his enough of it, so he went
to another man, a scholar for learning, and told him his intentions and
his wishes.

“To heaven!” said the scholar. “Well, it’s a fair day for that
good-looking journey.”

“It is indeed a fine day,” said Simon. As clear as crystal it was, yet
soft and mellow as snuff.

“Then content you, man Simon, and stay in it.”

“Ah, sir,” he says, “I’ve a mind and a will that makes me serve them.”

“Cats will mouse and larks will sing,” the scholar said, “but you are
neither the one nor the other. What you seek is hidden, perhaps hidden
for ever; God remove discontent and greed from the world: why should
you look on the other side of a wall—what is a wall for?”

The old man was silent.

“How long has this notion possessed you?”

The old man quavered “Since ... since ...” but he could say no more. A
green bird flew laughing above them.

“What bird is that—what is it making that noise for?”

“It is a woodpecker, sir; he knows he can sing a song for Sixpence.”

The scholar stood looking up into the sky. His boots were old—well,
that is the doom of all boots, just as it is of man. His clothes were
out of fashion, so was his knowledge; stripped of his gentle dignity he
was but dust and ashes.

“To travel from the world?” he was saying. “That is not wise.”

“Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half
done—like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t
know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then
there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving
your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before
you’re anything but a fool.”

“He is not a fool who is happy; mortal pleasures decline as the bubble
of knowledge grows; that’s the long of it, and it’s the short of it
too.”

Simon was silent, adding up the buttons on the scholar’s tidy coat. He
counted five of them, they shone like gold and looked—oh, very well
they looked.

“I was happy once,” then he said. “Ah, and I remember I was happy
twice, yes, and three times I was happy in this world. I was not happy
since....”

“Yes, since what?” the scholar asked him: but the old man was dumb.

“Tell me, Simon, what made you happy.”

“I was happy, sir, when I first dwelled in the wood and made with my
own hands a house of boards. Why—you’d not believe—but it had a chimney
then, and was no ways draughty then, and was not creaky then, nor
damp then; a good fine house with a door and a half door, birds about
it, magpies and tits and fine boy blackbirds! A lake with a score of
mallards on it! And for conies and cushats you could take your oath of
a meal any day in the week, and twice a day, any day. But ’tis falling
with age and weather now, I see it go; the rain wears it, the moss rots
it, the wind shatters it. The lake’s as dry as a hen’s foot, and the
forest changes. What was bushes is timber now, and what was timber is
ashes; the forest has spread around me and the birds have left me and
gone to the border. As for conies, there’s no contriving with those
foxes and weasels so cunning at them; not the trace of a tail, sir,
nothing but snakes and snails now. I was happy when I built that house;
that’s what I was; I was then.”

“Ah, so, indeed. And the other times—the second time?”

“Why, that was the time I washed my feet in the lake and I saw....”

“What, man Simon, what did you see?”

Simon passed his hand across his brow. “I see ... ah, well, I saw it. I
saw something ... but I forget.”

“Ah, you have forgotten your happiness,” said the scholar in a soft
voice: “Yes, yes.” He went on speaking to himself: “Death is a naked
Ethiope with flaming hair. I don’t want to live for ever, but I want to
live.”

He took off his coat and gave it to Simon, who thanked him and put it
on. It seemed a very heavy coat.

“Maybe,” the old man mumbled, “I’ll get a lift on the way.”

“May it be so. And good-bye to you,” said the scholar, “’Tis as fine a
day as ever came out of Eden.”

They parted so, and old Simon had not been gone an hour when the
scholar gave a great shout and followed after him frantic, but he could
not come up with him, for Simon had gone up in a lift to heaven—a lift
with cushions in it, and a bright young girl guiding the lift, dressed
like a lad, but with a sad stern voice.

Several people got into the lift, the most of them old ladies, but no
children, so Simon got in too and sat on a cushion of yellow velvet.
And he was near sleeping when the lift stopped of a sudden and a lady
who was taken sick got out. “Drugs and lounge!” the girl called out,
“Second to the right and keep straight on. Going up?”

But though there was a crowd of young people waiting nobody else got
in. They slid on again, higher and much higher. Simon dropped into
sleep until the girl stopped at the fourth floor: “Refreshments,” she
said, “and Ladies’ Cloak Room!” All the passengers got out except
Simon: he sat still until they came to the floor of heaven. There he
got out, and the girl waved her hand to him and said “Good-bye.” A few
people got in the lift. “Going down?” she cried. Then she slammed the
door and it sank into a hole and Simon never laid an eye on it or her
from that day for ever.

Now it was very pleasant where he found himself, very pleasant indeed
and in no ways different from the fine parts of the earth. He went
onwards and the first place he did come to was a farmhouse with a
kitchen door. He knocked and it was opened. It was a large kitchen; it
had a cracked stone floor and white rafters above it with hooks on them
and shearing irons and a saddle. And there was a smoking hearth and an
open oven with bright charred wood burning in it, a dairy shelf beyond
with pans of cream, a bed of bracken for a dog in the corner by the
pump, and a pet sheep wandering about. It had the number 100 painted
on its fleece and a loud bell was tinkling round its neck. There was a
fine young girl stood smiling at him; the plait of her hair was thick
as a rope of onions and as shining with the glint in it. Simon said to
her: “I’ve been a-walking, and I seem to have got a bit dampified like,
just a touch o’ damp in the knees of my breeches, that’s all.”

The girl pointed to the fire and he went and dried himself. Then he
asked the girl if she would give him a true direction, and so she gave
him a true direction and on he went. And he had not gone far when he
saw a place just like the old forest he had come from, but all was
delightful and sunny, and there was the house he had once built, as
beautiful and new, with the shining varnish on the door, a pool beyond,
faggots and logs in the yard, and inside the white shelves were loaded
with good food, the fire burning with a sweet smell, and a bed of rest
in the ingle. Soon he was slaking his hunger; then he hung up his coat
on a peg of iron, and creeping into the bed he went into the long sleep
in his old happy way of sleeping.

But all this time the scholar was following after him, searching
under the sun, and from here to there, calling out high and low, and
questioning the travelling people: had they seen a simple man, an old
man who had been but three times happy?—but not a one had seen him.
He was cut to the heart with anxiety, with remorse, and with sorrow,
for in a secret pocket of the coat he had given to Simon he had
left—unbeknown, but he remembered it now—a wallet of sowskin, full of
his own black sins, and nothing to distinguish them in any way from
any other man’s. It was a dark load upon his soul that the poor man
might be punished with an everlasting punishment for having such a
tangle of wickedness on him and he unable to explain it. An old man
like that, who had been happy but the three times! He enquired upon
his right hand, and upon his left hand he enquired, but not a walking
creature had seen him and the scholar was mad vexed with shame. Well,
he went on, and on he went, but he did not get a lift on the way. He
went howling and whistling like a man who would frighten all the wild
creatures down into the earth, and at last he came by a back way to
the borders of heaven. There he was, all of a day behind the man he
was pursuing, in a great wilderness of trees. It began to rain, a soft
meandering fall that you would hardly notice for rain, but the birds
gave over their whistling and a strong silence grew everywhere, hushing
things. His footfall as he stumbled through briars and the wild gardens
of the wood seemed to thump the whole earth, and he could hear all the
small noises like the tick of a beetle and the gasping of worms. In
a grove of raspberry canes he stood like a stock with the wonder of
that stillness. Clouds did not move, he could but feel the rain that
he could not see. Each leaf hung stiff as if it was frozen, though it
was summer. Not a living thing was to be seen, and the things that were
not living were not more dead than those that lived but were so secret
still. He picked a few berries from the canes, and from every bush as
he pulled and shook it a butterfly or a moth dropped or fluttered away,
quiet and most ghostly. “An old bit of a man”—he kept repeating in his
mind—“with three bits of joy, an old bit of a man.”

Suddenly a turtle dove with clatter enough for a goose came to a tree
beside him and spoke to him! A young dove, and it crooed on the tree
branch, croo, croo, croo, and after each cadence it heaved the air into
its lungs again with a tiny sob. Well, it would be no good telling what
the bird said to the scholar, for none would believe it, they could
not; but speak it did. After that the scholar tramped on, and on again,
until he heard voices close ahead from a group of frisky boys who were
chasing a small bird that could hardly fly. As the scholar came up
with them one of the boys dashed out with his cap and fell upon the
fledgling and thrust it in his pocket.

Now, by God, that scholar was angry, for a thing he liked was the notes
of birds tossed from bush to bush like aery bubbles, and he wrangled
with the boy until the little lad took the crumpled bird out of his
pocket and flung it saucily in the air as you would fling a stone. Down
dropped the bird into a gulley as if it was shot, and the boys fled
off. The scholar peered into the gulley, but he could not see the young
finch, not a feather of it. Then he jumped into the gulley and stood
quiet, listening to hear it cheep, for sure a wing would be broken,
or a foot. But nothing could he see, nothing, though he could hear
hundreds of grasshoppers leaping among the dead leaves with a noise
like pattering rain. So he turned away, but as he shifted his foot he
saw beneath it the shattered bird: he had jumped upon it himself and
destroyed it. He could not pick it up, it was bloody; he leaned over
it, sighing: “Poor bird, poor bird, and is this your road to heaven? Or
do you never share the heaven that you make?” There was a little noise
then added to the leaping of the grasshoppers—it was the patter of
tears he was shedding from himself. Well, when the scholar heard that
he gave a good shout of laughter, and he was soon contented, forgetting
the bird. He was for sitting down awhile but the thought of the old man
Simon, with that sinful wallet—a rare budget of his own mad joys—urged
him on till he came by the end of the wood, the rain ceasing, and
beyond him the harmony of a flock roaming and bleating. Every ewe of
the flock had numbers painted on it, that ran all the way up to ninety
and nine.

Soon he came to the farmhouse and the kitchen and the odd sheep and a
kind girl with a knot of hair as thick as a twist of bread. He told her
the thing that was upon his conscience.

“Help me to come up with him, for I’m a day to the bad, and what shall
I do? I gave him a coat, an old coat, and all my sins were hidden in
it, but I’d forgotten them. He was an old quavering man with but three
spells of happiness in the earthly world.” He begged her to direct
him to the man Simon. The smiling girl gave him a good direction, the
joyful scholar hurried out and on, and in a score of minutes he was
peeping in the fine hut, with his hand on the latch of the half door,
and Simon snoring in bed, a quiet decent snore.

“Simon!” he calls, but he didn’t wake. He shook him, but he didn’t
budge. There was the coat hanging down from the iron peg, so he went
to it and searched it and took out the wallet. But when he opened it—a
black sowskin wallet it was, very strong with good straps—his sins were
all escaped from it, not one little sin left in the least chink of the
wallet, it was empty as a drum. The scholar knew something was wrong,
for it was full once, and quite full.

“Well, now,” thought he, scratching his head and searching his mind,
“did I make a mistake of it? Would they be by chance in the very coat
that is on me now, for I’ve not another coat to my name?” He gave it
a good strong search, in the patch pockets and the inside pockets and
in the purse on his belt, but there was not the scrap of a tail of a
sin of any sort, good or bad, in that coat, and all he found was a few
cachous against the roughening of his voice.

“Did I make another mistake of it,” he says again, “and put those
solemn sins in the fob of my fancy waistcoat? Where are they?” he
shouts out.

Simon lifted his head out of sleeping for a moment. “It was that girl
with the hair,” Simon said. “She took them from the wallet—they are not
allowed in this place—and threw them in the pigwash.”

With that he was asleep again, snoring his decent snore.

“Glory be to God,” said the scholar, “am I not a great fool to have
come to heaven looking for my sins!”

He took the empty wallet and tiptoed back to the world, and if he
is not with the saints yet, it is with the saints he will be one
day—barring he gets another budget of sins in his eager joy. And _that_
I wouldn’t deny him.




                              _The Tiger_


The tiger was coming at last; the almost fabulous beast, the subject of
so much conjecture for so many months, was at the docks twenty miles
away. Yak Pedersen had gone to fetch it, and Barnabe Woolf’s Menagerie
was about to complete its unrivalled collection by the addition of a
full-grown Indian tiger of indescribable ferocity, newly trapped in
the forest and now for the first time exhibited, and so on, and so on.
All of which, as it happened, was true. On the previous day Pedersen
the Dane and some helpers had taken a brand new four-horse exhibition
waggon, painted and carved with extremely legendary tigers lapped in
blood—even the bars were gilded—to convey this unmatchable beast to its
new masters. The show had had to wait a long time for a tiger, but it
had got a beauty at last, a terror indeed by all accounts, though it is
not to be imagined that everything recorded of it by Barnabe Woolf was
truth and nothing but truth. Showmen do not work in that way.

Yak Pedersen was the tamer and menagerie manager, a tall, blonde,
angular man about thirty-five, of dissolute and savage blood himself,
with the very ample kind of moustache that bald men often develop;
yes, bald, intemperate, lewd, and an interminable smoker of Cuban
cigarettes, which seemed constantly to threaten a conflagration in
that moustache. Marie the Cossack hated him, but Yak loved her with a
fierce deep passion. Nobody knew why she was called Marie the Cossack.
She came from Canning Town—everybody knew that, and her proper name
was Fascota, Mrs. Fascota, wife of Jimmy Fascota, who was the architect
and carpenter and builder of the show. Jimmy was not much to look at,
so little in fact that you couldn’t help wondering what it was Marie
had seen in him when she could have had the King of Poland, as you
might say, almost for the asking. But still Jimmy was the boss ganger
of the show, and even that young gentleman in frock coat and silk hat
who paraded the platform entrance to the arena and rhodomontadoed you
into it, often against your will, by the seductive recital of the seven
ghastly wonders of the world, all certainly to be seen, to be seen
inside, waiting to be seen, must be seen, roll up—even he was subject
to the commands of Jimmy Fascota when the time came to dismantle and
pack up the show, although the transfer of his activities involved
him temporarily in a change, a horrid change, of attire and language.
Marie was not a lady, but she was not for Pedersen anyway. She swore
like a factory foreman, or a young soldier, and when she got tipsy she
was full of freedoms. By the power of God she was beautiful, and by
the same gracious power she was virtuous. Her husband knew it; he knew
all about master Pedersen’s passion, too, and it did not even interest
him. Marie did feats in the lion cages, whipping poor decrepit beasts,
desiccated by captivity, through a hoop or over a stick of wood and
other kindergarten disportings; but there you are, people must live,
and Marie lived that way. Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he
was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him
he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice
would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too
deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off
with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.

“God Almighty!” he would groan, “she is not good for me, this Marie.
What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could
not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some
day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.”

So you see the man really loved her.

When Pedersen returned from the docks the car with its captive was
dragged to a vacant place in the arena, and the wooden front panel was
let down from the bars. The marvellous tiger was revealed. It sprung
into a crouching attitude as the light surprised the appalling beauty
of its smooth fox-coloured coat, its ebony stripes, and snowy pads and
belly. The Dane, who was slightly drunk, uttered a yell and struck the
bars of the cage with his whip. The tiger did not blench, but all the
malice and ferocity in the world seemed to congregate in its eyes and
impress with a pride and ruthless grandeur the colossal brutality of
its face. It did not move its body, but its tail gradually stiffened
out behind it as stealthily as fire moves in the forest undergrowth,
and the hair along the ridge of its back rose in fearful spikes. There
was the slightest possible distension of the lips, and it fixed its
marvellous baleful gaze upon Pedersen. The show people were hushed
into silence, and even Pedersen was startled. He showered a few howls
and curses at the tiger, who never ceased to fix him with eyes that
had something of contempt in them and something of a horrible presage.
Pedersen was thrusting a sharp spike through the bars when a figure
stepped from the crowd. It was an old negro, a hunchback with a white
beard, dressed in a red fez cap, long tunic of buff cotton, and blue
trousers. He laid both his hands on the spike and shook his head
deprecatingly, smiling all the while. He said nothing, but there was
nothing he could say—he was dumb.

“Let him alone, Yak; let the tiger alone, Yak!” cried Barnabe Woolf.
“What is this feller?”

Pedersen with some reluctance turned from the cage and said: “He is
come with the animal.”

“So?” said Barnabe. “Vell, he can go. Ve do not vant any black feller.”

“He cannot speak—no tongue—it is gone,” Yak replied.

“No tongue! Vot, have they cut him out?”

“I should think it,” said the tamer. “There was two of them, a white
keeper, but that man fell off the ship one night and they do not see
him any more. This chap he feed it and look after it. No information
of him, dumb you see, and a foreigner; don’t understand. He have no
letters, no money, no name, nowheres to go. Dumb, you see, he has
nothing, nothing but a flote. The captain said to take him away with
us. Give a job to him, he is a proposition.”

“Vot is he got you say?”

“Flote.” Pedersen imitated with his fingers and lips the actions of a
flute-player.

“O ya, a vloot! Vell, ve don’t want no vloots now; ve feeds our own
tigers, don’t ve, Yak?” And Mr. Woolf, oily but hearty—and well
he might be so for he was beautifully rotund, hair like satin,
extravagantly clothed, and rich with jewellery—surveyed first with
a contemplative grin, and then compassionately, the figure of the
old negro, who stood unsmiling with his hands crossed humbly before
him. Mr. Woolf was usually perspiring, and usually being addressed by
perspiring workmen, upon whom he bellowed orders and such anathemas as
reduced each recipient to the importance of a potato, and gave him the
aspect of a consumptive sheep. But to-day Mr. Woolf was affable and
calm. He took his cigar from his mouth and poured a flood of rich grey
air from his lips. “O ya, look after him a day, or a couple of days.”
At that one of the boys began to lead the hunchback away as if he were
a horse. “Come on, Pompoon,” he cried, and thenceforward the unknown
negro was called by that name.

Throughout the day the tiger was the sensation of the show, and
the record of its ferocity attached to the cage received thrilling
confirmation whenever Pedersen appeared before the bars. The sublime
concentration of hatred was so intense that children screamed, women
shuddered, and even men held their breath in awe. At the end of the
day the beasts were fed. Great hacks of bloody flesh were forked into
the bottoms of the cages, the hungry victims pouncing and snarling in
ecstasy. But no sooner were they served than the front panel of each
cage was swung up, and the inmate in the seclusion of his den slaked
his appetite and slept. When the public had departed the lights were
put out and the doors of the arena closed. Outside in the darkness
only its great rounded oblong shape could be discerned, built high
of painted wood, roofed with striped canvas, and adorned with flags.
Beyond this matchbox coliseum was a row of caravans, tents, naphtha
flares, and buckets of fire on which suppers were cooking. Groups of
the show people sat or lounged about, talking, cackling with laughter,
and even singing. No one observed the figure of Pompoon as he passed
silently on the grass. The outcast, doubly chained to his solitariness
by the misfortune of dumbness and strange nationality, was hungry. He
had not tasted food that day. He could not understand it any more than
he could understand the speech of these people. In the end caravan,
nearest the arena, he heard a woman quietly singing. He drew a shining
metal flute from his breast, but stood silently until the singer
ceased. Then he repeated the tune very accurately and sweetly on his
flute. Marie the Cossack came to the door in her green silk tights
and high black boots with gilded fringes; her black velvet doublet
had plenty of gilded buttons upon it. She was a big, finely moulded
woman, her dark and splendid features were burned healthily by the
sun. In each of her ears two gold discs tinkled and gleamed as she
moved. Pompoon opened his mouth very widely and supplicatingly; he
put his hand upon his stomach and rolled his eyes so dreadfully that
Mrs. Fascota sent her little daughter Sophy down to him with a basin
of soup and potatoes. Sophy was partly undressed, in bare feet and red
petticoat. She stood gnawing the bone of a chicken, and grinning at
the black man as he swallowed and dribbled as best he could without
a spoon. She cried out: “Here, he’s going to eat the bloody basin
and all, mum!” Her mother cheerfully ordered her to “give him those
fraggiments, then!” The child did so, pausing now and again to laugh
at the satisfied roll of the old man’s eyes. Later on Jimmy Fascota
found him a couple of sacks, and Pompoon slept upon them beneath
their caravan. The last thing the old man saw was Pedersen, carrying
a naphtha flare, unlocking a small door leading into the arena, and
closing it with a slam after he had entered. Soon the light went out.


II

After a week the show shifted and Pompoon accompanied it. Mrs.
Kavanagh, who looked after the birds, was, a little fortunately
for him, kicked in the stomach by a mule and had to be left at an
infirmary. Pompoon, who seemed to understand birds, took charge of the
parakeets, love birds, and other highly coloured fowl, including the
quetzal with green mossy head, pink breast, and flowing tails, and the
primrose-breasted toucans with bills like a butcher’s cleaver.

The show was always moving on and moving on. Putting it up and taking
it down was a more entertaining affair than the exhibition itself.
With Jimmy Fascota in charge, and the young man of the frock coat in
an ecstasy of labour, half-clothed husky men swarmed up the rigged
frameworks, dismantling poles, planks, floors, ropes, roofs, staging,
tearing at bolts and bars, walking at dizzying altitudes on narrow
boards, swearing at their mates, staggering under vast burdens,
sweating till they looked like seals, packing and disposing incredibly
of it all, furling the flags, rolling up the filthy awnings, then Right
O! for a market town twenty miles away.

In the autumn the show would be due at a great gala town in the
north, the supreme opportunity of the year, and by that time Mr.
Woolf expected to have a startling headline about a new tiger act
and the intrepid tamer. But somehow Pedersen could make no progress
at all with this. Week after week went by, and the longer he left
that initial entry into the cage of the tiger, notwithstanding
the comforting support of firearms and hot irons, the more remote
appeared the possibility of its capitulation. The tiger’s hatred
did not manifest itself in roars and gnashing of teeth, but by its
rigid implacable pose and a slight flexion of its protruded claws. It
seemed as if endowed with an imagination of blood-lust, Pedersen being
the deepest conceivable excitation of this. Week after week went by
and the show people became aware that Pedersen, their Pedersen, the
unrivalled, the dauntless tamer, had met his match. They were proud of
the beast. Some said it was Yak’s bald crown that the tiger disliked,
but Marie swore it was his moustache, a really remarkable piece of
hirsute furniture, that he would not have parted with for a pound of
gold—so he said. But whatever it was—crown, moustache, or the whole
conglomerate Pedersen—the tiger remarkably loathed it and displayed
his loathing, while the unfortunate tamer had no more success with
it than he had ever had with Marie the Cossack, though there was at
least a good humour in her treatment of him which was horribly absent
from the attitude of the beast. For a long time Pedersen blamed the
hunchback for it all. He tried to elicit from him by gesticulations
in front of the cage the secret of the creature’s enmity, but the
barriers to their intercourse were too great to be overcome, and to
all Pedersen’s illustrative frenzies Pompoon would only shake his sad
head and roll his great eyes until the Dane would cuff him away with
a curse of disgust and turn to find the eyes of the tiger, the dusky,
smooth-skinned tiger with bitter bars of ebony, fixed upon him with
tenfold malignity. How he longed in his raging impotence to transfix
the thing with a sharp spear through the cage’s gilded bars, or to
bore a hole into its vitals with a red-hot iron! All the traditional
treatment in such cases, combined first with starvation and then
with rich feeding, proved unavailing. Pedersen always had the front
flap of the cage left down at night so that he might, as he thought,
establish some kind of working arrangement between them by the force of
propinquity. He tried to sleep on a bench just outside the cage, but
the horror of the beast so penetrated him that he had to turn his back
upon it. Even then the intense enmity pierced the back of his brain
and forced him to seek a bench elsewhere out of range of the tiger’s
vision.

Meanwhile, the derision of Marie was not concealed—it was even
blatant—and to the old contest of love between herself and the Dane
was now added a new contest of personal courage, for it had come to
be assumed, in some undeclarable fashion, that if Yak Pedersen could
not tame that tiger, then Marie the Cossack would. As this situation
crystallized daily the passion of Pedersen changed to jealousy and
hatred. He began to regard the smiling Marie in much the same way as
the tiger regarded him.

“The hell-devil! May some lightning scorch her like a toasted fish!”

But in a short while this mood was displaced by one of anxiety; he
became even abject. Then, strangely enough, Marie’s feelings underwent
some modification. She was proud of the chance to subdue and defeat
him, but it might be at a great price—too great a price for her.
Addressing herself in turn to the dim understanding of Pompoon she had
come to perceive that he believed the tiger to be not merely quite
untamable, but full of mysterious dangers. She could not triumph
over the Dane unless she ran the risk he feared to run. The risk was
colossal then, and with her realization of this some pity for Yak began
to exercise itself in her; after all, were they not in the same boat?
But the more she sympathized the more she jeered. The thing had to be
done somehow.

Meanwhile Barnabe Woolf wants that headline for the big autumn show,
and a failure will mean a nasty interview with that gentleman. It
may end by Barnabe kicking Yak Pedersen out of his wild beast show.
Not that Mr. Woolf is so gross as to suggest that. He senses the
difficulty, although his manager in his pride will not confess to any.
Mr. Woolf declares that his tiger is a new tiger; Yak must watch out
for him, be careful. He talks as if it were just a question of giving
the cage a coat of whitewash. He never hints at contingencies; but
still, there is his new untamed tiger, and there is Mr. Yak Pedersen,
his wild beast tamer—at present.


III

One day the menagerie did not open. It had finished an engagement, and
Jimmy Fascota had gone off to another town to arrange the new pitch.
The show folk made holiday about the camp, or flocked into the town for
marketing or carousals. Mrs. Fascota was alone in her caravan, clothed
in her jauntiest attire. She was preparing to go into the town when
Pedersen suddenly came silently in and sat down.

“Marie,” he said, after a few moments, “I give up that tiger. To me he
has given a spell. It is like a mesmerize.” He dropped his hands upon
his knees in complete humiliation. Marie did not speak, so he asked:
“What you think?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and put her brown arms akimbo. She was a
grand figure so, in a cloak of black satin and a huge hat trimmed with
crimson feathers.

“If _you_ can’t trust him,” she said, “who can?”

“It is myself I am not to trust. Shameful! But that tiger will do me,
yes, so I will not conquer him. It’s bad, very, very bad, is it not so?
Shameful, but I will not do it!” he declared excitedly.

“What’s Barnabe say?”

“I do not care, Mr. Woolf can think what he can think! Damn Woolf! But
for what I do think of my own self.... Ah!” He paused for a moment,
dejected beyond speech. “Yes, miserable it is, in my own heart very
shameful, Marie. And what you think of me, yes, that too!”

There was a note in his voice that almost confounded her—why, the
man was going to cry! In a moment she was all melting compassion and
bravado.

“You leave the devil to me, Yak. What’s come over you, man? God love
us, I’ll tiger him!”

But the Dane had gone as far as he could go. He could admit his defeat,
but he could not welcome her all too ready amplification of it.

“Na, na, you are good for him, Marie, but you beware. He is not a
tiger; he is beyond everything, foul—he has got a foul heart and a
thousand demons in it. I would not bear to see you touch him; no, no, I
would not bear it!”

“Wait till I come back this afternoon—you wait!” cried Marie, lifting
her clenched fist. “So help me, I’ll tiger him, you’ll see!”

Pedersen suddenly awoke to her amazing attraction. He seized her in his
arms. “Na, na, Marie! God above! I will not have it.”

“Aw, shut up!” she commanded, impatiently, and pushing him from her
she sprang down the steps and proceeded to the town alone.

She did not return in the afternoon; she did not return in the evening;
she was not there when the camp closed up for the night. Sophy, alone,
was quite unconcerned. Pompoon sat outside the caravan, while the
flame of the last lamp was perishing weakly above his head. He now
wore a coat of shag-coloured velvet. He was old and looked very wise,
often shaking his head, not wearily, but as if in doubt. The flute lay
glittering upon his knees and he was wiping his lips with a green silk
handkerchief when barefoot Sophy in her red petticoat crept behind him,
unhooked the lamp, and left him in darkness. Then he departed to an old
tent the Fascotas had found for him.

When the mother returned the camp was asleep in its darkness and she
was very drunk. Yak Pedersen had got her. He carried her into the
arena, and bolted and barred the door.


IV

Marie Fascota awoke next morning in broad daylight; through chinks and
rents in the canvas roof of the arena the brightness was beautiful
to behold. She could hear a few early risers bawling outside, while
all around her the caged beasts and birds were squeaking, whistling,
growling, and snarling. She was lying beside the Dane on a great bundle
of straw. He was already awake when she became aware of him, watching
her with amused eyes.

“Yak Pedersen! Was I drunk?” Marie asked dazedly in low husky tones,
sitting up. “What’s this, Yak Pedersen? Was I drunk? Have I been here
all night?”

He lay with his hands behind his head, smiling in the dissolute
ugliness of his abrupt yellow skull so incongruously bald, his
moustache so profuse, his nostrils and ears teeming with hairs.

“Can’t you speak?” cried the wretched woman. “What game do you call
this? Where’s my Sophy, and my Jimmy—is he back?”

Again he did not answer; he stretched out a hand to caress her.
Unguarded as he was, Marie smashed down both her fists full upon his
face. He lunged back blindly at her and they both struggled to their
feet, his fingers clawing in her thick strands of hair as she struck
at him in frenzy. Down rolled the mass and he seized it; it was her
weakness, and she screamed. Marie was a rare woman—a match for most
men—but the capture of her hair gave her utterly into his powerful
hands. Uttering a torrent of filthy oaths, Pedersen pulled the yelling
woman backwards to him and grasping her neck with both hands gave a
murderous wrench and flung her to the ground. As she fell Marie’s hand
clutched a small cage of fortune-telling birds. She hurled this at the
man, but it missed him; the cage burst against a pillar and the birds
scattered in the air.

“Marie! Marie!” shouted Yak, “listen! listen!”

Remorsefully he flung himself before the raging woman who swept at him
with an axe, her hair streaming, her eyes blazing with the fire of a
thousand angers.

“Drunk, was I!” she screamed at him. “That’s how ye got me, Yak
Pedersen? Drunk, was I!”

He warded the blow with his arm, but the shock and pain of it was so
great that his own rage burst out again, and leaping at the woman he
struck her a horrible blow across the eyes. She sunk to her knees and
huddled there without a sound, holding her hands to her bleeding face,
her loose hair covering it like a net. At the pitiful sight the Dane’s
grief conquered him again, and bending over her imploringly he said:
“Marie, my love, Marie! Listen! It is not true! Swear me to God, good
woman, it is not true, it is not possible! Swear me to God!” he raged
distractedly. “Swear me to God!” Suddenly he stopped and gasped. They
were in front of the tiger’s cage, and Pedersen was as if transfixed by
that fearful gaze. The beast stood with hatred concentrated in every
bristling hair upon its hide, and in its eyes a malignity that was
almost incandescent. Still as a stone, Marie observed this, and began
to creep away from the Dane, stealthily, stealthily. On a sudden, with
incredible agility, she sprang up the steps of the tiger’s cage, tore
the pin from the catch, flung open the door, and, yelling in madness,
leapt in. As she did so, the cage emptied. In one moment she saw
Pedersen grovelling on his knees, stupid, and the next....

All the hidden beasts, stirred by instinctive knowledge of the tragedy,
roared and raged. Marie’s eyes and mind were opened to its horror. She
plugged her fingers into her ears; screamed; but her voice was a mere
wafer of sound in that pandemonium. She heard vast crashes of someone
smashing in the small door of the arena, and then swooned upon the
floor of the cage.

The bolts were torn from their sockets at last, the slip door swung
back, and in the opening appeared Pompoon, alone, old Pompoon, with a
flaming lamp and an iron spear. As he stepped forward into the gloom
he saw the tiger, dragging something in its mouth, leap back into its
cage.




                        _Mordecai and Cocking_


Two men sat one afternoon beside a spinney of beeches near the top
of a wild bare down. Old shepherd Mordecai was admonishing a younger
countryman, Eustace Cocking, now out of work, who held beside him in
leash a brindled whippet dog, sharp featured and lean, its neck clipped
in a broad leather collar. The day was radiant, the very air had bloom;
bright day is never so bright as upon these lonely downs, and the grim
face of storm never so tragic elsewhere. From the beeches other downs
ranged in every direction, nothing but downs in beautiful abandoned
masses. In a valley below the men a thousand sheep were grazing; they
looked no more than a handful of white beach randomly scattered.

“The thing’s forbidden, Eustace; it always has and always will be, I
say, and thereby ’tis wrong.”

“Well, if ever I doos anything wrong I allus feel glad of it next
morning.”

“’Tis against law, Eustace, and to be against law is the downfall of
mankind. What I mean to say—I’m a national man.”

“The law! Foo! That’s made by them as don’t care for my needs, and
don’t understand my rights. Is it fair to let them control your mind as
haven’t got a grip of their own? I worked for yon farmer a matter of
fourteen years, hard, I tell you, I let my back sweat....”

The dog at his side was restless; he cuffed it impatiently: “and twice
a week my wife she had to go to farmhouse; twice a week; doing up
their washing and their muck—‘Lie down!’” he interjected sternly to
the querulous dog—“two days in every seven. Then the missus says to
my wife, ‘I shall want you to come four days a week in future, Mrs.
Cocking; the house is too much of a burden for me.’ My wife says: ‘I
can’t come no oftener, ma’am; I’d not have time to look after my own
place, my husband, and the six children, ma’am.’ Then missus flew into
a passion. ‘Oh, so you won’t come, eh!’

“‘I’d come if I could, ma’am,’ my wife says, ‘and gladly, but it ain’t
possible, you see.’

“‘Oh, very well!’ says the missus. And that was the end of that, but
come Saturday, when the boss pays me: ‘Cocking,’ he says, ‘I shan’t
want you no more arter next week.’ No explanation, mind you, and I
never asked for none. I know’d what ’twas for, but I don’t give a dam.
What meanness, Mordecai! Of course I don’t give a dam whether I goes or
whether I stops; you know my meaning—I’d much rather stop; my home’s
where I be known; but I don’t give a dam. ’Tain’t the job I minds so
much as to let him have that power to spite me so at a moment after
fourteen years because of his wife’s temper. ’Tis not decent. ’Tis
under-grading a man.’”

There was no comment from the shepherd. Eustace continued: “If that’s
your law, Mordecai, I don’t want it. I ignores it.”

“And that you can’t do,” retorted the old man. “God A’mighty can look
after the law.”

“If He be willing to take the disgrace of it, Mordecai Stavely, let
Him.”

The men were silent for a long time, until the younger cheerfully
asked: “How be poor old Harry Mixen?”

“Just alive.”

Eustace leaned back, munching a strig of grass reflectively and looking
at the sky: “Don’t seem no sign of rain, however?”

“No.”

The old man who said “No” hung his melancholy head, and pondered; he
surveyed his boots, which were of harsh hard leather with deep soles.
He then said: “We ought to thank God we had such mild weather at the
back end of the year. If you remember, it came a beautiful autumn and
a softish winter. Things are growing now; I’ve seen oats as high as my
knee; the clover’s lodged in places. It will be all good if we escape
the east winds—hot days and frosty nights.”

The downs, huge and bare, stretched in every direction, green and grey,
gentle and steep, their vast confusion enlightened by a small hanger
of beech or pine, a pond, or more often a derelict barn; for among
the downs there are barns and garners ever empty, gone into disuse
and abandoned. They are built of flint and red brick, with a roof of
tiles. The rafters often bear an eighteenth-century date. Elsewhere in
this emptiness even a bush will have a name, and an old stone becomes
a track mark. Upon the soft tufts and among the triumphant furze live
a few despised birds, chats and finches and that blithe screamer the
lark, but above all, like veins upon the down’s broad breast, you may
perceive the run-way of the hare.

“Why can’t a man live like a hare?” broke out the younger man. “I’d not
mind being shot at a time and again. It lives a free life, anyway, not
like a working man with a devil on two legs always cracking him on.”

“Because,” said Mordecai, “a hare is a vegetarian creature, what’s
called a rubinant, chewing the cud and dividing not the hoof. And,” he
added significantly, “there be dogs.”

“It takes a mazin’ good dog to catch ever a hare on its own ground.
Most hares could chase any dog ever born, believe you me, if they liked
to try at that.”

“There be traps and wires!”

“Well, we’ve no call to rejoice, with the traps set for a man, and the
wires a choking him.”

At that moment two mating hares were roaming together on the upland
just below the men. The doe, a small fawn creature, crouched coyly
before the other, a large nut-brown hare with dark ears. Soon she
darted away, sweeping before him in a great circle, or twisting and
turning as easily as a snake. She seemed to fly the faster, but when
his muscular pride was aroused he swooped up to her shoulder, and,
as if in loving derision, leaped over her from side to side as she
ran. She stopped as sharply as a shot upon its target and faced him,
quizzing him gently with her nose. As they sat thus the dark-eared
one perceived not far off a squatting figure; it was another hare, a
tawny buck, eyeing their dalliance. The doe commenced to munch the
herbage; the nut-brown one hobbled off to confront this wretched, rash,
intruding fool. When they met both rose upon their haunches, clawing
and scraping and patting at each other with as little vigour as mild
children put into their quarrels—a rigmarole of slapping hands. But,
notwithstanding the delicacy of the treatment, the interloper, a meek
enough fellow, succumbed, and the conqueror loped back to his nibbling
mistress.

Yet, whenever they rested from their wooing flights, the tawny
interloper was still to be seen near by. Hapless mourning seemed
to involve his hunched figure; he had the aspect of a deferential,
grovelling man; but the lover saw only his provocative, envious eye—he
swept down upon him. Standing up again, he slammed and basted him with
puny velvet blows until he had salved his indignation, satisfied his
connubial pride, or perhaps merely some strange fading instinct—for it
seemed but a mock combat, a ritual to which they conformed.

Away the happy hare would prance to his mate, but as often as he came
round near that shameless spy he would pounce upon him and beat him to
the full, like a Turk or like a Russian. But though he could beat him
and disgrace him, he could neither daunt nor injure him. The vanquished
miscreant would remain watching their wooing with the eye of envy—or
perhaps of scorn—and hoping for a miracle to happen.

And a miracle did happen. Cocking, unseen, near the beeches released
his dog. The doe shot away over the curve of the hill and was gone.
She did not merely gallop, she seemed to pass into ideal flight,
the shadow of wind itself. Her fawn body, with half-cocked ears and
unperceivable convulsion of the leaping haunches, soared across the
land with the steady swiftness of a gull. The interloping hare, in a
blast of speed, followed hard upon her traces. But Cocking’s hound
had found at last the hare of its dreams, a nut-brown, dark-eared,
devil-guided, eluding creature, that fled over the turf of the hill
as lightly as a cloud. The long leaping dog swept in its track with a
stare of passion, following in great curves the flying thing that grew
into one great throb of fear all in the grand sunlight on the grand bit
of a hill. The lark stayed its little flood of joy and screamed with
notes of pity at the protracted flight; and bloodless indeed were they
who could view it unmoved, nor feel how sweet a thing is death if you
be hound, how fell a thing it is if you be hare. Too long, O delaying
death, for this little heart of wax; and too long, O delaying victory,
for that pursuer with the mouth of flame. Suddenly the hound faltered,
staggered a pace or two, then sunk to the grass, its lips dribbling
blood. When Cocking reached him the dog was dead. He picked the body up.

“It’s against me, like everything else,” he muttered.

But a voice was calling “Oi! Oi!” He turned to confront a figure
rapidly and menacingly approaching.

“I shall want you, Eustace Cocking,” cried the gamekeeper, “to come
and give an account o’ yourself.”




                       _The Man from Kilsheelan_


If you knew the Man from Kilsheelan it was no use saying you did not
believe in fairies and secret powers; believe it or no, but believe
it you should; there he was. It is true he was in an asylum for the
insane, but he was a man with age upon him so he didn’t mind; and
besides, better men than himself have been in such places, or they
ought to be, and if there is justice in the world they will be.

“A cousin of mine,” he said to old Tom Tool one night, “is come from
Ameriky. A rich person.”

He lay in the bed next him, but Tom Tool didn’t answer so he went on
again: “In a ship,” he said.

“I hear you,” answered Tom Tool.

“I see his mother with her bosom open once, and it stuffed with
diamonds, bags full.”

Tom Tool kept quiet.

“If,” said the Man from Kilsheelan, “if I’d the trusty comrade I’d make
a break from this and go seek him.”

“Was he asking you to do that?”

“How could he an’ all and he in a ship?”

“Was he writing fine letters to you then?”

“How could he, under the Lord? Would he give them to a savage bird or a
herring to bring to me so?”

“How did he let on to you?”

“He did not let on,” said the Man from Kilsheelan.

Tom Tool lay long silent in the darkness; he had a mistrust of the
Man, knowing him to have a forgetful mind; everything slipped through
it like rain through the nest of a pigeon. But at last he asked him:
“Where is he now?”

“He’ll be at Ballygoveen.”

“You to know that and you with no word from him?”

“O, I know it, I know; and if I’d a trusty comrade I’d walk out of this
and to him I would go. Bags of diamonds!”

Then he went to sleep, sudden; but the next night he was at Tom Tool
again: “If I’d a trusty comrade,” said he; and all that and a lot more.

“’Tis not convenient to me now,” said Tom Tool, “but to-morrow night I
might go wid you.”

The next night was a wild night, and a dark night, and he would not
go to make a break from the asylum, he said: “Fifty miles of journey,
and I with no heart for great walking feats! It is not convenient, but
to-morrow night I might go wid you.”

The night after that he said: “Ah, whisht wid your diamonds and all!
Why would you go from the place that is snug and warm into a world that
is like a wall for cold dark, and but the thread of a coat to divide
you from its mighty clasp, and only one thing blacker under the heaven
of God and that’s the road you walk on, and only one thing more shy
than your heart and that’s your two feet worn to a tissue tramping in
dung and ditches....”

“If I’d a trusty comrade,” said the Man from Kilsheelan, “I’d go seek
my rich cousin.”

“ ... stars gaping at you a few spans away, and the things that have
life in them, but cannot see or speak, begin to breathe and bend. If
ever your hair stood up it is then it would be, though you’ve no more
than would thatch a thimble, God help you.”

“Bags of gold he has,” continued the Man, “and his pockets stuffed with
the tobacca.”

“Tobacca!”

“They were large pockets and well stuffed.”

“Do you say, now!”

“And the gold! large bags and rich bags.”

“Well, I might do it to-morrow.”

And the next day Tom Tool and the Man from Kilsheelan broke from the
asylum and crossed the mountains and went on.

Four little nights and four long days they were walking; slow it was
for they were oldish men and lost they were, but the journey was kind
and the weather was good weather. On the fourth day Tom Tool said to
him: “The Dear knows what way you’d be taking me! Blind it seems, and
dazed I am. I could do with a skillet of good soup to steady me and to
soothe me.”

“Hard it is, and hungry it is,” sighed the Man; “starved daft I am for
a taste of nourishment, a blind man’s dog would pity me. If I see a cat
I’ll eat it; I could bite the nose off a duck.”

They did not converse any more for a time, not until Tom Tool asked him
what was the name of his grand cousin, and then the Man from Kilsheelan
was in a bedazement, and he was confused.

“I declare, on my soul, I’ve forgot his little name. Wait now while I
think of it.”

“Was it McInerney then?”

“No, not it at all.”

“Kavanagh? the Grogans? or the Duffys?”

“Wait, wait while I think of it now.”

Tom Tool waited; he waited and all until he thought he would burst.

“Ah, what’s astray wid you? Was it Phelan—or O’Hara—or Clancy—or Peter
Mew?”

“No, not it at all.”

“The Murphys. The Sweeneys. The Moores.”

“Divil a one. Wait while I think of it now.”

And the Man from Kilsheelan sat holding his face as if it hurt him,
and his comrade kept saying at him: “Duhy, then? Coman? McGrath?” and
driving him distracted with his O this and O that, his Mc he—s and Mc
she—s.

Well, he could not think of it; but when they walked on they had not
far to go, for they came over a twist of the hills and there was the
ocean, and the neat little town of Ballygoveen in a bay of it below,
with the wreck of a ship lying sunk near the strand. There was a
sharp cliff at either horn of the bay, and between them some bullocks
stravaiging on the beach.

“Truth is a fortune,” cried the Man from Kilsheelan, “this it is.”

They went down the hill to the strand near the wreck, and just on the
wing of the town they saw a paddock full of hemp stretched drying, and
a house near it, and a man weaving a rope. He had a great cast of hemp
around his loins, and a green apron. He walked backwards to the sea,
and a young girl stood turning a little wheel as he went away from her.

“God save you,” said Tom Tool to her, “for who are you weaving this
rope?”

“For none but God himself and the hangman,” said she.

Turning the wheel she was, and the man going away from it backwards,
and the dead wreck in the rocky bay; a fine sweet girl of good dispose
and no ways drifty.

“Long life to you then, young woman,” says he. “But that’s a strong
word, and a sour word, the Lord spare us all.”

At that the rope walker let a shout to her to stop the wheel; then he
cut the rope at the end and tied it to a black post. After that he came
throwing off his green apron and said he was hungry.

“Denis, avick!” cried the girl. “Come, and I’ll get your food.” And the
two of them went away into the house.

“Brother and sister they are,” said the Man from Kilsheelan, “a good
appetite to them.”

“Very neat she is, and clean she is, and good and sweet and tidy she
is,” said Tom Tool. They stood in the yard watching some white fowls
parading and feeding and conversing in the grass; scratch, peck, peck,
ruffle, quarrel, scratch, peck, peck, cock a doodle doo.

“What will we do now, Tom Tool? My belly has a scroop and a screech in
it. I could eat the full of Isknagahiny Lake and gape for more, or the
Hill of Bawn and not get my enough.”

Beyond them was the paddock with the hemp drying across it, long
heavy strands, and two big stacks of it beside, dark and sodden, like
seaweed. The girl came to the door and called: “Will ye take a bite?”
They said they would, and that she should eat with spoons of gold in
the heaven of God and Mary. “You’re welcome,” she said, but no more she
said, for while they ate she was sad and silent.

The young man Denis let on that their father, one Horan, was away on
his journeys peddling a load of ropes, a long journey, days he had been
gone, and he might be back to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after.

“A great strew of hemp you have,” said the Man from Kilsheelan. The
young man cast down his eyes; and the young girl cried out: “’Tis foul
hemp, God preserve us all!”

“Do you tell me of that now,” he asked; but she would not, and her
brother said: “I will tell you. It’s a great misfortune, mister man.
’Tis from the wreck in the bay beyant, a good stout ship, but burst on
the rocks one dark terror of a night and all the poor sailors tipped in
the sea. But the tide was low and they got ashore, ten strong sailor
men, with a bird in a cage that was dead drowned.”

“The Dear rest its soul,” said Tom Tool.

“There was no rest in the ocean for a week, the bay was full of storms,
and the vessel burst, and the big bales split, and the hemp was
scattered and torn and tangled on the rocks, or it did drift. But at
last it soothed, and we gathered it and brought it to the field here.
We brought it, and my father did buy it of the salvage man for a price;
a Mexican valuer he was, but the deal was bad, and it lies there; going
rotten it is, the rain wears it, and the sun’s astray, and the wind is
gone.”

“That’s a great misfortune. What is on it?” said the Man from
Kilsheelan.

“It is a great misfortune, mister man. Laid out it is, turned it is,
hackled it is, but faith it will not dry or sweeten, never a hank of it
worth a pig’s eye.”

“’Tis the devil and all his injury,” said Kilsheelan.

The young girl, her name it was Christine, sat grieving. One of her
beautiful long hands rested on her knee, and she kept beating it with
the other. Then she began to speak.

“The captain of that ship lodged in this house with us while the hemp
was recovered and sold; a fine handsome sport he was, but fond of the
drink, and very friendly with the Mexican man, very hearty they were,
a great greasy man with his hands covered with rings that you’d not
believe. Covered! My father had been gone travelling a week or a few
days when a dark raging gale came off the bay one night till the hemp
was lifted all over the field.”

“It would have lifted a bullock,” said Denis, “great lumps of it, like
trees.”

“And we sat waiting the captain, but he didn’t come home and we went
sleeping. But in the morning the Mexican man was found dead murdered
on the strand below, struck in the skull, and the two hands of him
gone. ’Twas not long when they came to the house and said he was last
seen with the captain, drunk quarrelling; and where was he? I said to
them that he didn’t come home at all and was away from it. ‘We’ll take
a peep at his bed,’ they said, and I brought them there, and my heart
gave a strong twist in me when I see’d the captain stretched on it,
snoring to the world and his face and hands smeared with the blood.
So he was brought away and searched, and in his pocket they found one
of the poor Mexican’s hands, just the one, but none of the riches.
Everything to be so black against him and the assizes just coming on in
Cork! So they took him there before the judge, and he judged him and
said it’s to hang he was. And if they asked the captain how he did it,
he said he did not do it at all.”

“But there was a bit of iron pipe beside the body,” said Denis.

“And if they asked him where was the other hand, the one with the rings
and the mighty jewels on them, and his budget of riches, he said he
knew nothing of that nor how the one hand got into his pocket. Placed
there it was by some schemer. It was all he could say, for the drink
was on him and nothing he knew.

“‘You to be so drunk,’ they said, ‘how did you get home to your bed and
nothing heard?’

“‘I don’t know,’ says he. Good sakes, the poor lamb, a gallant strong
sailor he was! His mind was a blank, he said. ‘’Tis blank,’ said the
judge, ‘if it’s as blank as the head of himself with a gap like that in
it, God rest him!’”

“You could have put a pound of cheese in it,” said Denis.

“And Peter Corcoran cried like a loony man, for his courage was gone,
like a stream of water. To hang him, the judge said, and to hang him
well, was their intention. It was a pity, the judge said, to rob a man
because he was foreign, and destroy him for riches and the drink on
him. And Peter Corcoran swore he was innocent of this crime. ‘Put a
clean shirt to me back,’ says he, ‘for it’s to heaven I’m going.’”

“And,” added Denis, “the peeler at the door said ‘Amen.’”

“That was a week ago,” said Christine, “and in another he’ll be
stretched. A handsome sporting sailor boy.”

“What ... what did you say was the name of him?” gasped the Man from
Kilsheelan.

“Peter Corcoran, the poor lamb,” said Christine.

“Begod,” he cried out as if he was choking, “’tis me grand cousin from
Ameriky!”

True it was, and the grief on him so great that Denis was after giving
the two of them a lodge till the execution was over. “Rest here, my
dad’s away,” said he, “and he knowing nothing of the murder, or the
robbery, or the hanging that’s coming, nothing. Ah, what will we tell
him an’ all? ’Tis a black story on this house.”

“The blessing of God and Mary on you,” said Tom Tool. “Maybe we
could do a hand’s turn for you; me comrade’s a great wonder with the
miracles, maybe he could do a stroke would free an innocent man.”

“Is it joking you are?” asked Christine sternly.

“God deliver him, how would I joke on a man going to his doom and
destruction?”

The next day the young girl gave them jobs to do, but the Man from
Kilsheelan was destroyed with trouble and he shook like water when a
pan of it is struck.

“What is on you?” said Tom Tool.

“Vexed and waxy I am,” says he, “in regard of the great journey we’s
took, and sorra a help in the end of it. Why couldn’t he do his bloody
murder after we had done with him?”

“Maybe he didn’t do it at all.”

“Ah, what are you saying now, Tom Tool? Wouldn’t anyone do it, a nice,
easy, innocent crime. The cranky gossoon to get himself stretched on
the head of it, ’tis the drink destroyed him! Sure’s there’s no more
justice in the world than you’d find in the craw of a sick pullet.
Vexed and waxy I am for me careless cousin. Do it! Who wouldn’t do it?”

He went up to the rope that Denis and Christine were weaving together
and he put his finger on it.

“Is that the rope,” says he, “that will hang my grand cousin?”

“No,” said Denis, “it is not. His rope came through the post office
yesterday. For the prison master it was, a long new rope—saints
preserve us—and Jimmy Fallon the postman getting roaring drunk showing
it to the scores of creatures would give him a drink for the sight
of it. Just coiled it was, and no way hidden, with a label on it,
‘O.H.M.S.’”

“The wind’s rising, you,” said Christine. “Take a couple of forks now,
and turn the hemp in the field. Maybe ’twill scour the Satan out of it.”

“Stormy it does be, and the bay has darkened in broad noon,” said Tom
Tool.

“Why wouldn’t the whole world be dark and a man to be hung?” said she.

They went to the hemp so knotted and stinking, and begun raking it
and raking it. The wind was roaring from the bay, the hulk twitching
and tottering; the gulls came off the wave, and Christine’s clothes
stretched out from her like the wings of a bird. The hemp heaved upon
the paddock like a great beast bursting a snare that was on it, and a
strong blast drove a heap of it upon the Man from Kilsheelan, twisting
and binding him in its clasp till he thought he would not escape from
it and he went falling and yelping. Tom Tool unwound him, and sat him
in the lew of the stack till he got his strength again, and then he
began to moan of his misfortune.

“Stint your shouting,” said Tom Tool, “isn’t it as hard to cure as a
wart on the back of a hedgehog?”

But he wouldn’t stint it. “’Tis large and splendid talk I get from
you, Tom Tool, but divil a deed of strength. Vexed and waxy I am. Why
couldn’t he do his murder after we’d done with him. What a cranky
cousin. What a foolish creature. What a silly man, the devil take him!”

“Let you be aisy,” the other said, “to heaven he is going.”

“And what’s the gain of it, he to go with his neck stretched?”

“Indeed, I did know a man went to heaven once,” began Tom Tool, “but he
did not care for it.”

“That’s queer,” said the Man, “for it couldn’t be anything you’d not
want, indeed to glory.”

“Well, he came back to Ireland on the head of it. I forget what was his
name.”

“Was it Corcoran, or Tool, or Horan?”

“No, none of those names. He let on it was a lonely place, not fit for
living people or dead people, he said; nothing but trees and streams
and beasts and birds.”

“What beasts and birds?”

“Rabbits and badgers, the elephant, the dromedary, and all those
ancient races; eagles and hawks and cuckoos and magpies. He wandered in
a thick forest for nights and days like a flea in a great beard, and
the beasts and the birds setting traps and hooks and dangers for a poor
feller; the worst villains of all was the sheep.”

“The sheep! What could a sheep do then?” asked Kilsheelan.

“I don’t know the right of it, but you’d not believe me if I told you
at all. If you went for the little swim you was not seen again.”

“I never heard the like of that in Roscommon.”

“Not another holy soul was in it but himself, and if he was taken with
the thirst he would dip his hand in a stream that flowed with rich
wine and put it to his lips, but if he did it turned into air at once
and twisted up in a blue cloud. But grand wine to look at, he said. If
he took oranges from a tree he could not bite them, they were chiny
oranges, hard as a plate. But beautiful oranges to look at they were.
To pick a flower it burst on you like a gun. What was cold was too cold
to touch, and what was warm was too warm to swallow, you must throw it
up, or die.”

“Faith, it’s no region for a Christian soul, Tom Tool. Where is it at
all?”

“High it may be, low it may be, it may be here, it may be there.”

“What could the like of a sheep do? A sheep!”

“A devouring savage creature it is there, the most hard to come at, the
most difficult to conquer, with the teeth of a lion and a tiger, the
strength of a bear and a half, the deceit of two foxes, the run of a
deer, the...”

“Is it heaven you call it! I’d not look twice at a place the like of
that.”

“No, you would not, no.”

“Ah, but wait now,” said Kilsheelan, “wait till the day of Judgment.”

“Well, I will not wait then,” said Tom Tool sternly. “When the sinners
of the world are called to their judgment, scatter they will all over
the face of the earth, running like hares till they come to the sea,
and there they will perish.”

“Ah, the love of God on the world!”

They went raking and raking, till they came to a great stiff hump of it
that rolled over, and they could see sticking from the end of it two
boots.

“O, what is it, in the name of God?” asks Kilsheelan.

“Sorra and all, but I’d not like to look,” says Tom Tool, and they
called the girl to come see what was it.

“A dead man!” says Christine, in a thin voice with a great tremble
coming on her, and she white as a tooth. “Unwind him now.” They began
to unwind him like a tailor with a bale of tweed, and at last they came
to a man black in the face. Strangled he was. The girl let a great
cry out of her. “Queen of heaven, ’tis my dad; choked he is, the long
strands have choked him, my good pleasant dad!” and she went with a run
to the house crying.

“What has he there in his hand?” asked Kilsheelan.

“’Tis a chopper,” says he.

“Do you see what is on it, Tom Tool?”

“Sure I see, and you see, what is on it; blood is on it, and murder is
on it. Go fetch a peeler, and I’ll wait while you bring him.”

When his friend was gone for the police Tom Tool took a little squint
around him and slid his hand into the dead man’s pocket. But if he did
he was nearly struck mad from his senses, for he pulled out a loose
dead hand that had been chopped off as neat as the foot of a pig. He
looked at the dead man’s arms, and there was a hand to each; so he
looked at the hand again. The fingers were covered with the rings of
gold and diamonds. Covered!

“Glory be to God!” said Tom Tool, and he put his hand in another pocket
and fetched a budget full of papers and banknotes.

“Glory be to God!” he said again, and put the hand and the budget back
in the pockets, and turned his back and said prayers until the peelers
came and took them all off to the court.

It was not long, two days or three, until an inquiry was held; grand it
was and its judgment was good. And the big-Wig asked: “Where is the
man that found the body?”

“There are two of him,” says the peeler.

“Swear ’em,” says he, and Kilsheelan stepped up to a great murdering
joker of a clerk, who gave him a book in his hand and roared at him: “I
swear by Almighty God....”

“Yes,” says Kilsheelan.

“Swear it,” says the clerk.

“Indeed I do.”

“You must repeat it,” says the clerk.

“I will, sir.”

“Well, repeat it then,” says he.

“And what will I repeat?”

So he told him again and he repeated it. Then the clerk goes on: “...
that the evidence I give....”

“Yes,” says Kilsheelan.

“Say those words, if you please.”

“The words! Och, give me the head of ’em again!”

So he told him again and he repeated it. Then the clerk goes on: “ ...
shall be the truth....”

“It will,” says Kilsheelan.

“ ... and nothing but the truth....”

“Yes, begod, indeed!”

“Say ‘nothing but the truth,’” roared the clerk.

“No!” says Kilsheelan.

“Say ‘nothing.’”

“All right,” says Kilsheelan.

“Can’t you say ’nothing but the truth'?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Well, say it!”

“I will, so,” says he, “the scrapings of sense on it all!”

So they swore them both, and their evidence they gave.

“Very good,” his lordship said, “a most important and opportune
discovery, in the nick of time, by the tracing of God. There is a
reward of fifty pounds offered for the finding of this property and
jewels: fifty pounds you will get in due course.”

They said they were obliged to him, though sorrow a one of them knew
what he meant by a due course, nor where it was.

Then a lawyer man got the rights of the whole case; he was the
cunningest man ever lived in the city of Cork; no one could match him,
and he made it straight and he made it clear.

Old Horan must have returned from his journey unbeknown on the night
of the gale when the deed was done. Perhaps he had made a poor profit
on his toil, for there was little of his own coin found on his body.
He saw the two drunks staggering along the bay—he clove in the head
of the one with a bit of pipe—he hit the other a good whack to still
or stiffen him—he got an axe from the yard—he shore off the Mexican’s
two hands, for the rings were grown tight and wouldn’t be drawn from
his fat fingers. Perhaps he dragged the captain home to his bed—you
couldn’t be sure of that—but put the hand in the captain’s pocket he
did, and then went to the paddock to bury the treasure. But a blast of
wind whipped and wove some of the hemp strand around his limbs, binding
him sudden. He was all huffled and hogled and went mad with the fear
struggling, the hemp rolling him and binding him till he was strangled
or smothered.

And that is what happened him, believe it or no, but believe it you
should. It was the tracing of God on him for his dark crime.

Within a week of it Peter Corcoran was away out of gaol, a stout
walking man again, free in Ballygoveen. But on the day of his release
he did not go near the ropewalker’s house. The Horans were there
waiting, and the two old silly men, but he did not go next or near
them. The next day Kilsheelan said to her: “Strange it is my cousin not
to seek you, and he a sneezer for gallantry.”

“’Tis no wonder at all,” replied Christine, “and he with his picture in
all the papers.”

“But he had a right to have come now and you caring him in his black
misfortune,” said Tom Tool.

“Well, he will not come then,” Christine said in her soft voice, “in
regard of the red murder on the soul of my dad. And why should he put a
mark on his family, and he the captain of a ship.”

In the afternoon Tom Tool and the other went walking to try if they
should see him, and they did see him at a hotel, but he was hurrying
from it; he had a frieze coat on him and a bag in his hand.

“Well, who are you at all?” asks Peter Corcoran.

“You are my cousin from Ameriky,” says Kilsheelan.

“Is that so? And I never heard it,” says Peter. “What’s your name?”

The Man from Kilsheelan hung down his old head and couldn’t answer him,
but Tom Tool said: “Drifty he is, sir, he forgets his little name.”

“Astray is he? My mother said I’ve cousins in Roscommon, d’ye know ’em?
the Twingeings....”

“Twingeing! Owen Twingeing it is!” roared Kilsheelan. “’Tis my name!
’Tis my name! ’Tis my name!” and he danced about squawking like a
parrot in a frenzy.

“If it’s Owen Twingeing you are, I’ll bring you to my mother in
Manhattan.” The captain grabbed up his bag. “Haste now, come along out
of it. I’m going from the cunning town this minute, bad sleep to it for
ever and a month! There’s a cart waiting to catch me the boat train to
Queenstown. Will you go? Now?”

“Holy God contrive it,” said Kilsheelan; his voice was wheezy as an
old goat, and he made to go off with him. “Good-day to you, Tom Tool,
you’ll get all the reward and endure a rich life from this out, fortune
on it all, a fortune on it all!”

And the two of them were gone in a twink.

Tom Tool went back to the Horans then; night was beginning to dusk and
to darken. As he went up the ropewalk Christine came to him from her
potato gardens and gave him signs, he to be quiet and follow her down
to the strand. So he followed her down to the strand and told her all
that happened, till she was vexed and full of tender words for the old
fool.

“Aren’t you the spit of misfortune? It would daunt a saint, so it
would, and scrape a tear from silky Satan’s eye. Those two deluderers,
they’ve but the drainings of half a heart between ’em. And he not
willing to lift the feather of a thought on me? I’d not forget him till
there’s ten days in a week and every one of ’em lucky. But ... but ...
isn’t Peter Corcoran the nice name for a captain man, the very pattern?”

She gave him a little bundle into his hands. “There’s a loaf and a cut
of meat. You’d best be stirring from here.”

“Yes,” he said, and stood looking stupid, for his mind was in a dream.
The rock at one horn of the bay had a red glow on it like the shawl on
the neck of a lady, but the other was black now. A man was dragging a
turf boat up the beach.

“Listen, you,” said Christine. “There’s two upstart men in the house
now, seeking you and the other. There’s trouble and damage on the head
of it. From the asylum they are. To the police they have been, to put
an embargo on the reward, and sorra a sixpence you’ll receive of the
fifty pounds of it: to the expenses of the asylum it must go, they say.
The treachery! Devil and all, the blood sweating on every coin of it
would rot the palm of a nigger. Do you hear me at all?”

She gave him a little shaking for he was standing stupid, gazing at
the bay which was dying into grave darkness except for the wash of its
broken waves.

“Do you hear me at all? It’s quit now you should, my little old man, or
they’ll be taking you.”

“Ah, yes, sure, I hear you, Christine; thank you kindly. Just looking
and listening I was. I’ll be stirring from it now, and I’ll get on and
I’ll go. Just looking and listening I was, just a wee look.”

“Then good-bye to you, Mr. Tool,” said Christine Horan, and turning
from him she left him in the darkness and went running up the ropewalk
to her home.




                               _Tribute_


Two honest young men lived in Braddle, worked together at the spinning
mills at Braddle, and courted the same girl in the town of Braddle,
a girl named Patience who was poor and pretty. One of them, Nathan
Regent, who wore cloth uppers to his best boots, was steady, silent,
and dignified, but Tony Vassall, the other, was such a happy-go-lucky
fellow that he soon carried the good will of Patience in his heart, in
his handsome face, in his pocket at the end of his nickel watch chain,
or wherever the sign of requited love is carried by the happy lover.
The virtue of steadiness, you see, can be measured only by the years,
and this Tony had put such a hurry into the tender bosom of Patience:
silence may very well be golden, but it is a currency not easy to
negotiate in the kingdom of courtship; dignity is so much less than
simple faith that it is unable to move even one mountain, it charms the
hearts only of bank managers and bishops.

So Patience married Tony Vassall and Nathan turned his attention to
other things, among them to a girl who had a neat little fortune—and
Nathan married that.

Braddle is a large gaunt hill covered with dull little houses, and
it has flowing from its side a stream which feeds a gigantic and
beneficent mill. Without that mill—as everybody in Braddle knew, for it
was there that everybody in Braddle worked—the heart of Braddle would
cease to beat. Tony went on working at the mill. So did Nathan in a
way, but he had a cute ambitious wife, and what with her money and
influence he was soon made a manager of one of the departments. Tony
went on working at the mill. In a few more years Nathan’s steadiness so
increased his opportunities that he became joint manager of the whole
works. Then his colleague died; he was appointed sole manager, and his
wealth became so great that eventually Nathan and Nathan’s wife bought
the entire concern. Tony went on working at the mill. He now had two
sons and a daughter, Nancy, as well as his wife Patience, so that even
his possessions may be said to have increased although his position was
no different from what it had been for twenty years.

The Regents, now living just outside Braddle, had one child, a daughter
named Olive, of the same age as Nancy. She was very beautiful and had
been educated at a school to which she rode on a bicycle until she was
eighteen.

About that time, you must know, the country embarked upon a disastrous
campaign, a war so calamitous that every sacrifice was demanded of
Braddle. The Braddle mills were worn from their very bearings by their
colossal efforts, increasing by day or by night, to provide what were
called the sinews of war. Almost everybody in Braddle grew white
and thin and sullen with the strain of constant labour. Not quite
everybody, for the Regents received such a vast increase of wealth that
their eyes sparkled; they scarcely knew what to do with it; their faces
were neither white nor sullen.

“In times like these,” declared Nathan’s wife, “we must help our
country still more, still more We must help; let us lend our money to
the country.”

“Yes,” said Nathan.

So they lent their money to their country. The country paid them
tribute, and therefore, as the Regent wealth continued to flow in, they
helped their country more and more; they even lent the tribute back to
the country and received yet more tribute for that.

“In times like these,” said the country, “we must have more men, more
men we must have.” And so Nathan went and sat upon a Tribunal; for, as
everybody in Braddle knew, if the mills of Braddle ceased to grind, the
heart of Braddle would cease to beat.

“What can we do to help our country?” asked Tony Vassall of his master,
“we have no money to lend.”

“No?” was the reply. “But you can give your strong son Dan.”

Tony gave his son Dan to the country.

“Good-bye, dear son,” said his father, and his brother and his sister
Nancy said “Good-bye.” His mother kissed him.

Dan was killed in battle; his sister Nancy took his place at the mill.

In a little while the neighbours said to Tony Vassall: “What a fine
strong son is your young Albert Edward!”

And Tony gave his son Albert Edward to the country.

“Good-bye, dear son,” said his father; his sister kissed him, his
mother wept on his breast.

Albert Edward was killed in battle; his mother took his place at the
mill.

But the war did not cease; though friend and foe alike were almost
drowned in blood it seemed as powerful as eternity, and in time Tony
Vassall too went to battle and was killed. The country gave Patience a
widow’s pension, as well as a touching inducement to marry again; she
died of grief. Many people died in those days, it was not strange at
all. Nathan and his wife got so rich that after the war they died of
over-eating, and their daughter Olive came into a vast fortune and a
Trustee.

The Trustee went on lending the Braddle money to the country, the
country went on sending large sums of interest to Olive (which was
the country’s tribute to her because of her parents’ unforgotten, and
indeed unforgettable, kindness), while Braddle went on with its work of
enabling the country to do this. For when the war came to an end the
country told Braddle that those who had not given their lives must now
turn to and really work, work harder than before the war, much, much
harder, or the tribute could not be paid and the heart of Braddle would
therefore cease to beat. Braddle folk saw that this was true, only too
true, and they did as they were told.

The Vassall girl, Nancy, married a man who had done deeds of valour in
the war. He was a mill hand like her father, and they had two sons,
Daniel and Albert Edward. Olive married a grand man, though it is true
he was not very grand to look at. He had a small sharp nose, but they
did not matter very much because when you looked at him in profile
his bouncing red cheeks quite hid the small sharp nose, as completely
as two hills hide a little barn in a valley. Olive lived in a grand
mansion with numerous servants who helped her to rear a little family
of one, a girl named Mercy, who also had a small sharp nose and round
red cheeks.

Every year after the survivors’ return from the war Olive gave a supper
to her workpeople and their families, hundreds of them; for six hours
there would be feasting and toys, music and dancing. Every year Olive
would make a little speech to them all, reminding them all of their
duty to Braddle and Braddle’s duty to the country, although, indeed,
she did not remind them of the country’s tribute to Olive. That was
perhaps a theme unfitting to touch upon, it would have been boastful
and quite unbecoming.

“These are grave times for our country,” Olive would declare, year
after year: “her responsibilities are enormous, we must all put our
shoulders to the wheel.”

Every year one of the workmen would make a little speech in reply,
thanking Olive for enabling the heart of Braddle to continue its beats,
calling down the spiritual blessings of heaven and the golden blessings
of the world upon Olive’s golden head. One year the honour of replying
fell to the husband of Nancy, and he was more than usually eloquent for
on that very day their two sons had commenced to doff bobbins at the
mill. No one applauded louder than Nancy’s little Dan or Nancy’s Albert
Edward, unless it was Nancy herself. Olive was always much moved on
these occasions. She felt that she did not really know these people,
that she would never know them; she wanted to go on seeing them, being
with them, and living with rapture in their workaday world. But she did
not do this.

“How beautiful it all is!” she would sigh to her daughter, Mercy,
who accompanied her. “I am so happy. All these dear people are being
cared for by us, just simply us. God’s scheme of creation—you see—the
Almighty—we are his agents—we must always remember that. It goes on for
years, years upon years it goes on. It will go on, of course, yes, for
ever; the heart of Braddle will not cease to beat. The old ones die,
the young grow old, the children mature and marry and keep the mill
going. When I am dead ...”

“Mamma, mamma!”

“O yes, indeed, one day! Then _you_ will have to look after all these
things, Mercy, and you will talk to them—just like me. Yes, to own
the mill is a grave and difficult thing, only those who own them know
how grave and difficult; it calls forth all one’s deepest and rarest
qualities; but it is a divine position, a noble responsibility. And the
people really love me—I think.”




                          _The Handsome Lady_


Towards the close of the nineteenth century the parish of Tull was
a genial but angular hamlet hung out on the north side of a midland
hill, with scarcely renown enough to get itself marked on a map. Its
felicities, whatever they might be, lay some miles distant from a
railway station, and so were seldom regarded, being neither boasted of
by the inhabitants nor visited by strangers.

But here as elsewhere people were born and, as unusual, unconspicuously
born. John Pettigrove made a note of them then, and when people came in
their turns to die Pettigrove made a note of that too, for he was the
district registrar. In between whiles, like fish in a pond, they were
immersed in labour until the Divine Angler hooked them to the bank, and
then, as is the custom, they were conspicuously buried and laboured
presumably no more.

The registrar was perhaps the one person who had love and praise for
the simple place. He was born and bred in Tull, he had never left
Tull, and at forty years of age was as firmly attached to it as the
black clock to the tower of Tull Church, which never recorded anything
but twenty minutes past four. His wife Carrie, a delicate woman, was
also satisfied with Tull, but as she owned two or three small pieces
of house property there her fancy may not have been entirely beyond
suspicion; possession, as you might say, being nine points of the
prejudice just as it is of the law. A year or two after their marriage
Carrie began to suffer from a complication of ailments that turned
her into a permanent invalid; she was seldom seen out of the house and
under her misfortunes she peaked and pined, she was troublesome, there
was no pleasing her. If Pettigrove went about unshaven she was vexed;
it was unclean, it was lazy, disgusting; but when he once appeared with
his moustache shaven off she was exceedingly angry; it was scandalous,
it was shameful, maddening. There is no pleasing some women—what is a
man to do? When he began to let it grow again and encouraged a beard
she was more tyrannical than ever.

The grey church was small and looked shrunken, as if it had sagged; it
seemed to stoop down upon the green yard, but the stones and mounds,
the cypress and holly, the strangely faded blue of a door that led
through the churchyard wall to the mansion of the vicar, were beautiful
without pretence, and though as often as not the parson’s goats used to
graze among the graves and had been known to follow him into the nave,
there was about the ground, the indulgent dimness under the trees, and
the tower with its unmoving clock, the very delicacy of solitude. It
inspired compassion and not cynicism as, peering as it were through the
glass of antiquity, the stranger gazed upon its mortal register. In
its peace, its beauty, and its age, all those pious records and hopes
inscribed upon its stones, seemed not uttered in pride nor all in vain.
But to speak truth the church’s grace was partly the achievement of its
lofty situation. A road climbing up from sloping fields turned abruptly
and traversed the village, sidling up to the church; there, having
apparently satisfied some itch of curiosity, it turned abruptly again
and trundled back another way into that northern prospect of farms and
forest that lay in the direction of Whitewater Copse, Hangman’s Corner,
and One O’clock.

It was that prospect which most delighted Pettigrove, for he was a
simple-minded countryman full of ambling content. Not even the church
allured him so much, for though it pleased him and was just at his own
threshold, he never entered it at all. Once upon a time there had been
talk of him joining the church choir, for he had a pleasant singing
voice, but he would not go.

“It’s flying in the face of Providence,” cried his exasperated wife—her
mind, too, was a falsetto one: “You’ve as strong a voice as anyone in
Tull, in fact stronger, not that that is saying much, for Tull air
don’t seem good for songsters if you may judge by that choir. The air
is too thick maybe, I can’t say, it certainly oppresses my own chest,
or perhaps it’s too thin, I don’t thrive on it myself; but you’ve the
strength and it would do you credit; you’d be a credit to yourself and
it would be a credit to me. But that won’t move you! I can’t tell what
you’d be at; a drunken man ’ull get sober again, but a fool ... well,
there!”

John, unwilling to be a credit, would mumble an objection to being tied
down to that sort of thing. That was just like him, no spontaneity, no
tidiness in his mind. Whenever he addressed himself to any discussion
he had, as you might say, to tuck up his intellectual sleeves, give a
hitch to his argumentative trousers. So he went on singing, just when
he had a mind to it, old country songs, for he disliked what he called
“gimcrack ballads about buzzums and roses.”

Pettigrove’s occupation dealt with the extreme features of existence,
but he himself had no extreme notions. He was a good medium type of
man mentally and something more than that physically, but nevertheless
he was a disappointment to his wife—he never gave her any opportunity
to shine by his reflected light. She had nurtured foolish ideas of him
first as a figure of romance, then of some social importance; he ought
to be a parish councillor or develop eminence somehow in their way of
life. But John was nothing like this, he did not develop, or shine, or
offer counsel, he was just a big, solid, happy man. There were times
when his childless wife hated every ounce and sign of him, when his
fair clipped beard and hair, which she declared were the colour of
jute, and his stolidity, sickened her.

“I do my duty by him and, please God, I’ll continue to do it. I’m a
humble woman and easily satisfied. An afflicted woman has no chance, no
chance at all,” she said. After twelve years of wedded life Pettigrove
sometimes vaguely wondered what it would have been like not to have
married anybody.

One Michaelmas a small house belonging to Mrs. Pettigrove was let
to a widow from Eastbourne. Mrs. Cronshaw was a fine upstanding
woman, gracefully grave and, as the neighbours said, clean as a
pink. For several evenings after she had taken possession of the
house Pettigrove, who was a very handy sort of man, worked upon some
alterations to her garden, and at the end of the third or fourth
evening she had invited him into her bower to sip a glass of some
cordial, and she thanked him for his labours.

“Not at all, Mrs. Cronshaw.” And he drank to her very good fortune.
Just that and no more.

The next evening she did the same, and the very next evening to that
again. And so it was not long before they spoke of themselves to each
other, turn and turn about as you might say. She was the widow of an
ironmonger who had died two years before, and the ironmonger’s very
astute brother had given her an annuity in exchange for her interest in
the business. Without family and with few friends she had been lonely.

“But Tull is such a hearty place,” she said. “It’s beautiful. One might
forget to be lonely.”

“Be sure of that,” commented Pettigrove. They had the light of two
candles and a blazing fire. She grew kind and more communicative
to him; a strangely, disturbingly attractive woman, dark, with an
abundance of well-dressed hair and a figure of charm. She had carpet
all over her floor; nobody else in Tull dreamed of such a thing.
She did not cover her old dark table with a cloth as everybody else
habitually did. The pictures on the wall were real, and the black-lined
sofa had cushions on it of violet silk which she sometimes actually sat
upon. There was a dainty dresser with china and things, a bureau, and
a tall clock that told the exact time. But there was no music, music
made her melancholy. In Pettigrove’s home there were things like these
but they were not the same. His bureau was jammed in a corner with
flowerpots upon its top; his pictures comprised two photo prints of a
public park in Swansea—his wife had bought them at an auction sale.
Their dresser was a cumbersome thing with knobs and hooks and jars and
bottles, and the tall clock never chimed the hours. The very armchairs
at Mrs. Cronshaw’s were wells of such solid comfort that it made him
feel uncomfortable to use them.

“Ah, I should like to be sure of it!” she continued. “I have not found
kindly people in the cities—they do not even seem to notice a fine
day!—I have not found them anywhere, so why should they be in Tull? You
are a wise man, tell me, is Tull the exception?”

“Yes, Mrs. Cronshaw. You must come and visit us whenever you’ve a mind
to; have no fear of loneliness.”

“Yes, I will come and visit you,” she declared, “soon, I will.”

“That’s right, you must visit us.”

“Yes, soon, I must.”

But weeks passed over and the widow did not keep her promise although
she only lived a furlong from his door. Pettigrove made no further
invitation for he found excuses on many evenings to visit her. It was
easy to see that she did not care for his wife, and he did not mind
this for neither did he care for her now. The old wish that he had
never been married crept back into his mind, a sly, unsavoury visitant;
it was complicated by a thought that his wife might not live long, a
dark, shameful thought that nevertheless trembled into hope. So on many
of the long winter evenings, while his wife dozed in her bed, he sat in
the widow’s room talking of things that were strange and agreeable. She
could neither understand nor quite forgive his parochialism; this was
sweet flattery to him. He had scarcely ever set foot outside a ten-mile
radius of Tull, but he was an intelligent man, and all her discourse
was of things he could perfectly understand! For the first time in his
life Pettigrove found himself lamenting the dullness of existence.
He tried to suppress this tendency, but words would come and he was
distressed. He had always been in love with things that lasted, that
had stability, that gave him a recognition and guidance, but now his
feelings were flickering like grass in a gale.

“How strange that is,” she said, when he told her this, “we seem to
have exchanged our feelings. I am happy here, but I know that dark
thought, yes, that life is a dull journey on which the mind searches
for variety, unvarying variety.”

“But what for?” he cried.

“It is constantly seeking change.”

“But for why? It seems like treachery to life.”

“It may be so, but if you seek, you find.”

“What?”

“Whatever you are seeking.”

“What am I seeking?”

“Not to know that is the blackest treachery to life. We are growing
old,” she added inconsequently, stretching her hands to the fire. She
wore black silk mittens.

“Perhaps that’s it,” he allowed, with a laugh. “Childhood’s best.”

“Surely not,” she protested.

“Ah, but I was gay enough then. I’m not a religious man, you know—and
perhaps that’s the reason—but however—I can remember things of great
joy and pleasure then.”

And it seemed from his recollections that not the least pleasant
and persistent was his memory of the chapel, a Baptist hall long
since closed and decayed, to which his mother had sent him on Sunday
afternoons. It was a plain, tough, little tabernacle, with benches of
deal, plain deal, very hard, covered with a clear varnish that smelled
pleasant. The platform and its railing, the teacher’s desk, the pulpit
were all of deal, the plainest deal, very hard and all covered with
the clear varnish that smelled very pleasant. And somehow the creed
and the teacher and the attendants were like that too, all plain and
hard, covered with a varnish that was pleasant. But there was a way in
which the afternoon sun beamed through the cheap windows that lit up
for young Pettigrove an everlasting light. There were hymns with tunes
that he hoped would be sung in Paradise. The texts, the stories, the
admonitions of the teachers, were vivid and evidently beautiful in his
memory. Best of all was the privilege of borrowing a book at the end of
school time—_Pilgrim’s Progress_ or _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.

For a While his recollections restored him to cheerfulness, but his
dullness soon overcame him again.

“I have been content all my life. Never was a man more content. And
now! It’s treachery if you like. My faith’s gone, content gone, for
why?”

He rose to go, and as he paused at the door to bid her good-night she
took his hand and softly and tenderly said: “Why are you depressed?
Don’t be so. Life is not dull, it is only momentarily unkind.”

“Ah, I’ll get used to it.”

“John Pettigrove, you must never get used to dullness, I forbid you.”

“But I thought Tull was beautiful,” he said as he paused upon the
doorsill. “I thought Tull was beautiful....”

“Until I came?” It was so softly uttered and she closed the door so
quickly upon him. They called “Good-night, good-night” to each other
through the door.

He went away through the village, his mind streaming with strange
emotions. He exulted, and yet he feared for himself and for the widow,
but he could not summon from the depths of his mind what it was he
feared. He passed a woman in the darkness who, perhaps mistaking him
for another, said “Good-night, my love.”

The next morning he sat in the kitchen after breakfast. It wanted but a
few days to Christmas. There was no frost in the air; the wind roared,
but the day, though grey, was not gloomy; only the man was gloomy.

“Nothing ever happens,” he murmured. “True, but what would you want to
happen?”

Out in the scullery a village girl was washing dishes; as she rattled
the ware she hummed a song. From his back window Pettigrove could see
a barn in a field, two broken gates, a pile of logs, faggots, and
a single pollarded willow whose head was strangled under a hat of
ivy. Beside a barley stack was a goose with a crooked neck; it stood
sulking. High aloft in the sky thousands of blown rooks wrangled like
lost men. And Pettigrove vowed he would go no more to the widow—not
for a while. Something inside him kept asking, Why not? And he as
quickly replied to himself: “You know, you know. You’ll find it all in
God-a-mighty’s own commandments. Stick to them, you can’t do more—at
least, you might, but what would be the good?”

So that evening he went along to the Christmas lottery held in a vast
barn, dimly lit and smelling of vermin. A rope hung over each of its
two giant beams, dangling smoky lanterns. There was a crowd of men and
boys inspecting the prizes in the gloomy corners, a pig sulking in a
pen of hurdles, sacks of wheat, live hens in coops, a row of dead hares
hung on the rail of a wagon. Amid silence a man plunged his hand into
a corn measure and drew forth a numbered ticket; another man drew from
a similar measure a blank ticket or a prize ticket. Each time a prize
was drawn a hum of interest spread through the onlookers, but when the
chief prize, the fat pig, was drawn against number seventy-nine there
was agitation, excitement even.

“Who be it?” cried several. “Who be number seventy-nine for the fat
pig?”

A man consulted a list and said doubtfully: “Miss Subey Jones—who be
she?”

No one seemed to know until a husky alto voice from a corner piped: “I
know her. She’s from Shottsford way, over by Squire Marchand’s.”

“Oh,” murmured the disappointed men; the husky voice continued: “Day
afore yesterday she hung herself.”

For a few seconds there was a pained silence, until a powerful voice
cried: “It’s a mortal shame, chaps.”

The ceremony proceeded until all the tickets were drawn and all the
prizes won and distributed. The cackling hens were seized from the pens
by their legs and handed upside down to their new owners. The pig was
bundled squealing into a sack. Bags of wheat were shouldered and the
white-bellied hares were held up to the light. Everybody was animated
and chattered loudly.

“I had number thirty in the big chance and I won nothing. And I had
number thirty-one in the little chance and I won a duck. Number
thirty-one was my number, and number thirty in the big draw; I won
nothing in that, but in the little draw I won a duck. Well, there’s
flesh for you.”

Some of those who had won hens held them out to a white-faced youth who
smoked a large rank pipe; he took each fowl quietly by the neck and
twisted it till it died. A few small feathers stuck to his hands or
wavered to the floor, and even after the bird was dead and carried away
it continued slowly and vaguely to flap its big wings and scatter its
lorn feathers.

Pettigrove spent most of the next day in the forest plantation south
of Tull Great Wood, where a few chain of soil had been cultivated and
reserved for seedlings, trees of larch and pine no bigger than potted
geraniums, groves of oaks with stems slender as a cockerel’s leg and
most of the stiff brown leaves still clinging to the famished twigs;
or sycamores, thin but tall, flourishing in a mat of their own dropped
foliage that was the colour of butter fringed with blood and stained
with black gouts like a child’s copy-book. It was a toy forest, dense
enough for the lair of a beast, and dim enough for an anchorite’s
meditations, but a dog could leap over it, and a boy could stand amid
its growth and look like Gulliver in Lilliput.

“May I go into the wood?” a voice called to Pettigrove. Looking sharply
up he saw Mrs. Cronshaw, clad in a long dark blue cloak with a fur
necklet, a grey velvet hat trimmed with a pigeon’s wing confining her
luxuriant hair.

“Ah, you may,” he said, stalking to her side, “but you’d best not,
’tis a heavy marshy soil within and the ways are stabbled by the
hunters’ horses. Better keep out till summer comes, then ’tis dry and
pleasant-like.”

She sat down awkwardly on a heap of faggots, her feet turned slightly
inwards, but her cheeks were dainty pink in the cold air. What a smart
lady! He stood telling her things about the wood, its birds and foxes;
deep in the heart of it all was a lovely open space covered with the
greenest grass and a hawthorn tree in the middle of that. It bloomed in
spring with heavy creamy blossom. No, he had never seen any fairies
there. Come to that, he did not expect to, he had never thought of it.

“But there are fairies, you know,” cried the widow. “O yes, in old
times, I mean very old times, before the Romans, in fact before
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob then, the Mother of the earth had a big
family, thousands, something like the old woman who lived in a shoe
she was. And one day God sent word to say he was coming to visit her.
Well, then! She was so excited—the Mother of the earth—that she made a
great to do you may be sure, and after she had made her house sparkle
with cleanliness and had baked a great big pie she began to wash her
children. All of a sudden she heard the trumpets blow—God was just
a-coming! So as she hadn’t got time to finish them all, she hid those
unwashed ones away out of sight, and bade them to remain there and make
no noise or she would be angry and punish them. But you can’t conceal
anything from the King of All and He knew of those hidden children, and
he caused them to be hidden from mortal eyes for ever, and they are the
fairies, O yes!”

“No, nothing can be concealed,” Pettigrove admitted in his slow grave
fashion, “murder will out, as they say, but that’s a tough morsel if
you’re going to swallow it all.”

“But I like to believe in those things I Wish were true.”

“Ah, so, yes,” said Pettigrove.

It was an afternoon of damp squally blusters, uncheering, with slaty
sky; the air itself seemed slaty, and though it had every opportunity
and invitation to fall, the rain, with strange perversity, held off.
In the oddest corners of the sky, north and east, a miraculous glow
could be seen, as if the sun in a moment of aberration had determined
to set just then and just there. The wind made a long noise in the
sky, the smell of earth rose about them, of timber and of dead leaves;
except for rooks, or a wren cockering itself in a bush, no birds were
to be seen.

Letting his spade fall Pettigrove sat down beside the widow and kissed
her. She blushed red as a cherry and he got up quickly.

“I ought not to ha’ done it, I ought not to ha’ done that, Mrs.
Cronshaw!”

“Caroline!” said she, smiling the correction at him.

“Is that your name?” He sat down by her again. “Why, it is the same as
my wife’s.”

And Caroline said “Humph! You’re a strange man, but you are wise and
good. Tell me, does she understand you?”

“What is there to understand? We are wed and we are faithful to each
other, I can take my oath on that to God or man.”

“Yes, yes, but what is faith—without love between you? You see? You
have long since broken your vows to love and cherish, understand that,
you have broken them in half.”

She had picked up a stick and was drawing patterns of cubes and stars
in the soil.

“But what is to be done, Caroline? Life is good, but there is good
living and there is bad living, there is fire and there is water. It is
strange what the Almighty permits to happen.”

A slow-speaking man; scrupulous of thought and speech he weighed each
idea before its delivery as carefully as a tobacconist weighs an ounce
of tobacco.

“Have some cake?” said Caroline, drawing a package from a pocket. “Will
you have a piece ... John?”

She seemed to be on the point of laughing aloud at him. He took the
fragment of cake but he did not eat it as she did. He held it between
finger and thumb and stared at it.

“It’s strange how a man let’s his tongue wag now and again as if he’d
got the universe stuck on the end of a common fork.”

“Or at the end of a knitting needle, yes, I know,” laughed Caroline,
brushing the crumbs from her lap. Then she bent her head, patted her
lips, and regurgitated with a gesture of apology—just like a lady.
“But what are you saying? If there is love between you there is
faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity.”

He bit a mouthful off the cake at last.

“Maybe true, but you must have respect for the beliefs of others....”

“How can you if they don’t fit in with your own?”

“Or there is sorrow.” He bolted the rest of his cake. “O you are
right, I daresay, Caroline, no doubt; it’s right, I know, but is it
reasonable?”

“There are afflictions,” she said, “which time will cure, so they
don’t matter; but there are others which time only aggravates, so what
can we do? I daresay it’s different with a man, but a woman, you know,
grasps at what she wants. That sounds reasonable, but you don’t think
it’s right?”

In the cold whistling sky a patch of sunset had now begun to settle
in its proper quarter, but as frigid and unconvincing as a stage
fireplace. Pettigrove sat with his great hands clasped between his
knees. Perhaps she grew tired of watching the back of him; she rose to
go, but she said gently enough: “Come in to-night, I want to tell you
something.”

“I will, Caroline.”

Later, when he reached home, he found two little nieces had arrived,
children of some relatives who lived a dozen miles away. A passing
farmer had dropped them at Tull; their parents were coming a day later
to spend Christmas with the Pettigroves.

They sat up in his wife’s room after tea, for Carrie left her bed only
for an hour or two at noon. She dozed against her pillows, a brown
shawl covering her shoulders, while the two children played by the
hearth. Pettigrove sat silent, gazing in the fire.

“What a racket you are making, Polly and Jane!” quavered Carrie.

The little girls thereupon ceased their sporting and took a picture
book to the hearthrug where they examined it in awed silence by the
firelight. After some minutes the invalid called out: “Don’t make such
a noise turning over all them leaves.”

Polly made a grimace and little Jane said: “We are looking at the
pictures.”

“Well,” snapped Mrs. Pettigrove, “why can’t you keep to the one page!”

John sat by the fire vowing to himself that he would not go along to
the widow, and in the very act of vowing he got up and began putting on
his coat.

“Are you going out, John?”

“There’s a window catch to put right along at Mrs. Cronshaw’s,” he
said. At other times it had been a pump to mend, a door latch to
adjust, or a jamb to ease.

“I never knew things to go like it before—I can’t understand it,” his
wife commented. “What with windows and doors and pumps and bannisters
anyone would think the house had got the rot. It’s done for the
purpose, or my name’s not what it is.”

“It won’t take long,” he said as he went.

The wind had fallen away, but the sky, though clearer, had a dull
opaque mean appearance, and the risen moon, without glow, without
refulgence, was like a brass-headed nail stuck in a kitchen wall.

The yellow blind at the widow’s cot was drawn down and the candles
within cast upon the blind a slanting image of the birdcage hanging at
the window; a fat dapper bird appeared to be snoozing upon its rod; a
tiny square was probably a lump of sugar; the glass well must have been
half full of water, it glistened and twinkled on the blind. The shadowy
bird shifted one foot, then the other, and just opened its beak as
Pettigrove tapped at the door.

They did not converse very easily, there was constraint between them,
Pettigrove’s simple mind had a twinge of guilt.

“Will you take lime juice or cocoa?” asked the widow, and he said:
“Cocoa.”

“Little or large?”

And he said: “Large.”

While they sat sipping the cocoa Caroline began: “Well, I am going
away, you know. No, not for good, just a short while, for Christmas
only, or very little longer. I must go.”

She nestled her blue shawl more snugly round her shoulders. A cough
seemed to trouble her. “There are things you can’t put on one side for
ever....”

“Even if they don’t fit in with your own ideas!” he said slyly.

“Yes, even then.”

He put down his cup and took both her hands in his own. “How long?”

“Not long, not very long, not long enough....”

“Enough for what?” He broke up her hesitation. “For me to forget you?
No, no, not in the fifty-two weeks of the whole world of time.”

“I did want to stay here,” she said, “and see all the funny things
country people do now.” She was rather vague about those funny things.
“Carols, mumming, visiting; go to church on Christmas morning, though
how I should get past those dreadful goats, I don’t know; why are they
always in the churchyard?”

“Teasy creatures they are! Followed parson into service one Sunday,
indeed, ah! one of ’em did. Jumped up in his pulpit, too, so ’tis said.
But when are you coming back?”

She told him it was a little uncertain, she was not sure, she could not
say, it was a little uncertain.

“In a week, maybe?”

Yes, a week; but perhaps it would be longer, she could not say, it was
uncertain.

“So. Well, all right then, I shall watch for you.”

“Yes, watch for me.”

They gave each other good wishes and said good-bye in the little dark
porch. The shadowy bird on the blind stood up and shrugged itself.
Pettigrove’s stay had scarcely lasted an hour, but in that time the
moon had gone, the sky had cleared, and in its ravishing darkness the
stars almost crackled, so fierce was their mysterious perturbation. The
village man felt Caroline’s arms about him and her lips against his
mouth as she whispered a “God bless you.” He turned away home, dazed,
entranced, he did not heed the stars. In the darkness a knacker’s cart
trotted past him with a dim lantern swinging at its tail and the driver
bawling a song. In the keen air the odour from the dead horse sickened
him.

Pettigrove passed Christmas gaily enough with his kindred, and even
his wife indulged in brief gaieties. Her cousin was one of those men
full of affable disagreements; an attitude rather than an activity of
mind. He had a curious face resembling an owl’s except in its colour
(which was pink) and in its tiny black moustache curling downwards like
a dark ring under his nose. If Pettigrove remarked upon a fine sunset
the cousin scoffed, scoffed benignantly; there was a sunset every
day, wasn’t there?—common as grass, weren’t they? As for the farming
hereabouts, nothing particular in it was there? The scenery was, well,
it was just scenery, a few hills, a few woods, plenty of grass fields.
No special suitability of soil for any crop; corn would be just
average, wasn’t that so? And the roots, well, on his farm at home he
could show mangolds as big as young porkers, forty to the cartload, or
thereabouts. There weren’t no farmers round here making a fortune, he’d
be bound, and as for their birds, he should think they lived on rook
pie.

Pettigrove submitted that none of the Tull farmers looked much the
worse for farming.

“Well, come,” said the other, “I hear your workhouses be middling
full. Now an old neighbour of mine, old Frank Stinsgrove, was a man as
_could_ farm, any mortal thing. He wouldn’t have looked at this land,
not at a crown an acre, and he was a man as _could_ farm, any mortal
thing, oranges and lemons if he’d a mind to it. What a head that man
had, God bless, his brain was stuffed! Full!! He’d declare black was
white, and what’s more he could prove it. I like a man like that.”

The cousin’s wife was a vast woman, shaped like a cottage loaf. For
some reason she clung to her stays: it could not be to disguise or curb
her bulk, for they merely put a gloss upon it. You could only view her
as a dimension, think of her as a circumference, and wonder grimly what
she looked like when she prepared for the bath. She devoured turkey and
pig griskin with such audible voracity that her husband declared that
he would soon be compelled to wear corks in his earholes at meal times,
yes, the same as they did in the artillery. She was quite unperturbed
by this even when little Jane giggled, and she avowed that good food
was a great enjoyment to her.

“O ’tis a good thing and a grand thing, but take that child now,” said
her father. Resting his elbow on the table he indicated with his fork
the diminutive Jane; upon the fork hung a portion of meat large enough
to half-sole a lady’s shoe. “She’s just the reverse, she eats as soft
as a fly, a spillikin a day, and not a mite more; no, very dainty
is our Jane.” Here he swallowed the meat and treated four promising
potatoes with very great savagery. “Do you know our Jane is going to
marry a house-painter, yah, a house-painter, or is it a coach-painter?
’Tis smooth and gentle work, she says, not like rough farmers or chaps
that knock things pretty hard, smiths and carpenters, you know. O
Lord! eight years old, would you believe it? The spillikin! John, this
griskin’s a lovely bit of meat.”

“Beautiful meat,” chanted his wife, “like a pig we killed a month ago.
That was a nice pig, fat and contented as you’d find any pig, ’twould
have been a shame to keep him alive any longer. It dressed so well, a
picture it was, the kidneys shun like gold.”

“That reminds me of poor old Frank Stinsgrove,” said her husband.
“He’d a mint of money, a very wealthy man, but he didn’t like parting
with it. He’d got oldish and afraid of his death, must have a doctor
calling to examine him every so often. Didn’t mind spending a fortune
on doctors, but every other way he’d skin a flint. And there was nought
wrong with him, ’cept age. So his daughter ups and says to him one
day—You are wasting your money on all these doctors, father, they do
you no good, what you must have is nice, dainty, nourishing food. Now
what about some of these new laid eggs? How much are they fetching now?
old Frank says. A penny farthing, says she. A penny farthing! I cannot
afford it. And there was that man with a mint of money, a mint, could
have bought Buckingham Palace—you understand me—and yet he must go on
with his porridge and his mustard plasters and his syrup of squills,
until at last a smartish doctor really did find something the matter
with him, in his kidneys. They operated, mark you, and they say—but I
never quite had the rights of it—they say they gave him a new kidney
made of wax; a new wax kidney, ah, and I believe it was successful,
only he had not to get himself into any kind of a heat, of course, nor
sit too close to the fire. ’Stonishing what they doctors can do with
your innards. But of course he was too old, soon died. Left a fortune,
a mint of money, could have bought the crown of England. Staunch old
chap, you know.”

Throughout the holidays John sang his customary ballads, “The Bicester
Ram,” “The Unquiet Grave,” and dozens of others. After songs there
would be things to eat. Then a game of cards, and after that things to
eat. Then a walk to the inn, to the church, to a farm, or to a friend’s
where, in all jollity, there would be things to eat and drink. They
went to a meet of the hounds, a most successful outing for it gave them
ravening appetites. In short, as the cousin’s wife said when bidding
farewell, it was a time of great enjoyment.

And Pettigrove said so too. He believed it, and yet was glad to be quit
of his friends in order to contemplate the serene dawn that was to
come at any hour now. By New Year’s Day Mrs. Cronshaw had not returned,
but the big countryman was patient, his mind, though not at rest,
was confident. The days passed as invisibly as warriors in a hostile
country, and almost before he had begun to despair February came, a
haggard month to follow a frosty January. Mist clung to the earth
as tightly as the dense grey fur on the back of a cat, ice began to
uncongeal, adjacent lands became indistinct, and distant fields could
not be seen at all. The banks of the roads and the squat hedges were
heavily dewed. The cries of invisible rooks, the bleat of unseen sheep,
made yet more gloomy the contours of motionless trees wherefrom the
slightest movement of a bird fetched a splatter of drops to the road,
cold and uncheering.

All this inclemency crowded into the heart of the waiting man, a
distress without a gleam of anger or doubt, but only a fond anxiety.
Other anxieties came upon him which, without lessening his melancholy,
somewhat diverted it: his wife suffered a sudden grave decline in
health, and on calling in the doctor Pettigrove was made aware of her
approaching end. Torn between a strange recovered fondness for his
sinking wife and the romantic adventure with the widow, which, to
his mind at such a juncture, wore the sourest aspect of infidelity,
Pettigrove dwelt in remorse and grief until the night of St.
Valentine’s Day, when he received a letter. It came from a coast town
in Norfolk, from a hospital; Caroline, too, was ill. She made light of
her illness, but it was clear to him now that this and this alone was
the urgent reason of her retreat from Tull at Christmas. It was old
tubercular trouble (that was consumption, wasn’t it?) which had driven
her into sanatoriums on several occasions in recent years. She was
getting better now, she wrote, but it would be months before she would
be allowed to return. It had been rather a bad attack, so sudden. Now
she had no other thought or desire in the world but to be back at Tull
with her friend, and in time to see that fairy may tree at bloom in the
wood—he had promised to show it to her—they would often go together,
wouldn’t they—and she signed herself his, “with the deepest affection.”

He did not remember any promise to show her the tree, but he sat down
straightway and wrote her a letter of love, incoherently disclosed and
obscurely worded for any eyes but hers. He did not mention his wife;
he had suddenly forgotten her. He sealed the letter and put it aside
to be posted on the morrow. Then he crept back to his wife’s room and
continued his sick vigil.

But in that dim room, lit by one small candle, he did not heed the
invalid. His mind, feverishly alert, was devoted to thoughts of that
other who also lay sick, and who had intimidated him. He had feared
her, feared for himself. He had behaved like a lost wanderer who at
night, deep in a forest, had come upon the embers of a fire left
mysteriously glowing, and had crept up to it frightened, without stick
or stone: if only he had conquered his fear he might have lain down and
rested by its strange comfort. But now he was sure of her love, sure
of his own, he was secure, he would lay down and rest. She would come
with all the sweetness of her passion and the valour of her frailty,
stretching smooth, quiet wings over his lost soul.

Then he began to be aware of a soft, insistent noise, tapping, tapping,
tapping, that seemed to come from the front door below. To assure
himself he listened intently, and soon it became almost the only
sound in the world, clear but soft, sharp and thin, as if struck with
the finger nails only, tap, tap, tap, quickly on the door. When the
noise ceased he got up and groped stealthily down his narrow crooked
staircase. At the bottom he waited in an uncanny pause until just
beyond him he heard the gentle urgency again, tap, tap, and he flung
open the door. There was enough gloomy light to reveal the emptiness
of the porch; there was nothing there, nothing to be seen, but he
could distinctly hear the sound of feet being vigorously shuffled on
the doormat below him, as if the shoes of some light-foot visitor
were being carefully cleaned before entry. Then it stopped. Beyond
that—nothing. Pettigrove was afraid, he dared not cross the startling
threshold, he shot back the door, bolted it in a fluster, and blundered
away up the stairs.

And there was now darkness, the candle in his wife’s room having spent
itself, but as a glow from the fire embers remained he did not hasten
to light another candle. Instead, he fastened the bedroom door also,
and stood filled with wondering uneasiness, dreading to hear the tap,
tap, tap come again, just there, behind him. He listened for it with
stopped breath, but he could hear nothing, not the faintest scruple of
sound, not the beat of his own heart, not a flutter from the fire, not
a rustle of feet, not a breath—no! not even a breathing! He rushed to
the bed and struck a match: that was a dead face.... Under the violence
of his sharpening shock he sank upon the bed beside dead Carrie and a
faint crepuscular agony began to gleam over the pensive darkness of his
mind, with a promise of mad moonlight to follow.

Two days later a stranger came to the Pettigrove’s door, a short
brusque, sharp-talking man with iron-grey hair and iron-rimmed
spectacles. He was an ironmonger.

“Mr. Pettigrove? My name is Cronshaw, of Eastbourne, rather painful
errand, my sister-in-law, Mrs. Cronshaw, tenant of yours, I believe.”

Pettigrove stiffened into antagonism: what the devil was all this?
“Come in,” he remarked grimly.

“Thank you,” said Cronshaw, following Pettigrove into the parlour
where, with many sighs and much circumstance, he doffed his overcoat
and stood his umbrella in a corner. “Had to walk from the station, no
conveyances; that’s pretty stiff, miles and miles.”

“Have a drop of wine?” invited Pettigrove.

“Thank you,” said the visitor.

“It’s dandelion.”

“Very kind of you, I’m sure.” Cronshaw drew a chair up to the
fireplace, though the fire had not been lit, and the grate was full of
ashes, and asked if he might smoke. Pettigrove did not mind; he poured
out a glass of the yellow wine while Cronshaw lit his pipe. The room
smelled stuffy, heavy noises came from overhead as if men were moving
furniture. The stranger swallowed a few drops of the wine, coughed, and
said: “My sister-in-law is dead, I’m sorry to say. You had not heard, I
suppose?”

“Dead!” whispered Pettigrove. “Mrs. Cronshaw! No, no, I had not, I had
not heard that, I did not know. Mrs. Cronshaw dead—is it true?”

“Ah,” said the stranger with a laboured sigh. “Two nights ago in a
hospital at Mundesley. I’ve just come on from there. It was very
sudden, O, frightfully sudden, but it was not unexpected, poor woman,
it’s been off and on with her for years. She was very much attached to
this village, I suppose, and we’re going to bury her here, it was her
last request. That’s what I want to do now. I want to arrange about the
burial and the disposal of her things and to give up possession of your
house. I’m very sorry for that.”

“I’m uncommon grieved to hear this,” said Pettigrove. “She was a
handsome lady.”

“O yes,” the ironmonger took out his pocket-book and prepared to write
in it.

“A handsome lady,” continued the countryman tremulously, “handsome,
handsome.”

At that moment someone came heavily down the stairs and knocked at the
parlour door.

“Come in,” cried Pettigrove. A man with red face and white hair
shuffled into the room; he was dressed in a black suit that had been
made for a man not only bigger, but probably different in other ways.

“We shall have to shift her down here now,” he began. “I was sure we
should, the coffin’s too big to get round that awkward crook in these
stairs when it’s loaded. In fact, ’tis impossible. Better have her down
now afore we put her in, or there’ll be an accident on the day as sure
as judgment.” The man, then noticing Cronshaw, said: “Good-morning,
sir, you’ll excuse me.”

The ironmonger stared at him with horror, and then put his notebook
away.

“Yes, yes, then,” mumbled Pettigrove. “I’ll come up in a few minutes.”

The man went out and Cronshaw jumped up and said: “You’ll pardon me,
Mr. Pettigrove, I had no idea that you had had a bereavement too.”

“My wife,” said Pettigrove dully, “two nights ago.”

“Two nights ago! I am very sorry, most sorry,” stammered the other,
picking up his umbrella and hat. “I’ll go away. What a sad coincidence!”

“There’s no call to do that; what’s got to be done must be done.”

“I’ll not detain you long then, just a few details: I am most sorry,
very sorry, it’s extraordinary.”

He took out his notebook again—it had red edges and a fat elastic
band—and after conferring with Pettigrove for some time the stranger
went off to see the vicar, saying, as he shook hands: “I shall of
course see you again when it is all over. How bewildering it is, and
what a shock it is; from one day to another, and then nothing; and the
day after to-morrow they’ll be buried beside one another. I am very
sorry, most sorry. I shall of course come and see you again when it is
all over.”

After he had gone Pettigrove walked about the room murmuring: “She was
a lady, a handsome lady,” and then, still murmuring, he stumbled up the
stairs to the undertakers. His wife lay on the bed in a white gown. He
enveloped her stiff thin body in a blanket and carried it downstairs to
the parlour; the others, with much difficulty, carried down the coffin
and when they had fixed it upon some trestles they unwrapped Carrie
from the blankets and laid her in it.

Caroline and Carrie were buried on the same day in adjoining graves,
buried by the same men, and as the ironmonger was prevented by some
other misfortune from attending the obsequies there were no other
mourners than Pettigrove. The workshop sign of the Tull carpenter bore
the following notice:

                           Small
  ☞COMPLETE UNDERTAKER    Hearse
                           Kept.

and therefore it was he who ushered the handsome lady from the station
on that bitter day. Frost was so heavy that the umbrage of pine and fir
looked woolly, thick grey swabs. Horses stood miserably in the frozen
fields, breathing into any friendly bush. Rooks pecked industriously at
the tough pastures, but wiser fowls, unlike the fabulous good child,
could be neither seen nor heard. And all day someone was grinding corn
at the millhouse; the engine was old and kept on emitting explosions
that shook the neighbourhood like a dreadful bomb. Pettigrove, who
had not provided himself with a black overcoat and therefore wore none
at all, shivered so intensely during the ceremony that the keen edge
of his grief was dulled, and indeed from that time onwards his grief,
whatever its source, seemed deprived of all keenness: it just dulled
him with a permanent dullness.

He caused to be placed on his wife’s grave a headstone, quite small,
not a yard high, inscribed to

      CAROLINE
  The beloved wife
         of
  John Pettigrove

Some days after its erection he was astonished to find the headstone
had fallen flat on its face. It was very strange, but after all it was
a small matter, a simple affair, so in the dusk he himself took a spade
and set it up again. A day or two later it had fallen once more. He
was now inclined to some suspicion, he fancied that mischievous boys
had done it; he would complain to the vicar. But Pettigrove was an
easy-going man, he did not complain; he replaced the stone, setting it
more deeply in the earth and padding the turf more firmly around it.

When it fell the third time he was astonished and deeply moved, but he
was no longer in doubt, and as he once more made a good upheaval by the
grave in the dusk he said in his mind, and he felt too in his heart,
that he understood.

“It will not fall again,” he said, and he was right: it did not.

Pettigrove himself lived for another score of years, during which the
monotony of his life was but mildly varied; he just went on registering
births and deaths and rearing little oaks and pines, firs and
sycamores. Sentimental deference to the oft-repeated wish of his wife
led him to join the church choir and sing its anthems and hymns with
a secular blitheness that was at least mellifluous. Moreover, after a
year or two, he _did_ become a parish councillor and in a modest way
was something of a “shining light.”

“If I were you,” observed an old countryman to him, “and I had my way,
I know what I would do: I would live in a little house and have a
quiet life, and I wouldn’t care the toss of a ha’penny for nothing and
nobody!”

In the time of May, always, Pettigrove would wander in Tull Great Wood
as far as the hidden pleasaunce where the hawthorn so whitely bloomed.
None but he knew of that, or remembered it, and when its dying petals
were heaped upon the grass he gathered handfuls to keep in his pocket
till they rotted. Sometimes he thought he would leave Tull and see
something of the world; he often thought of that, but it seemed as if
time had stabilized and contracted round his heart and he did not go.
At last, after twenty years of widowhood, he died and was buried, and
this was the manner of that.

Two men were digging his grave on the morning of the interment, a
summer’s day so everlasting beautiful that it was incredible anyone
should be dead. The two men, an ancient named Jethro and a younger
whom he called Mark, went to sit in the cool porch for a brief rest.
The work on the grave had been very much delayed, but now the old
headstone was laid on one side, and most of the earth that had covered
his wife’s body was heaped in untidy mounds upon the turf close by.
Otherwise there was no change in the yard or the trees that grew so
high, the grass that grew so greenly, the dark brick wall, or the door
of fugitive blue; there was even a dappled goat quietly cropping. A
woman came into the porch, remarked upon the grand day, and then passed
into the church to her task of tidying up for the ceremony. Jethro took
a swig of drink from a bottle and handed it to his mate.

“You don’t remember old Fan as used to clean the church, do you? No,
’twas ’fore you come about these parts. She was a smartish old gal.
Bother me if one of they goats didn’t follow her into the darn church
one day, ah, and wouldn’t be drove out on it, neither, no, and she
chasing of it from here to there and one place and another but out it
would not go, that goat. And at last it act-u-ally marched up into the
pulpit and putt its two forelegs on the holy book and said ’Baa-a-a!’”
Here Jethro gave a prolonged imitation of a goat’s cry. “Well, old Fan
had been a bit skeered but she was so overcome by that bit of piety
that, darn me, if she didn’t sit down and play the organ for it!”

Mark received this narration with a lack-lustre air and at once the
two men resumed their work. Meanwhile a man ascended the church tower;
other men had gone into the home of the dead man. Soon the vicar came
hurrying through the blue door in the wall and the bell gave forth its
first solemn toll.

“Hey, Jethro,” called Mark from the grave. “What d’you say’s the name
of this chap?”

“Pettigrove. Hurry up, now.”

Mark, after bending down, whispered from the grave: “What was his
wife’s name?”

“Why, man alive, that ’ud be Pettigrove, too.”

The bell in the tower gave another profoundly solemn beat.

“What’s the name on that headstone?” asked Mark.

“Caroline Pettigrove. What be you thinking on?”

“We’re in the wrong hole, Jethro; come and see for yourself, the plate
on this old coffin says Caroline Cronshaw, see for yourself, we’re in
the wrong hole.”

Again the bell voiced its melancholy admonition.

Jethro descended the short ladder and stood in the grave with Mark just
as the cortège entered the church by the door on the opposite side of
the yard. He knelt down and rubbed with his own fingers the dulled
inscription on the mouldering coffin; there was no doubt about it,
Caroline Cronshaw lay there.

“Well, may I go to glory,” slowly said the old man. It may have
occurred to Mark that this was an extravagantly remote destination to
prescribe; at any rate he said: “There ain’t no time, now, come on.”

“Who the devil be she? However come that wrong headstone to be putt on
this wrong grave?” quavered the kneeling man.

“Are you coming out?” growled Mark, standing with one foot on the
ladder, “or ain’t you? They’ll be chucking him on top of you in a
couple o’ minutes. There’s no time, I tell you.”

“’Tis a strange come-up as ever I see,” said the old man; striking one
wall of the grave with his hand: “that’s where we should be, Mark, next
door, but there’s no time to change it and it must go as it is, Mark.
Well, it’s fate; what is to be must be whether it’s good or right and
you can’t odds it, you darn’t go against it, or you be wrong.” They
stood in the grave muttering together. “Not a word, Mark, mind you!”
At last they shovelled some earth back upon the tell-tale name-plate,
climbed out of the grave, drew up the ladder, and stood with bent heads
as the coffin was borne from the church towards them. It was lowered
into the grave, and at the “earth to earth” Jethro, with a flirt of his
spade dropped in a handful of sticky marl, another at “ashes to ashes,”
and again at the “dust to dust.” Finally, when they were alone together
again, they covered in the old lovers, dumping the earth tightly and
everlastingly about them, and reset the headstone, Jethro remarking as
they did so: “That headstone, well, ’tis a mystery, Mark! And I can’t
bottom it, I can’t bottom it at all, ’tis a mystery.”

And indeed, how should it not be, for the secret had long since been
forgotten by its originator.




                        _The Fancy Dress Ball_


There was a young fellow named Bugloss. He wore cufflinks made of
agate with studs to match but was otherwise an agreeable person who
suffered much from a remarkable diffidence, one of nature’s minor
inconsistencies having been to endow him with a mute desire for
romantic adventure and an entire incapacity to inaugurate any such
thing.

It was in architecture that he found his way of life, quite a
profitable and genteel way; for while other hands and heads devised
the mere details of drainage, of window and wall, staircase, cupboard,
and floor, in fact each mechanical thing down to the hooks and bells
in every room, he it was who painted those entrancing draughts of
elevation and the general prospect (with a few enigmatic but graceful
trees, clouds in the offing, and a tiny postman plodding sideways up
the carriage drive) which lured the fond fly into the architectural
parlour. It must be confessed that he himself lived in rooms over the
shop of a hairdresser, whose window displayed the elegantly coiffed
head and bust of a wax lady suffering either from an acute attack of
jaundice or the effects of a succession of late nights: next door was
an establishment dealing exclusively, but not exhaustingly, in mangles
and perambulators. In Bugloss’s room there were two bell handles with
wires looking very handy and complete, yet whenever he desired the
attendance of the maid he had (_a_) to take a silver whistle from his
pocket; (_b_) to open the door; and (_c_) to blow it smartly in the
passage.

His exceeding shyness was humiliating to himself and annoying to people
of friendly disposition, it could not have been more preposterous had
he been condemned to wear a false nose; he might have gone (he may
even now be going) to his grave without once looking into a woman’s
eyes. What a pity! His own eyes were worth looking at; he was really
a nice young man, tall and slender with light fluffy hair, who if he
couldn’t hide his amiable light under a bushel certainly behaved as if
it wasn’t there. Things were so until one day he chanced to read with
envious pleasure but a good deal of scepticism a book called _Anatol_
by a Viennese writer; almost immediately the fascinating possibilities
of romantic infidelity were confirmed by a quarrel which began in
the hairdresser’s house between the young hairdresser and his wife,
Monsieur and Madame Rabignol, and lasted for a week in the course of
which Bugloss learned that the hairdresser was indulging in precisely
one of those intrigues with an unknown lady living somewhere near by;
Madame Rabignol, charming but virulent, protested a thousand times
that it must be a base woman who walked the streets at night, and that
Monsieur Rabignol was a low pig. The fair temptress, it appeared, was
given to the use of a toilet unguent with the beguiling misdescription
of “Vanishing Face Cream”; that was an unfortunate circumstance,
because the wife of the hairdresser, a very cute woman, on her
husband’s return from an evening’s absence, invariably kissed him and
smelt him.

“Evil communications,” saith St. Paul (borrowing the phrase from
Menander), “corrupt good manners,” and his notion must have something
of truth in it, for these domestic revelations produced an unusual
stir in the Bugloss bosom—he bought a ticket for a popular fancy dress
ball and made a mighty resolve to discard his pusillanimous self with
one grand gesture and there and then take the plunge. At a fancy dress
ball you could do that; everyone made a fool of himself more or less;
and Bugloss determined to plunge into whatever there was to plunge
in. This was desperately unwise, but you are not to suppose that he
harboured any looseness or want of principle; he was good and modest,
and virtuous as any young man could possibly be; he only hoped, at the
very least, to look some fair girl deep in the eyes. So he designed
an oriental costume, simple to make (being loose-fitting), and having
bought quantities of purple and crimson fabric he wrapped them up and
sent the office-boy with his design, materials, measurements, and
instructions to a dressmaker in the neighbourhood, whom he wisely
thought would make a better job of it than a tailor. When the costume
was finished he was delighted; it was magnificent, resplendent,
artistic, and the dressmaker’s charge was moderate.

On the night of the ball, a warm August night with soft thrilling air
and a sky of sombre velvet, he drove in a closed cab. Dancing was
in the open, the lawns of a mansion were lent for the occasion, and
Bugloss went rather late to escape notice—nearly eleven o’clock—but
in the cab his timorousness conspiring against him had deepened to
palpitating dejection; he was afraid again, the grand gesture was
forgotten, and his attire was fantastically guarded from the public
eye. From his window he had watched the arrival of the cab and had
slunk down to it secretly—not a word to the Rabignols!—in a bowler
hat and a mackintosh that reached to his feet; his fancy shoes were
concealed under a pair of goloshes, the bright tasselled cap was in his
pocket.

Heavens! It was too painful. This was no plunge, this miserable sink or
swim—it was delirium, hell—what a stupid man he had been to come—it was
no go, it was useless—and he was about to order the cabman to turn back
home when the cab stopped at the gates of the mansion, the door was
flung open and a big policeman almost dragged him out upon the carpeted
pavement. A knot of jocular bystanders caused him to scurry into the
grounds where three officials—good, bad, and indifferent—examined his
ticket and directed him onwards. But the cloak rooms were right across
the grounds, the great lawn was simply a bath of illumination, the band
played in the centre and the dancers, madly arrayed, were waltzing
madly. Bugloss, desiring only some far corner of darkness to flee into,
saw on all sides shadowy trees, dim shrubs, and walks that led to utter
gloom—thank God!—and there was a black moonless sky, though even that
seemed positively to drip with stars.

At this moment the big policeman, following after him, said: “What
about this cab, sir?”

“What—yes—this cab!” repeated Bugloss, and to his agonized imagination
every eye in the grounds became ironically fixed upon him alone;
even the music ceased, and there resounded a flutter of coruscating
amiability.

“D’ye want him to wait?” the policeman was grinning—“He ain’t got any
orders.”

“O, O dear, how much, what’s his fare? I don’t want him again
and—gracious! I haven’t a cent on me—what, what—O, please tell him to
call at my house to-morrow. Pay him then I will. Please!”

“Righto, my lord!” said the big policeman, saluting—he was a regular
joker that fellow. Then Bugloss, trembling in every limb, almost leapt
towards one of the dark walks, away from those grinning eyes. The
shrubs and trees concealed him, though even here an odd paper lantern
or two consorted with a few coloured bulbs of light. Shortly he began
his observations.

The cloak rooms, he found, could be approached only by crossing the
lawn. In a mackintosh, goloshes, and a bowler hat, that was too
terrific an ordeal; the trembling Israelite during that affrighting
passage of the Red Sea had all the incitements of escape and the
comfort of friends, but this more violent ordeal led into captivity,
and Bugloss was alone. What was to be done? The music began again
and it was agreeable, the illuminations were lustrous and pretty,
the dancers gay, but Bugloss was neither agreeable nor gay, and his
prettiness was not yet on the surface. He was in a highly wrought
condition, he was limp, and he remained in what seclusion he could
find in the garden, peering like a sinner at some assembly of the
blest. At last he snatched off his goloshes and stuffed them in his
pocket. “So far,” he murmured, “so good. I will hide the mackintosh
among the bushes, I can’t face that dressing room.” Just then the band
gave a heightened blare, drum and cymbals were rapidly beaten and the
music ceased amid clapping and polite halloing. “Dash it, I must wait
till the next dance,” said Bugloss, “and, O lord, there’s a lot of
them coming this way.” He turned to retreat into deeper darkness when
suddenly, near the musicians, he saw a fascinating girl, a dainty but
startling figure skimming across the lawn as if to overtake a friend.
Why—yes—she had a wig of bright green hair, green; a short-waisted
cherry silk jacket and harlequin pantaloons, full at the hips but
narrowing to the ankles, where white stockings slipped into a pair of
gilded leather shoes with heels of scarlet. Delicately charming were
her face and figure, entrancing were her movements, and she tinkled all
over with hidden bells.

“Sweet God, what beauty!” thought Bugloss, “this is She, the Woman to
know, I must, I must ... but how?”

She disappeared. For the moment he could not rid himself of the bowler
hat and mackintosh, so many couples roamed in the dark glades; wherever
he went he could see the glow of cigarettes, generally in twos, and
there were whispering or silent couples standing about in unexpected
places. Retiring to the darkest corner he had previously found he was
about to discard his mackintosh when he was startled by a cry at his
elbow: “Lena, where are you, what’s that?” and a girl scuttled away,
calling “Lena! Lena!” Her terror dismayed him, the little shock itself
brought the sweat to his brow, but the music beginning again drew all
the stragglers back to the lawn. There, from his gloomy retreat, he
beheld the green-haired beauty in the arms of a pirate king who was
adorned with an admiral’s hat and a dangerous moustache. “If,” thought
Bugloss, still in his mufti, “I couldn’t have discovered a better
get-up than that fellow, I’d have stayed away. There’s no picture in
it, it’s just silly, I couldn’t wear a thing like that, I couldn’t
wear it, I’d have perished rather than come.” And indeed there was an
absence of imagination about all the male adornment; many of the ladies
were right enough, but some were horrors, and most of the men were
horrors; there was justification for Bugloss’s subsequent reflection:
“I’ll show them, a little later on, what can be done when an artist
takes the thing in hand; now after this dance is over.... etc., etc.”

Two lovers startled him by beginning to quarrel. They were passing
among the trees behind him and talking quite loudly, both with a slight
foreign accent. “But I shall not let you go, Johannes,” said the lady
with a fierce little cry. Bugloss turned and could just discern a lady
costumed as a vivandière; her companion was in the uniform Of a Danish
soldier.

“If you forced me to stop I would kill you,” retorted the man.

“O, you would kill me!”

“If you forced me to stop.”

“You would kill me ... so!”

“Yes, I would kill you.”

“But you have told me that if I _can_ keep you here in England I may do
it. You know. If I can. You know that, Johannes!”

Bugloss was persuaded that he had heard her voice before, though he
could not recognize the speaker.

“Be quiet, you are a fool,” the man said. That was all Bugloss heard.
It was brutal enough. If only a woman, any woman, had wanted _him_ like
that!

He wandered about during other dances. The green-haired girl was always
with that idiotic pirate, and it made things very difficult, because
although Bugloss had fallen desperately in love with her he could not,
simply could not, march up and drag her away from her companion. He
could not as yet even venture from his ambush among the trees, and they
never wandered in the gloom—they were always dancing together or eating
together. He, Bugloss, had no interest in any other woman there, no
spark of interest whatsoever. That being so, why go to all the fuss of
discarding the mackintosh and making an exhibition of himself? Why go
bothering among that crowd, he was not a dancer at all, he didn’t want
to go! But still ... by and by perhaps ... when that lovely treasure
was not so extraordinarily engaged. Sweet God! she was just ... well,
but he could not stand much more of that infernal pirate’s antics with
her. Withdrawing his tantalized gaze he sat down in darkness behind a
clump of yew trimmed in the shape of some fat animal that resembled a
tall hippopotamus. Here he lit his tenth cigarette. At once a dizziness
assailed him, he began to see scarlet splashes in the gloom, to feel
as if he were being lacerated with tiny pins. Throwing the cigarette
away he stretched himself at full length under the bush. Scarcely had
he done so when he became aware that two others were sitting down on
the other side of it, the same foreign couple, the vivandière and her
threatening cavalier.

“Listen to me, Hélène,” the man was saying in a soft consoling voice,
“you shall trust to me and come away. Together we will go. But here
I cannot stay. It is fate. You love, eh? Come then, we will go to
Copenhagen, I will take you to my country. Now, Hélène!”

The lady made no reply; Bugloss felt that she must be crying. The Dane
continued to woo and the Frenchwoman to murmur back to him: “Is it not
so, Johannes?” “No, Hélène, no.” But at last he cried angrily: “Pah!
Then stop with your bandit, that pig! Pah!” and chattering angrily in
his strange language he sprang up and stalked away. Hélène rose too and
followed him beseechingly into the gloom: “No, no, Johannes, no!”

Bugloss got up from the grass; his dizziness was gone. He knew that
voice, it seemed impossible, but he knew her, and he had half a mind
to rush home: but being without his watch and unable to discover what
o’clock it was, he did not care to walk out into the streets with the
chance of being guyed by any half-drunken sparks passing late home.
He would wait, he was sure it was past midnight now, there would be a
partial exodus soon, and he would go off unnoticed in the crowd. There
was no more possibility now of him shedding his coat and joining the
revellers than there was of that beauteous girl flying into his arms;
his inhibition possessed him with tenfold power, he was an imbecile.
Sad, pitiful, wretched, outcast! Through the screen of foliage the
music floated with exquisite faintness, luminous cadenzas from a
gleaming but guarded Eldorado whose light was music, whose music was
all a promise and a mockery; he was a miserable prisoner pent in his
own unbearable but unbreakable shackles and dressed up like a doll in a
pantomime! Many people had come in their ordinary clothes; why, O why
had he put on this maddening paralysing raiment? Why had he come at all?

Some of the lights had begun to fade; at one end of the lawn most of
the small lamps had guttered out, leaving a line of a dozen chairs in
comparative obscurity. Weary of standing, he slunk to the corner chair
and sat down with a sigh. Just beside him was a weeping ash that he
supposed only looked happy when it rained, and opposite was a poplar
straining so hard to brush the heavens that he fancied it would be
creaking in every limb. By and by an elderly decorous lady, accompanied
by two girls not so decorous—the one arrayed as a Puritan maiden and
the other as a Scout mistress—came and sat near him, but he did not
move. They did not perceive the moody Bugloss. The elderly lady spoke:
“Do go and fetch her here; no, when this waltz is over. She is very
rude, but I want to see her. I can’t understand why she avoids us, and
how she is getting on is a mystery to everybody. Bring her here.”

The puritan maiden and the scout mistress, embracing each other,
skipped away to the refreshment booth. Glorious people sat about
there drinking wine as if they disliked it, sipping ices as if it were
a penance, and eating remarkable food or doing some other reasonable
things, but Bugloss dared not join them although he was very hungry. It
was not hunger he wanted to avert, but an impending tragedy.

The hypersensitive creature sees in the common mass of his fellows only
something that seeks to deny him, and either in fear of that antagonism
or in the knowledge of his own imperfections he isolates and envelopes
the real issue of his being—much as an oyster does with the irritant
grain in its beard; only the outcome is seldom a pearl and not always
as useful as a fish. Bugloss was still wholly enveloped, and his
predicament gave a melancholy tone to his thoughts. He sat hunched in
his chair until the dance ended and the two girls came back, bringing
with them the lovely green-haired one!

“Hello, aunt,” she cried merrily enough, “why aren’t you in costume?
Like my get-up?”

Without a word the elderly lady kissed her, and all sat down within
a few feet of Bugloss. It thrilled him to hear her voice; at least
he would be able to recognize that when she turned back again to
daylight’s cool civilities.

“Did you know that I had blossomed out in business?” she was saying.
Bugloss thought it a beautiful voice.

“I heard of it,” said her aunt, whom you may figure as a lady with a
fan, eyeglasses, and the repellant profile of a bird of prey, “about
half an hour ago. I wish I had heard of it before.”

“I am a full-blown modiste.”

“Yes, you might have told me.”

“But I have told you.”

“You might have told me before.”

“But I haven’t seen you before, aunt.”

“No, we haven’t seen you. How is this business, Claire, is it thriving,
making money?”

“O, we get along, aunt,” said the radiant niece in a tone of almost
perverse amiability. “I have several assistants. Do you know, we made
seven of the costumes for this ball—seven—one of them for a man.”

“I thought ladies only made for ladies.”

“So did I, but this order just dropped in upon us very mysteriously,
and we did it, from top to toe, a most gorgeous arrangement, all
crimson and purple and silver and citron, but I haven’t seen anybody
wearing it yet. I wonder if you have? I’m so disappointed. It’s a
sultan, or a nabob, or a nankipoo of some kind, I am certain it was for
this ball. I was so anxious to see it worn. I had made up my mind to
dance at least half the dances with the wearer, it was so lovely. Have
you seen such a costume here?”

“No,” said the aunt grimly, “I have not, but I have noticed the pirate
king—did you make his costume too? I hope not!”

“O no, aunt,” laughed Claire, “isn’t he a fright?”

“Who is he?”

“That? O, a friend of mine, a business friend.”

“He seems fond of you.”

“I have known him some time. Yes, I like him. Don’t you like my pirate
king?” asked Claire, turning to her two cousins.

The cousins both thought he was splendid.

(“Good God!” groaned Bugloss.)

“I don’t,” declared auntie. “Do you know him very well, has he any
intentions? An orphan girl living by herself—you have your way to make
in the world—I am not presuming to criticize, my dear Claire, but is it
wise? Who is he?”

“Yes, aunt,” said Claire. Bugloss could hear the tinkle of her bells as
she moved a little restlessly.

“Are his intentions honourable? I should think they were otherwise.”

Claire did not reply immediately. It looked as if the musicians were
about to resume. There was a rattle of plates and things over at the
booth. Then she said reflectively: “I don’t think he has any—what you
call honourable intentions.”

“Not! Is he a bad man?”

“O no, I don’t mean that, aunt, no.”

“But what do you mean then, you’re a strange girl, what _could_ his
intentions be?”

“He hasn’t any intentions at all.”

“Not one way or the other?”

Claire seemed vaguely to hover over the significance of this. She said
calmly enough: “Not in any way. He’s my hairdresser, a Frenchman, and
so clever. He made this beautiful wig and gave it me. What do you think
of my beautiful wig, isn’t it sweet?”

There was a note of exasperation in the elder woman’s voice: “Why
don’t you get married, girl?”

“I’d rather work,” said Claire, “and besides, he’s already married.”

The music did begin, and a gentleman garbed as a druid came to claim
auntie for a dance. The three girls were left alone.

“Did he _really_ give you that wig?” asked the puritan maiden.

“Yes, isn’t it bonny? I love it.” She shook the dangling curls about
her face. “He’s frightfully clever with hair. French! You know his
saloon probably, Rabignol’s in the High Street. His wife is here, you
must have seen her too—a French soldier woman—what do you call them?
She hates me. She’s with a Danish captain. He _is_ a Dane, but he is
really an ice merchant. He thinks she adores him.”

“O Claire!” cried the two shocked cousins.

“But she doesn’t,” said Claire. “Sakes, I’m beginning to shiver; come
along.”

They all romped back towards the orchestra. Bugloss shivered too
and was glad—yes, glad—that she had gone. The tragedy had floated
satisfactorily out of his hands, thank the fates; it was Rabignol’s
affair. Damn Rabignol! Curse Rabignol! the bandit, the pig! He hoped
that Madame Rabignol _would_ elope with Johannes. He hoped the
green-haired girl—frail and lovely thing—would behave well; and he
hoped finally and frenziedly that Rabignol himself would be choked by
the common hangman. Bugloss then wanted to yawn, but somehow he could
not. He put on his rubber goloshes again. With unwonted audacity he
stalked off firmly, even a little fiercely, across the lawn in his
mackintosh and bowler hat, passing round the fringe of the dancers but
looking neither to the right nor to the left, then out of the gates
into the dark empty streets and so home. There, feeling rather like
a Cromwell made of chutney, he disarrayed himself and crept into bed
yawning and murmuring to himself: “So that’s a fancy dress ball! Sweet
God, but I’m glad I went! And I could have shown them something, I
could have. Say what you like, but mine was the finest costume at the
show; there’s no doubt about that, it was, it was! And I’m very glad I
went.”




               _The Cat, the Dog, and the bad old Dame_


The chemist had certain odd notions that were an agreeable reflex of
his name, which was Oddfellow—Herbert Oddfellow. Our man was odd about
diet. It was believed that he lived without cookery, that he browsed,
as it were, upon fruit and salads. Ironically enough he earned a
considerable income by the sale of nostrums for indigestion. At any
hour of the day you were likely to find him devouring apples, nibbling
artichokes, or sucking an orange, and your inquiry for a dose of
bismuth or some such aid would cause by an obscure process a sardonic
grin to assemble upon his face. You would scarcely have expected to
find a lot of indigestion in the working-class neighbourhood where his
pharmacy flourished, but it was there, certainly; he was quite cynical
about it—his business throve abundantly upon dietary disorders.

There were four big ornamental carboys in his shop windows—red, violet,
green, and yellow; incidentally he sold peppermint drops and poisons,
and at forty years of age he was reputed to be the happiest, as he
was certainly the healthiest, man in the county. This was not merely
because he was unmarried ... but there, I declare this tale is not
about Oddfellow himself, but about his lethal chamber.

You must know that the sacrificial exactions of the war did not spare
cats and dogs. They, too, were immolated—but painlessly—scores of
them, at Oddfellow’s. He was unhappy about that part of his business,
very much so; he loved animals, perhaps rather more than people, for,
naturally, what he ministered to in his pharmacy was largely human
misery or human affectation. Evil cruel things—the bolt of a gaol, the
lime of the bird-snarer, the butcher’s axe—maddened him.

In the small garden at the back of the dispensary the interments were
carried out by Horace the errand boy, a juvenile with snub nose and
short, tough hair, who always wore ragged puttees. He delighted in such
obsequies, and had even instituted some ceremonial orgies. But at last
these lethal commissions were so numerous that the burial-ground began
to resemble the habitat of some vast, inappeasable mole, and thereupon
Oddfellow had to stipulate for sorrowing owners to conduct the
interments themselves in cemeteries of their own. Even this provision
did not quell the inflow of these easily disposable victims.

Mr. Franks brought him a magnificent cat to be destroyed. (Shortly
afterwards Franks was conveyed to the lunatic asylum, an institution
which still nurtures him in despotic durance.) Pending the return of
Horace, who was disbursing remedial shrapnel to the neighbourhood, the
cat, tied to a rail in the shop, sat dozing in the sunlight.

“What a beautiful cat!” exclaimed a lady caller, stroking its purring
majesty. The lady herself was beautiful. Oddfellow explained that its
demise was imminent—nothing the matter with it—owner didn’t want it.

“How cruel, you sweet thing, how cruel!” pronounced the lady, who
really was very beautiful. “I would love to have it. Why shouldn’t I
have it ... if its owner doesn’t want it? I wonder. May I?”

Manlike was Oddfellow, beautiful was the lady; the lady took the cat
away. Twenty-four hours later the shop counter was stormed by the
detestable Franks, incipient insanity already manifest in him. He
carried the selfsame cat under his arm—it had returned to its old home.
Franks assailed the abashed chemist with language that at its mildest
was abusive and libellous. His chief complaint seemed to repose upon
the circumstance of having _paid_ for the cat’s destruction, whereupon
Oddfellow who, like an Irishman, never walked into an argument—he
simply bounced in—threw down the fee upon the counter and urged Mr.
Franks to take his cat, and his money, and himself away as speedily
as might be. This reprehensible behaviour did by no means allay the
tension; the madman-designate paraded many further signs of his
impending doom.

“Take your cat away, I tell you,” shouted Oddfellow, “take it away. I
wouldn’t destroy it for a thousand pounds!”

“You won’t, oh?”

“Put an end to you with pleasure!”

“Yes?”

“Make you a present of a dose of poison whenever you like to come and
take it!”

“Yes?”

“I will!”

Franks went away with his tom-cat.

“O ... my ... lord!” ejaculated the chemist, that being his favourite
evocation; “I’ll do no more of this cat-and-dog business. I shall not
do any more; no, I shall not. I do not like it at all.”

But in the afternoon his assistant, who had not been informed of this
resolve, accepted two more victims for the lethal chamber, another
tom-cat and a collie dog.

“O ... my ... lord!” groaned the chemist distractedly; but there was
no help for it, and, calling his boy Horace, they carried the cat
into the storeroom. The lethal box was in a corner; all round were
shelves of costly drugs. The place did not smell of death; it smelt of
paint, oils, volatile spirits, tubs of white lead, and packing-cases
that contained scented soap or feeding-bottles. As Oddfellow prepared
his syringe, a sporting friend named Jerry peeped in to watch the
proceedings.

“Shut the door!” cried little Horace. “I can’t hold him.... He’s off!”

Sure enough the cat, sensing its danger, had burst from his arms and
sprung to one of the shelves. Immediately phials of drugs began to
fall and smash upon the floor, and as the cat rushed and scurried from
their grasp disaster was heaped upon disaster; the green, glowing eyes,
the rigid teeth, that seemed to grow as large as a tiger’s, confounded
them, and the havoc deterred them; they dared not approach the spitting
fury, it was a wild beast again, and a bold one.

“O ... my ... lord!” said Oddfellow, also swearing softly, for bottles
continued to slip from shelf to floor. “What’s to be done?”

“Open the door—let the flaming thing go,” said Jerry.

“No fear,” replied the chemist, “I’ve had enough of these dead cats
turning up like Banquo’s ghost—just enough.”

Horace intervened. “My father’s got a gun, sir; shall I run round home
and get it?”

Jerry’s eyes began to gleam, the costly phials kept dropping to
the floor—the chemist distractedly agreed—the boy Horace ran home
and fetched a rook rifle. But his prowess was so poor, his aim so
disastrous—he shot a hole through a barrel of linseed oil and received
a powerful squirt of it in his eye—that Jerry deprived him of the
weapon. Even then several rounds had to be fired, a carboy of acid was
cracked, a window smashed, a lamp blown to pieces, before poor tom was
finally subdued. Oddfellow had gone into the shop. He could not bring
himself to witness the dismal slaughter. Every repercussion sent a pang
of pity to his heart, and when at last the bleeding body of the cat was
laid in the yard to await removal by its owner he almost vomited and he
almost wept; if he had not sniffed the bunch of early primroses in his
buttonhole he would surely have done one or the other.

“Now the dog,” whispered the chemist. The collie was very subdued, good
dog, he gave no trouble at all, good dog, he was hustled into the big
box, good dog, and quietly chloroformed. Later on, a countryman with
his cart called for the body. The old woman who owned it was going
to make a hearthrug with the skin. It was enveloped in a sack; the
countryman carried it out on his shoulder like a butcher carrying the
carcase of a sheep and flung it into the cart. The callousness of this
struck Mr. Oddfellow so profoundly that he announced there and then,
positively and finally, that he would undertake no more business of
that kind, and doubly to insure this the lethal box was taken into the
yard and chopped up.

Now, the poor old woman who owned the dog called next day at the
chemist’s shop. Behind her walked the very collie. For a moment or two
Oddfellow feared that he was to be haunted by the walking ghost of cats
and dogs for evermore. Said the old woman: “Please, sir, you must do
him again; he’s woke up!”

She described at great length the dog’s strange revival. It stood
humbly enough in the background, a little drowsy, but not at all uneasy.

“No,” cried Oddfellow firmly; “can’t do it—destroyed my tackle. You
take him home, ma’am; he’s all right. Dog that’s been through that
ought to live a long life. Take him home again, ma’am,” he urged, “he’s
all right.”

The woman was old; she was feeble and poor; she was not able to keep
him now, he was such a big dog. Wasn’t it hard enough to get him food,
things were so dear, and now there was the licence money due! She
hadn’t got it; she never would have it; she really couldn’t afford it.

“You take him, sir, and keep him, sir.”

“No, I can’t keep a dog—no room.”

“Have him, sir,” she pleaded; “you’ll be kind to him.”

“No, no; ... but ... if it’s only his licence ... I’ll tell you what.
I’ll pay for his licence rather than destroy him.”

Putting his hand into the till, he laid three half-crowns before her.
The old woman stared at the chemist, but she stared still more at the
money. Then, thanking him with quaint, confused dignity, she gathered
it up, but again stood gazing meditatively at the three big coins, now
lying, so unexpectedly, in her thin palm.

“Good dog,” said the chemist, giving him a final pat. “Good dog!”

Then the poor old woman, with tears in her eyes, turned out of Mr.
Oddfellow’s shop and, followed by her dog, walked off to a quarter of
the town where there was another chemist who kept a lethal chamber.




                       _The Wife of Ted Wickham_


Perhaps it is a mercy we can’t see ourselves as others see us. Molly
Wickham was a remarkable pretty woman in days gone by; maybe she is
wiser since she has aged, but when she was young she was foolish. She
never seemed to realize it, but I wasn’t deceived.

So said the cattle-dealer, a healthy looking man, massive, morose, and
bordering on fifty. He did not say it to anybody in particular, for it
was said—it was to himself he said it—privately, musingly, as if to
soothe the still embittered recollection of a beauty that was foolish,
a fondness that was vain.

Ted Wickham himself was silly, too, when he married her. Must have been
extraordinarily touched to marry a little soft, religious, teetotal
party like her, and him a great sporting cock of a man, just come into
a public-house business that his aunt had left him, “The Half Moon,”
up on the Bath Road. He always ate like an elephant, but she’d only
the appetite of a scorpion. And what was worse, he was a true blood
conservative while all her family were a set of radicals that you
couldn’t talk sense to: if you only so much as mentioned the name of
Gladstone they would turn their eyes up to the ceiling as if he was a
saint in glory. Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it’s unnatural
stuff to drink so much of. Grant their name was. They christened her
Pamela, and as if that wasn’t cruel enough they messed her initials up
by giving her the middle name of Isabel.

But she was a handsome creature, on the small side but sound as a
roach and sweet as an apple tree in bloom. Pretty enough to convert
Ted, and I thought she would convert him, but she was a cussed
woman—never did what you would expect of her—and so she didn’t even
try. She gave up religion herself, gave it up altogether and went to
church no more. That was against her inclination, but of course it
was only right, for Ted never could have put up with that. Wedlock’s
one thing and religion’s two: that’s odd and even: a little is all
very well if it don’t go a long ways. Parson Twamley kept calling on
her for a year or two afterwards, trying to persuade her to return
to the fold—he couldn’t have called oftener if she had owed him a
hundred pound—but she would not hear of it, she would not go. He was
not much of a parson, not one to wake anybody up, but he had a good
delivery, and when he’d the luck to get hold of a sermon of any sense
his delivery was very good, very good indeed. She would say: “No, sir,
my feelings aren’t changed one bit, but I won’t come to church any
more, I’ve my private reasons.” And the parson would glare across at
old Ted as if he were a Belzeboob, for Ted always sat and listened to
the parson chattering to her. Never said a word himself, always kept
his pipe stuck in his jaw. Ted never persuaded her in the least, just
left it to her, and she would come round to his manner of thinking in
the end, for though he never actually said it, she always knew what his
way of thinking was. A strange thing, it takes a real woman to do that,
silly or no! At election times she would plaster the place all over
with tory bills, do it with her own hands!

Still, there’s no stability in meekness of that sort, a weathervane can
only go with wind and weather, and there was no sense in her giving
in to Ted as she did, not in the long run, for he couldn’t help but
despise her. A man wants something or other to whet the edge of his
life on; and he did despise her, I know.

But she was a fine creature in her way, only her way wasn’t his. A
beautiful woman, too, well-limbered up, with lovely hair, but always
a very proper sort, a milksop—Ted told me once that he had never seen
her naked. Well, can you wonder at the man? And always badgering him to
do things that could not be done at the time. To have “The Half Moon”
painted, or enlarged, or insured: she’d keep on badgering him, and he
could not make her see that any god’s amount of money spent on paint
wouldn’t improve the taste of liquor.

“I can see as far into a quart pot as the King of England,” he says,
“and I know that if this bar was four times as big as ’tis a quart
wouldn’t hold a drop more then than it does now.”

“No, of course,” she says.

“Nor a drop less neither,” says Ted. He showed her that all the money
expended on improvements and insurance and such things were so much
off something else. Ted was a generous chap—liked to see plenty of
everything, even though he had to give some of it away. But you can’t
make some women see some things.

“Not a roof to our heads, nor a floor to our feet, nor a pound to turn
round on if a fire broke out,” Molly would say.

“But why should a fire break out?” he’d ask her. “There never has been
a fire here, there never ought to be a fire here, and what’s more,
there never will be a fire here, so why should there be a fire?”

And of course she let him have his own way, and they never had a fire
there while he was alive, though I don’t know that any great harm
would have been done anyways, for after a few years trade began to
slacken off, and the place got dull, and what with the taxes it was not
much more than a bread and cheese business. Still, there’s no matter
of that: a man don’t ask for a bed of roses: a world without some
disturbance or anxiety would be like a duckpond where the ducks sleep
all day and are carried off at night by the foxes.

Molly was like that in many things, not really contrary, but no tact.
After Ted died she kept on at “The Half Moon” for a year or two by
herself, and regular as clockwork every month Pollock, the insurance
manager, would drop in and try for to persuade her to insure the
house or the stock or the furniture, any mortal thing. Well, believe
you, when she had only got herself to please in the matter that woman
wouldn’t have anything to say to that insurance—she never did insure,
and never would.

“I wouldn’t run such a risk; upon my soul it’s flying in the face of
possibilities, Mrs. Wickham”—he was a palavering chap, that Pollock; a
tall fellow with sandy hair, and he always stunk of liniment for he had
asthma on the chest—“A very grave risk, it is indeed,” he would say,
“the Meazer’s family was burnt clean out of hearth and home last St.
Valentine’s day, and if they hadn’t taken up a policy what would have
become of those Meazers?”

“I dunno,” Molly says—that was the name Ted give her—“I dunno, and I’m
sorry for unfortunate people, but I’ve my private reasons.”

She was always talking about her private reasons, and they must have
been devilish private, for not a soul on God’s earth ever set eyes on
them.

“Well, Mrs. Wickham,” says Pollock, “they’d have been a tidy ways up
Queer Street, and ruin’s a long-lasting affair,” Pollock says. He was
a rare palavering chap, and he used to talk about Gladstone, too, for
he knew her family history; but that didn’t move her, and she did not
insure.

“Yes, I quite agree,” she says, “but I’ve my private reasons.”

Sheer female cussedness! But where her own husband couldn’t persuade
her Pollock had no chance at all. And then, of course, two years after
Ted died she did go and have a fire there. “The Half Moon” was burnt
clean out, rafter and railings, and she had to give it up and shift
into the little bullseye business where she is now, selling bullseyes
to infants and ginger beer to boy scholars on bicycles. And what does
it all amount to? Why, it don’t keep her in hairpins. She had the most
beautiful hair once. But that’s telling the story back foremost.

Ted was a smart chap, a particular friend of mine (so was Molly),
and he could have made something of himself and of his business,
perhaps, if it hadn’t been for her. He was a sportsman to the backbone;
cricket, shooting, fishing, always game for a bit of life, any mortal
thing—what was there he couldn’t do? And a perfect demon with women,
I’ve never seen the like. If there was a woman for miles around as he
couldn’t come at, then you could bet a crown no one else could. He had
the gift. Well, when one woman ain’t enough for a man, twenty ain’t
too many. He and me were in a tight corner together more than once,
but he never went back on a friend, his word was his Bible oath. And
there was he all the while tied up to this soft wife of his, who never
once let on she knew of it at all, though she knowed much. And never
would she cast the blink of her eyes—splendid eyes they were, too—on
any willing stranger, nor even a friend, say, like myself; it was
all Ted this and Ted that, though I was just her own age and Ted was
twelve years ahead of us both. She didn’t know her own value, wouldn’t
take her opportunities, hadn’t the sense, as I say, though she had got
everything else. Ah, she was a woman to be looking at once, and none so
bad now; she wears well.

But she was too pious and proper, it aggravated him, but Ted never once
laid a finger on her and never uttered one word of reproach though
he despised her; never grudged her a thing in reason when things
were going well with him. It’s God Almighty’s own true gospel—they
never had a quarrel in all the twelve years they was wed, and I don’t
believe they ever had an angry word, but how he kept his hands off her
I don’t know. I couldn’t have done it, but I was never married—I was
too independent for that work. He’d contradict her sometimes, for she
_would_ talk, and Ted was one of your silent sorts, but _she_—she
would talk for ever more. She was so artful that she used to invent all
manners of tomfoolery on purpose to make him contradict her; believe
you, she did, even on his death-bed.

I used to go and sit with him when he was going, poor Ted, for I
knew he was done for; and on the day he died, she said to him—and I
was there and I heard it: “Is there anything you would like me to
do, dear?” And he said, “No.” He was almost at his last gasp, he
had strained his heart, but she was for ever on at him, even then,
an unresting woman. It was in May, I remember it, a grand bright
afternoon outside, but the room itself was dreadful, it didn’t seem to
be afternoon at all; it was unbearable for a strong man to be dying
in such fine weather, and the carts going by, and though we were a
watching him, it seemed more as if something was watching us.

And she says to him again: “Isn’t there anything you would like me to
do?”

Ted says to her: “Ah! I’d like to hear you give one downright good damn
curse. Swear, my dear!”

“At what?” she says.

“Me, if you like.”

“What for?” she says. I can see her now, staring at him.

“For my sins.”

“What sins?” she says.

Now did you ever hear anything like that? What sins! After a while she
began at him once more.

“Ted, if anything happens to you I’ll never marry again.”

“Do what you like,” says he.

“I’ll not do that,” she says, and she put her arms round him, “for
you’d not rest quiet in your grave, would you, Ted?”

“Leave me alone,” he says, for he was a very crusty sick man, very
crusty, poor Ted, but could you wonder? “You leave me alone and I’ll
rest sure enough.”

“You can be certain,” she cries, “that I’d never, never do that, I’d
never look at another man after you, Ted, never; I promise it solemnly.”

“Don’t bother me, don’t bother at all.” And poor Ted give a grunt and
turned over on his side to get away from her.

At that moment some gruel boiled over on the hob—gruel and brandy was
all he could take. She turned to look after it, and just then old Ted
gave a breath and was gone, dead. She turned like a flash, with the
steaming pot in her hand, bewildered for a moment. She saw he had gone.
Then she put the pot back gently on the fender, walked over to the
window and pulled down the blind. Never dropped a tear, not one tear.

Well, that was the end of Ted. We buried him, one or two of us. There
was an insurance on his life for fifty pounds, but Ted had long before
mortgaged the policy and so there was next to nothing for her. But what
else could the man do? (Molly always swore the bank defrauded her!) She
put a death notice in the paper, how he was dead, and the date, and
what he died of: “after a long illness, nobly and patiently borne.” Of
course, that was sarcasm, she never meant one word of it, for he was a
terror to nurse, the worst that ever was; a strong man on his back is
like a wasp in a bottle. But every year, when the day comes round—and
it’s ten years now since he died—she puts a memorial notice in the same
paper about her loving faithful husband and the long illness nobly and
patiently borne!

And then, as I said, the insurance man and the parson began to call
again on that foolish woman, but she would not alter her ways for
any of them. Not one bit. The things she had once enjoyed before her
marriage, the things she had wanted her own husband to do but were all
against his grain, these she could nohow bring herself to do when he
was dead and gone and she was alone and free to do them. What a farce
human nature can be! There was an Italian hawker came along with rings
in his ears and a coloured cart full of these little statues of Cupid,
and churches with spires a yard long and red glass in them, and heads
of some of the great people like the Queen and General Gordon.

“Have you got a head of Lord Beaconsfield?” Molly asks him.

He goes and searches in his cart and brings her out a beautiful head on
a stand, all white and new, and charges her half a crown for it. Few
days later the parson calls on the job of persuading her to return to
his flock now that she was free to go once more. But no. She says: “I
can never change now, sir, it may be all wrong of me, but what my man
thought was good enough for me, and I somehow cling to that. It’s all
wrong, I suppose, and you can’t understand it, sir, but it’s all my
life.”

Well, Twamley chumbled over an argument or two, but he couldn’t move
her; there’s no mortal man could ever more that woman except Ted—and he
didn’t give a damn.

“Well,” says parson, “I have hopes, Mrs. Wickham, that you will come
to see the matter in a new light, a little later on perhaps. In fact,
I’m sure you will, for look, there’s that bust,” he says, and he points
to it on the mantelpiece. “I thought you and he were all against
Gladstone, but now you’ve got his bust upon your shelf; it’s a new one,
I see.”

“No, no, that isn’t Gladstone,” cried Molly, all of a tremble, “that
isn’t Gladstone, it’s Lord Beaconsfield!”

“Indeed, but pardon me, Mrs. Wickham, that is certainly a bust of Mr.
Gladstone.”

So it was. This Italian chap had deceived the silly creature and palmed
her off with any bust that come handy, and it happened to be Gladstone.
She went white to the teeth, and gave a sort of scream, and dashed the
little bust in a hundred pieces on the hearth in front of the minister
there. O, he had a very vexing time with her.

That was years ago. And then came the fire, and then the bullseye shop.
For ten years now I’ve prayed that woman to marry me, and she just
tells me: No. She says she pledged her solemn word to Ted as he lay
a-dying that she would not wed again. It was his last wish—she says.
But it’s a lie, a lie, for I heard them both. Such a lie! She’s a mad
woman, but fond of him still in her way, I suppose. She liked to see
Ted make a fool of himself, liked him better so. Perhaps that’s what
she don’t see in me. And what I see in her—I can’t imagine. But it’s
a something, something in her that sways me now just as it swayed me
then, and I doubt but it will sway me for ever.




                                _Tanil_


A Great while ago a man in a stripéd jacket went travelling almost
to the verge of the world, and there he came upon a region of green
fertility, quiet sounds, and sharp colour; save for one tiny green
mound it was all smooth and even, as level as the moon’s face, so flat
that you could see the sky rising up out of the end of everything like
a blue dim cliff. He passed into a city very populous and powerful, and
entered the shop of a man who sold birds in traps of wicker, birds of
rare kinds, the flame-winged antillomeneus and kriffs with green eyes.

“Sir,” said he to the hawker of birds, “this should be a city of great
occasions, it has the smell of opulence. But it is all unknown to me, I
have not heard the story of its arts and policy, or of its people and
their governors. What annalists have you recording all its magnificence
and glory, or what poets to tell if its record be just?”

The hawker of birds replied: “There are tales and the tellers of tales.”

“I have not heard of these,” said the other, “tell me, tell me.”

The bird man drew finger and thumb downwards from the bridge of his
long nose to its extremity, and sliding the finger across his pliant
nostrils said: “I will tell you.” They both sat down upon a coffer
of wheat. “I will tell you,” repeated the bird man, and he asked the
other if he had heard of the tomb in which none could lie, nor die, nor
mortify.

“No,” said he.

“Or of the oracle that destroys its interpreter?”

“No,” answered the man in the stripéd jacket, and a talking bird in a
cage screamed: “No, no, no, no!” The traveller whistled caressingly to
the bird, tapping his finger nail along the rods of its cage, while the
bird man continued: “Or of Fax, Mint, and Bombassor, the three faithful
brothers?”

“No,” replied he again.

“They had a sister of beauty, of beauty indeed, beyond imagination.
(_Soo-eet! soo-eet!_ chirped the oracular bird.) It smote even the
hearts of kings like a reaping hook among grass, and her favour was a
ransom from death itself, as I will tell you.”

“Friend,” said he of the stripéd jacket, “tell me of that woman.”

“I will tell you,” answered the other; and he told him, and this was
the way of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was once a king of this country, mighty with riches and homage,
with tribute from his enemies—for he was a great warrior—and the favour
of many excellent queens. His ancestors were numberless as the hairs
of his black beard; so ancient was his lineage that he may have sprung
from divinity itself, but he had a heart of brass, his bowels were of
lead, and at times he was afflicted with madness.

One day he called for his captain of the guard, Tanil, a valiant,
debonair man of much courtesy, and delivered to him his commands.

Tanil took a company of the guard and they marched to that green hill
on the plain—it is but a league away. At the foot of the hill they
crossed a stream; beyond that was a white dwelling and a garden; at
the gate of the garden was a stumbling stone; a flock grazed on the
hill. The soldiers threw down the stone and, coming into the vineyard,
they hacked down the vines until they heard a voice call to them. They
saw at the door of the white dwelling a woman so beautiful that the
weapons slid from their hands at the wonder of it. “Friends, friends!”
said she. Tanil told her the King’s bidding, how they must destroy
the vineyard, the dwelling, and the flock, and turn Fax, Mint, and
Bombassor, with the foster sister Flaune, out from the kingdom of Cumac.

“You have denied the King tribute,” said he.

“We are wanderers from the eastern world,” Flaune answered. “Is not the
mountain a free mountain? Does not this stream divide it from Cumac’s
country?”

She took Tanil into the white dwelling and gave a pitcher of wine to
his men.

“Sir,” said she to Tanil, “I will go to your King. Take me to your
King.”

And when Tanil agreed to do this she sent a message secretly to her
brothers to drive the flock away into a hiding-place. So while Flaune
was gone a-journeying to the palace with Tanil’s troup, Fax, Mint, and
Bombassor set back the stumbling stone and took away the sheep.

The King was resting in his palace garden, throwing crumbs into the
lake, and beans to his peacocks, but when Flaune was brought to him he
rose and bowed himself to the pavement at her feet. The woman said
nothing, she walked to and fro before him, and he was content to let
his gaze rest upon her. The carp under the fountain watched them, the
rose drooped on its envious briar, the heart of King Cumac was like a
tree full of chirping birds.

Tanil confessed his fault; might the King be merciful and forgive him!
but the lady had taken their trespass with a soft temper and policy
that had overcome both his loyalty and his mind. It was unpardonable,
but it was not guilt, it was infirmity, she had bewitched him. Cumac
grinned and nodded. He bade Tanil return to the vineyard and restore
the vines, bade him requite the brothers and confirm them in those
pastures for ever. But as to this Flaune he would not let her go.

She paces before him, or she dips her palm into the fountain, spilling
its drops upon the ground; she smiles and she is silent.

Cumac gave her into the care of his groom of the women, Yali, the
sister of Tanil, and thereafter, every day and many a day, the King
courted and coveted Flaune. But he could not take her; her pride, her
cunning words, and her lustre bore her like an anchored boat upon the
tide of his purpose. At one moment full of pride and gloom, and in the
next full of humility and love, he would bring gifts and praises.

“I will cover you,” he whispered, “with green garnets and jargoons.
A collar of onyx and ruby, that is for you; breastknots of beryl, and
rings for the finger, wrist, and ear. Take them, take them! For you I
would tear the moon asunder.”

But all her desire was only to return to the green mountain and her
brothers and the flock by the stumbling stone. The King was merged in
anger and in grief.

“Do not so,” he pleaded, “I have given freedom to your men; will you
not give freedom to me?”

“What freedom, Cumac?” she asked him.

And he said: “Love.”

“How may the bound give freedom?”

“With the gift of love.”

“The spirit of the gift lies only in the giver.” Her voice was mournful
and low.

He was confused and cast down. “You humble me with words, but words are
nothing, beautiful one. Put on your collar of onyx, and fasten your
breastknots of beryl. Have I not griefs, fierce griefs, that crash upon
my brain, and frenzies that shoot in fire! Does not your voice—that
rest-recovering lure—allay them, your presence numb them! I cannot let
you go, I cannot let you go.”

“He who woos and does not win,” so said Flaune, “wins what he does not
woo for.”

“Though I beg but a rose,” murmured the King, “do you offer me a sword?”

“Time’s sword is laid at the breast of every rose.”

“But I am your lowly servant,” he cried. “You have that which all
secretly seek and denyingly long for; it is seen without sight and
affirmed without speech.”

“What is the thing you seek and long for?”

“Purity,” said he.

“Purity!” She seemed to muse upon it as a theme of mystery. “If you
found purity, what would you match it with?”

“My sins!” he cried again. “Would you waste purity on purity, or mingle
sin with sin?”

“Cumac,” said the wise woman, with no pride then but only pity, “you
seek to conquer that which strikes the conqueror dead.”

Then, indeed, for a while he was mute, and then for a while he talked
of his sickness and his frenzy. “Are there not charms,” he asked, “or
magic herbs, to find and bind these demons?”

There was no charm—she told him—but the mind, and no magic but in the
tranquillity of freedom.

“I do not know this,” he sighed, “it will never be known.”

The unknown—she told him—was better than the known.

“Alas, then,” sighed the King again, “I shall never discover it.”

“It is everywhere,” said Flaune, “but it is like a sweet herb that
withers in the ground. All may gather it—and it is not gathered. All
may see it—and it is not seen. All destroy it—and it never dies....”

“Shall I be a little wind,” laughed Cumac, “and gush among this grass?”

“It is the wind’s way among the roses. It has horns of bright brass and
quiet harps of silver. Its golden boats flash in every tossing bay.”

Cumac laughed again, but still he would not let her go. “The fox has
many tricks, the cat but one,” he said, and caused her ankles to be
fastened with two jewelled links tied with a hopple of gold. But in a
day he struck them from her with his own hands, and hung the hopple
upon her lustrous neck.

And still he would not let her go; so Yali and Tanil connived to send
news to the brothers, and in a little time Bombassor came to her aid.

Bombassor was a dancer without blemish, in beauty or movement either.
He came into the palace to Cumac who did not know him, and the King’s
household came to the beaten gongs to witness the art of Bombassor.
Yali brought Flaune a harp of ivory, and to its music Bombassor
caracoled and spun before the delighted King. Then Flaune (who spoke
as a stranger to him) asked Bombassor if he would dance with her, and
he said they would take the dance of “The Flying Phœnix.” The King was
enchanted; he vowed he would grant any wish of Bombassor’s, any wish;
yes, he would cut the moon in half did he desire it. “I will dance for
your pledge,” said Bombassor.

It seemed to the King then as if a little whirling wind made of
flame, and a music that was perfume, gyred and rose before him: the
tapped gongs, the tinkle of harp, the surprise of Flaune’s swaying
and reeling, now coy, now passionate, the lure of her wooing arms,
the rhythm of her flying feet, the chanting of the onlookers, and the
flashing buoyance of Bombassor, so thrilled and distracted him that he
shouted like an eager boy.

But when Bombassor desired Cumac to give him the maiden Flaune, the
King was astonished. “No, no,” he said, “but give him an urn full of
diamonds,” and Bombassor was given an urn full of diamonds. He let it
fall at the King’s feet, and the gems clattered upon the pavement like
a heap of peas. “Give him Yali, then,” Cumac shouted. Yali was a nymph
of splendour, but Bombassor called aloud, “No, a pledge is a pledge!”

Then the King’s joy went from him and, like a star falling, left
darkness and terror.

“Take,” he cried, “an axe to his head and pitch it to the crows.”

And so was Bombassor destroyed, while the King continued ignorantly to
woo his sister. Silent and proud was she, silent and proud, but her
beauty began to droop until Yali and Tanil, perceiving this, connived
again to send to her brothers, and in a little time Mint came. To race
on foot he was fleeter than any of Cumac’s champions; they strove with
him, but he was like the unreturning wind, and although they cunningly
moved the bounds of the course, and threw thorns and rocks under his
feet, he defeated them all, and the King jeered at his own champions.
Then Mint called for an antelope to be set in the midst of the plain
and cried: “Who will catch this for the King?” All were amazed and
Cumac said: “Whoever will do it I will give him whatever a King may
give, though I crack the moon for it.”

The men let go the hind and it swooped away, Mint pursuing. Fast and
far they sped until no man’s gaze could discern them, but in a while
Mint returned bearing the breathing hind upon his back. “Take off his
shoes,” cried the King, “and fill them with gold.” But when this was
done Mint spilled the gold back at the King’s feet.

“Give me,” said he, “this maiden Flaune.”

The King grinned and refused him.

“Was it not in the bond?” asked Mint.

“Ay,” replied Cumac, “but choose again.”

“Is this then a King’s bond?” sneered Mint.

“It was a living bond,” said the King, “but death can sever it. Let
this dog be riven in sunder and his bowels spilled to the foxes.” Mint
died on the moment, and Cumac continued ignorantly to woo his sister.

Then Flaune conferred with Tanil and with Yali about a means of escape.
Tanil feared to be about this, but he loved Flaune, and his sister Yali
persuaded him. He showed them a great door in the back of the palace, a
concealed issue through the city wall, from which Flaune might go in a
darkness could but the door be opened. But it had not been opened for
a hundred years, and they feared the hinges would shriek and the wards
grind in the lock and so discover them.

“Let us bring oil to-morrow,” they said, “and oil it.”

In the morning they brought oil to the hinge and brushed it with drops
from a cock’s feather. The hinge gave up its squeak but yet it groaned.
They filled Yali’s thimble that was made of tortoise horn and poured
this upon it. The hinge gave up its groan but yet it sighed. They
filled the eggshell of a goose with oil and poured upon the hinge until
it was silent. Then they turned to the lock, which, as they threw
back the wards, cried clack, clack. Tanil lapped the great key with
ointment, but still the lock clattered. He filled his mouth with oil
and spat into the hole, but still it clinked. Then Flaune caught a
grasshopper which she dipped in oil and cast into the lock. After that
the lock was silent too.

On the mid of night Tanil ushered Flaune to the great door, and it
opened in peace. She said “Farewell” to him tenderly, and vanished
away into the darkness, and so to the green mountain. As he stooped,
watching her until his eyes could see no more, the door suddenly closed
and locked against him, leaving him outside the wall. Lights came, and
an outcry and a voice roaring: “Tanil is fled with the King’s mistress.
Turn out the guard.” Tanil knew it to be the voice of a jealous
captain, and, filled with consternation, he too turned and fled away
into the night; not towards the mountains, but to the sea, hoping to
catch a ship that would deliver him.

Throughout the night he was going, striving or sleeping, and it was
stark noon before he came to the shore and passed over the strait in a
ship conveying merchants to a fair where no one knew him and all were
friendly. He hobnobbed with the merchants for several days, feeding
and sleeping in the booths until the morning of the sixth day, and on
that day a crier came into the fair ringing and bawling, bawling and
ringing, and what he cried was this:

That King Cumac, Lord of the Forty Kingdoms, Prince of the Moon, and
Chieftain under God, laid a ban upon all who should aid or relieve his
treacherous servant Tanil, who had conspired against the King and
fled. Furthermore it was to be known that Yali, the sister of Tanil,
was taken as hostage for him, that if he failed to redeem her and
deliver up his own body Yali herself was doomed to perish at sunset of
the seventh day after his flight.

Tanil scarcely waited to hear the conclusion, for he had but one day
more and he could suffer not his sister Yali to die. He turned from
the fair and ran to the sea. As he ran he slipped upon a rock and was
stunned, but a good wife restored him and soon he reached the harbour.
Here none of the sailors would convey him over the strait, for they
were bound to the merchantmen who intended not to sail that day. Having
so little time to reckon Tanil offered them bribes (but in vain), and
threats (but they would not), and he was in torment and anguish until
he came to an old man who said he would take him within the hour if the
wind held and the tide turned. But if the wind failed, although the
tide should ebb never so kindly, yet he would not go: and even should
the tide ebb strongly, yet if the wind wavered from its quarter he
would not go: and if by mysterious caprice (for all was in the hands of
God and a great wonder) the tide itself should not turn, then the wind
might blow a dainty squall but he would not be able to undertake him.
Upon this they agreed, and Tanil and the old sailor sat down in the
little ship to play at checkers. Alas, fortune was against Tanil, he
could not conquer the sailor, so he made to pay down his loss.

“Friend,” said the sailor, “a game is but a game, put up your purse.”

Tanil would not put back the money and the sailor said: “Let us then
play on, friend; double or quits.” They played on, and again Tanil
lost, and, as before, tendered his money. “Nay,” said the sailor, “a
game is but a pastime, put back your money.” But Tanil laid it in a
heap upon one of the thwarts. The old sailor sighed and said: “Come,
you are now at the turn of fortune; is not an egg made of water and
a stone of fire: let us play once more; double or quits.” And so
continually, until it was long past noon ere they began to sail in a
course for Cumac’s shore, two leagues over the strait. Now they had
accomplished about three parts of this voyage when the wind slackened
away like a wisp of smoke; slowly they drifted onwards until at eve the
boat lay becalmed, and as yet some way out from the land. “Friend,”
said the old sailor, laying out the checkers again, “let us tempt the
winds of fortune.” But, full of grief at having squandered the precious
hours, Tanil leaped into the sea and swam towards the shore. Soon the
tide checked and was changed, and a current washed him far down the
strait until the fading of day; then he was cast upon a crooking cape
of sand in such darkness of night and such weariness of mind and body
that he could not rise. He lay there for a while consumed with languor
and hunger until the peace refreshed him; the winds of night were
lulled and the waves; but though there were stars in the sky they could
not guide him.

“Alas,” he groaned, “darkness and the oddness of the coast deceive
me. Whether I venture to the right hand or the left, how shall I make
my way? How little is man’s power; the fox and the hare may wander
deceitfully but undeterred, yet here in this darkness I go groping like
a worm laid upon a rock. Yali, my sister, how shall I preserve you?”

He went wandering across a hill away from the sea until he stumbled
upon a hurdle and fell; and where he fell he lay still, sleeping.

Not until the dawn did Tanil wake; then he lay shivering in bonds, with
a company of sheep watchers that stood by and mocked at him. Their
shadows were long, a hundred-fold, for day was but newly dawned.

Their master was not yet risen from his bed, but the watchers carried
Tanil to the door of his house and called to him.

“Master, we have caught a robber of the flock, lying by the fold and
feigning sleep.”

Now the sleepy master lay with a new bride, and he would not stir.

“Come, master, we have taken a robber,” they cried again. And still he
did not move, but the bride rose and came to the window.

“What sheep has he stole?”

They answered her: “None, for we swaddled him; behold!”

She looked down at Tanil with her pleasant eyes, and bade the men
unbind him.

“Who guards now the sheep from robbers and wolves?” she called. They
were all silent, and some made to go off. She bade them mend their
ways, and went back to her lover. When the thongs were loosened from
Tanil he begged them to give him a little food for he was empty and
weak, but they scolded him and went hastily away. Their shadows were
long, a hundred-fold.

Tanil travelled on wings. Yali was to die at fall of night. He hastened
like a lover, but sickness and hunger overcame him; at noon he lay down
in a cool cavern to recover. No other travellers came by him and no
homes were near, for he was passing across the fringe of a desert to
shorten his journey, and the highway crooked round far to the eastward.
Nothing that man could eat was there to sustain him, but he slept. When
he rose his legs weakened and he limped onwards like a slow beggar
whose life lies all behind him. Again he sank down, again he could not
keep from sleeping. The sun was setting when he awoke, the coloured
towers of his city shone only a league away. Then in his heart despair
leaped and maddened him—Yali had died while he tarried.

Searching through a thicket for some place where he could hang himself
he came upon a river, and saw, close to the shore, a small ship
standing slowly down towards the straits from which he had come. Under
her slack sail a man was playing on a pipe; with him was a monkey
gazing sorrowfully from the deck at the great glow in the sky.

“Shipman,” cried Tanil, “will you give me bread, I am at an end?”

The man with a smile of malice held up from the deck a dish of fruits
and said: “Take. I have done.”

But the hungry man could not reach it. “Throw it to me,” he cried,
following the ship. But the sailor had no mind to throw it upon the
shore; he went leaning against his mast, piping an air, while the
monkey peered at him and gabbled. Tanil plunged into the river and swam
beneath the ship’s keel. Taking a knife from his girdle he was for
mounting by a little hawser, but the man beflogged him with a cudgel
until he fell back into the water. There he would have died but that a
large barque presently catched him up on board and recovered him.

The ship carried Tanil from the river past the straits and so to the
great sea, where for the space of a year he was borne in absence,
willy-nilly, while the ship voyaged among the archipelagos, coasted
grim seaboards, or lay against strange wharves docking her cargo of
oil. Faithfully he laboured for wages under this ship’s captain,
being a man of pith and limb, valiant in storm, and enamoured of the
uncouth work: the haul of anchor, and men singing; setting, reefing,
furling, and men singing; the watch, the sleep, the song; the treading
of unknown waters, the crying gust, the change to glassy endless calm,
and the change again from green day to black night and the bending
of the harsh sheet in a starry squall, the crumpling of far thunder,
the rattle of halyard and block, the howl of cordage. Grand it was in
some bright tempest to watch the lubber wave slide greenly to the bows
and crack in showers of flying diamonds, but best of all was the long
crunch in from the vast gulfs, and the wafture to some blue bay sighing
below a white dock and the homes of men.

Forgotten was Yali his loved sister, but that proud living Flaune who
had brought Yali to her death, she was not forgotten. He sailed the
seas and he sailed the seas, but she was ever a soft recalling wonder
in his breast, the sound of a bell of glass beaten by a spirit.

After a year of hazards the ship by chance docked in that harbour where
Tanil had heard the crier crying of Yali and her doom. Looking about
him he espied an old sailor sitting in his boat playing a game of
checkers with a young man. The crier bawled in the market place, but he
had no news for Tanil. Standing again amid the merchants and the kind
coloured sweetness of streets and people, this bliss of home so welled
up in his breast that he hastened back to the ship. “Master,” he said,
“give me my wages, and let me go.” The shipman gave him his wages, and
he went back to the town.

But only nine days did he linger there, for joy, like truth, lives in
the bottom of a well, and he cast in his wages. Then he went off with
a hunter to trap leopards in a forest. A month they were gone, and
they trapped the leopards and sold them, and then, having parted from
the hunter, Tanil roved back to the port to spend his gains among the
women of the town. Often his soul invited him to return to that city of
Cumac, but death awaited him there and he did not go. Now he was come
to poverty, but he was blithe, and evil could not chain him. “Surely,”
said Tanil, “life is a hope unquenched and a tree of longing. There
is none so poor but he can love himself.” With a stolen net he used
to catch fish and live. Then he lost the net at dicing. So he went to
bake loaves for certain scholars, but they were unmonied men and he
desisted, and went wandering from village to village snaring birds, or
living like the wild dogs, until a friendly warrior enlisted him to
convoy a caravan across the desert to the great lakes. When he came
again to the harbour town two years had withered since he had flown
from Cumac’s city.

He went to lodge at the inn, and as he paced in the evening along the
wharf a man accosted him, called him by name, and would not let him go,
and then Tanil knew it was Fax, the brother of that Flaune. His heart
rocked in his breast when he took Fax to the inn and related all his
adventure. “Tell me the tidings of our city, what comes or goes there,
what lives or dies.” And Fax replied: “I have wandered in the world
searching after you from that time. I bring a greeting from my sister
Flaune,” he said, “and from your sister Yali, my beloved.”

The wonder then, the joy and shame of Tanil, cannot be told: he threw
himself down and wept, and begged Fax to tell him of the miracle:
“For,” said he, “my mind has misused me in this.”

“Know then,” proceeded Fax, “that after the unlocking of the door
my sister flees in darkness to the green mountain. I go watching and
lurking, and learn that the King is in jealous madness, for your enemy
spreads a slander and Cumac is deceived. He believes that my sister’s
love has been cozened by you. Yali is caught fast in his net. My heart
quivers in fear of his bloody intent, and I say to Flaune: ‘What shall
follow if Tanil return not?’ And she smiles and says ever: ‘He will
return.’ And again I say: ‘He tarries. What if he be dead?’ And she
smiles and says ever: ‘He is not dead.’ But you come not, your steps
are turned from us, no one has seen you, you are like a hare that has
fallen into a pit, and you do not come. Then in that last hour Flaune
goes to Cumac. He raves of deceit and treachery. ‘It is my sin,’ my
sister pleads, ‘the blame is mine. Spare but this Yali and I will wash
out the blame.’ ’Ay, you will wash it out with words!‘ ’I will pay the
debt in kind,’ says my sister Flaune, ‘if Tanil does not return.’ But
the cunning King will not yield up Yali unless my sister yield in love
to him. So thus it stands even now, but whether they live in peace and
love I do not know. I only know that Yali lives and serves her in the
palace there. But they wait, and I too wait. Now the thread is ravelled
to its end; I have lived only to seek you. My flock is lost, perished;
my vineyard fades, but I came seeking.”

“Brother,” cried Tanil in grief, “all shall be as before. Yali shall
rest in your bosom.”

At dawn then they sailed over the straits and landed, and having
bargained with a wine carrier for two asses they rode off in the
direction of the city. Tanil’s heart was filled with joy and love, his
voice carolled, his mind hummed like a homing bee. “Surely,” he said,
“life is a hope unquenched, a tree of longing. It yields its branches
into a little world of summer. The asp and the dragon appear, but the
tree buds, the enriching bough cherishes its leaves, and, lo, the fruit
hangs.”

But the heart of Fax was very grave within him. “For,” thought he,
“this man will surely die. Yet I would rather this than lose the love
of Yali, and though they slay him I will bring him there.”

So they rode along upon the asses, and a great bird on high followed
them and hovered on its wings.

“What bird is that?” asked the one. And the other, screening his eyes
and peering upwards, said:

“A vulture.”

When King Cumac heard that they were come he ordered them to be bound,
and they were bound, and the guard clustered around them. Tanil saw
that his enemy was now captain of the men, and that the King was sour
and distraught.

“You come!” cried Cumac, “why do you come?”

They told him it was to redeem the bond and make quittance.

“Bonds and quittances! What bond can lie between a King and faithless
subjects?”

Said Fax: “It lies between the King and my sister Flaune.”

“How if I kill you both?”

“The bond will hold,” said Fax.

“Come, is a bond everlasting then, shall nothing break it?”

“Neither everlasting, nor to be broken.”

“What then?”

“It shall be fulfilled.”

“Can nothing amend it?”

“Nothing,” said Fax.

“Nothing? Nothing? Fools!” laughed the King, “the woman is happy, and
desires not to leave me!”

Tanil stood bowed in silence and shame, and Cumac turned upon him.
“What says this rude passionate beast!” The King’s anger rose like a
blast among oaks. “Has he no talk of bonds, this toad that crawled into
my heart and drank my living blood? Has he nothing to restore? or gives
he and takes he at the will of the wind?”

“I have a life to give,” said Tanil.

“To give! You have a life to lose!”

“Take it, Cumac,” said he.

The King sprang up and seized Tanil by the beard, rocking him, and
shouting through his gritting teeth: “Ay, bonds should be kept—should
they not?—in truth and trust—should they not?”

Then he flung from him and went wailing in misery, swinging his hands,
and raging to and fro, up and down.

“Did she not come to me, come to me? Was it not agreed? Bonds and again
bonds! Yet when I woo her she denies me still. O, honesty in petticoats
is a saint with a devil’s claw. The bitter virginal thing turned her
wild heart to this piece of cloven honour. Bonds, more bonds! Spare me
these supple bonds! O, you spread cunning nets, but what fowler ever
thrived in his own snare? Did she not come to me? Was it not agreed?”

Suddenly he stopped and made a sign through a casement. “Is all ready?”

“Ay,” cried a voice.

“Now I will make an end,” said King Cumac. “Prop them against the
casements.” They carried Tanil to a casement on his right hand, and Fax
to a casement on his left hand. Tanil saw Flaune standing in the palace
garden amid a troop of Ethiopians, each with a green turban and red
shoes and a tunic coloured like a stone, but she half-clad with only
black pantaloons, and her long dark locks flowing. And Fax saw Yali in
fetters amid another troop of black soldiers.

Again a sigh from the King; two great swords flashed, and Tanil, at one
casement, saw the head of Flaune turn over backwards and topple to the
ground, her body falling after with a great swathe of shorn tresses
floating over it. Fax at the other casement saw Yali die, screaming a
long cry that it seemed would never end. Tanil swayed at the casement.

Then Cumac turned with a moan of grief, his madness all gone. “The bond
is ended. I have done. I say I have done.” He seemed to wake as from
sleep, and, seeing the two captive men, he asked: “Why did they come?
What brought them here? Take them away, the bond is ended, I say I have
done. There shall be no more bonds given in the world. But take them
out of the city gate and unbind them and cast them both loose; then
clap fast the gate again. No more death, I would not have them die; let
them wander in the live world, and dog each other for ever. Tanil, you
rotten core of constancy, Fax brought you here and so Flaune, bitter
and beautiful, dies. But Fax still lives—do you not see him?—I give Fax
to you: may he die daily for ever. Fax, blundering jackal, you spoke of
bonds. The bond is met, and so Yali is dead, but Tanil still lives: I
give you Tanil as an offering, but not of peace. May he die daily for
ever.”

So the guard took Fax and Tamil out of the city, struck off their
shackles, and left them there together.

       *       *       *       *       *

The bird man finished; there was a silence; the other yawned. “Did
you hear this?” asked the bird man. And the man in the stripéd jacket
replied: “Ay, with both ears, and so may God bless you.” So saying, he
rose and went out singing.




                     _The Devil in the Churchyard_


“Henry Turley was one of those awkward old chaps as had more money than
he knowed what to do wi'. Shadrach we called him, the silly man. He had
worked for it, worked hard for it, but when he was old he stuck to his
fortune and wouldn’t spend a sixpence of it on his comforts. What a
silly man!”

The thatcher, who was thus talking of Henry Turley (long since dead and
gone) in the “Black Cat” of Starncombe, was himself perhaps fifty years
old. Already there was a crank of age or of dampness or of mere custom
in most of his limbs, but he was bluff and gruff and hale enough, with
a bluffness of manner that could only offend a fool—and fools never
listened to him.

“Shadrach—that’s what we called him—was a good man wi’ cattle, a
masterpiece; he would strip a cow as clean as a tooth and you never
knowed a cow have a bad quarter as Henry Turley ever milked. And when
he was buried he was buried with all that money in his coffin, holding
it in his hand, I reckon. He had plenty of relations—you wouldn’t know
’em, it is thirty years ago I be speaking of—but it was all down in
black and white so’s no one could touch it. A lot of people in these
parts had a right to some of it, Jim Scarrott for one, and Issy Hawker
a bit, Mrs. Keelson, poor woman, ought to have had a bit, and his own
brother, Mark Turley; but he left it in the will as all his fortune was
to be buried in the coffin along of him. ’Twas cruel, but so it is and
so it will be, for whenever such people has a shilling to give away
they goes and claps it on some fat pig’s haunches. The foolishness!
Sixty pounds it was, in a canister, and he held it in his hand.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said a mild-faced man sitting in the
corner. “Henry Turley never did a deed like that.”

“What?” growled the thatcher with unusual ferocity.

“Coorse I’m not disputing what you’re saying, but he never did such a
thing in his life.”

“Then you calls me a liar?”

“Certainly not. O no, don’t misunderstand me, but Henry Turley never
did any such thing, I can’t believe it of him.”

“Huh! I be telling you facts, and facts be true one way or another. Now
you waunts to call over me, you waunts to know the rights of everything
and the wrongs of nothing.”

“Well,” said the mild-faced man, pushing his pot toward the teller of
tales, “I might believe it to-morrow, but it’s a bit of a twister now,
this minute!”

“Ah, that’s all right then”—the thatcher was completely mollified.
“Well the worst part of the case was his brother Mark. Shadrach served
him shameful, treated him like a dog. (Good health!) Ah, like a dog.
Mark was older nor him, about seventy, and he lived by himself in
a little house out by the hanging pust, not much of a cottage, it
warn’t—just wattle and daub wi’ a thetch o’ straa'—but the lease was
running out (‘twas a lifehold affair) and unless he bought this little
house for fifty pound he’d got to go out of it. Well, old Mark hadn’t
got no fifty pounds, he was ate up wi’ rheumatics and only did just a
little light labour in the woods, they might as well a’ asked him for
the King’s crown, so he said to his master: Would he lend him the fifty
pounds?

“‘No, I can’t do that,’ his master says.

“‘You can reduct it from my wages,’ Mark says.

“‘Nor I can’t do that neither,’ says his master, ‘but there’s your
brother Henry, he’s worth a power o’ money, ask him.‘ So Mark asks
Shadrach to lend him the fifty pounds, so’s he could buy this little
house. ’No,’ says Henry, ‘I can’t.’ Nor he wouldn’t. Well—old Mark says
to him: ‘I doan wish you no harm Henry,’ he says, ‘but I hope as how
you’ll die in a ditch.’ (Good health!) And sure enough he did. That
was his own brother, he were strooken wi’ the sun and died in a ditch,
Henry did, and when he was buried his fortune was buried with him, in a
little canister, holding it in his hand, I reckons. And a lot of good
that was to him! He hadn’t been buried a month when two bad parties
putt their heads together. Levi Carter, one was, he was the sexton, a
man that was half a loony as I always thought. O yes, he had got all
his wits about him, somewheres, only they didn’t often get much of a
quorum, still he got them—somewheres. T’other was a chap by the name of
Impey, lived in Slack the shoemaker’s house down by the old traveller’s
garden. He wasn’t much of a mucher, helped in the fieldwork and did
shepherding at odd times. And these two chaps made up their minds to
goo and collar Henry Turley’s fortune out of his coffin one night and
share it between theirselves. ’Twas crime, ye know, might a been prison
for life, but this Impey was a bad lot—he’d the manners of a pig,
pooh! filthy!—and I expects he persuaded old Levi on to do it. Bad as
body-snatchen, coorse ’twas!

“So they goos together one dark night, ’long in November it was, and
well you knows, all of you, as well as I, that nobody can’t ever see
over our churchyard wall by day let alone on a dark night. You all
knows that, don’t you?” asserted the thatcher, who appeared to lay
some stress upon this point in his narrative. There were murmurs
of acquiescence by all except the mild-faced man, and the thatcher
continued: “‘Twere about nine o’clock when they dug out the earth.
’Twarn’t a very hard job, for Henry was only just a little way down.
He was buried on top of his old woman, and she was on top of her two
daughters. But when they got down to the coffin Impey didn’t much care
for that part of the job, he felt a little bit sick, so he gives the
hammer and the screwdriver to Levi and he says: ’Levi,’ he says, ‘are
you game to make a good job o’ this?’

“‘Yes, I be,’ says old Levi.

“‘Well, then,’ Impey says, ‘yous’ll have my smock on now while I just
creeps off to old Wannaker’s sheep and collars one of they fat lambs
over by the 'lotments.’

“‘You’re not going to leave me here,’ says Carter, ‘what be I going to
do?’

“‘You go on and finish this ’ere job, Levi,’ he says, ‘you get the
money and put back all the earth and don’t stir out of the yard afore I
comes or I’ll have yer blood.’

“‘No,’ says Carter, ‘you maun do that.’

“‘I ’ull do that,’ Impey says, ‘he’ve got some smartish lambs I can
tell ’ee, fat as snails.’

“‘No,’ says Carter, ‘I waun’t have no truck wi’ that, tain’t right.’

“‘You will,’ says Impey, ‘and I ’ull get the sheep. Here’s my smock.
I’ll meet ’ee here again in ten minutes. I’ll have that lamb if I ’as
to cut his blasted head off.’ And he rooshed away before Levi could
stop him. So Carter putts on the smock and finishes the job. He got
the money and putt the earth back on poor Henry and tidied it up, and
then he went and sat in the church poorch waiting for this Impey to
come back. Just as he did that an oldish man passed by the gate. He was
coming to this very place for a drop o’ drink and he sees old Levi’s
white figure sitting in the church poorch and it frittened him so that
he took to his heels and tore along to this very room we be sittin’ in
now—only 'twas thirty years ago.

“‘What in the name of God’s the matter wi’ you?‘ they says to him, for
he’d a face like chalk and his lips was blue as a whetstone. ’Have you
seen a goost?’

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I have seen a goost, just now then.’

“‘A goost?’ they says, ‘a goost? You an’t seen no goost.’

“‘I seen a goost.’

“‘Where a’ you seen a goost?’

“So he telled ’em he seen a goost sitting up in the church poorch.

“‘I shan’t have that,’ says old Mark Turley, for he was a setting here.

“‘I tell you ’twas then,’ says the man.

“‘Can’t be nothing worse’n I be myself,’ Mark says.

“‘I say as ’tis,’ the man said, and he was vexed too. ‘Goo and see for
yourself.’

“‘I would goo too and all,’ said old Mark, ‘if only I could walk
it, but my rheumatucks be that scrematious I can’t walk it. Goosts!
There’s ne’er a mortal man as ever see’d a goost. I’d go, my lad, if
my legs ’ud stand it.’ And there was a lot of talk like that until a
young sailor spoke up—Irish he was, his name was Pat Crowe, he was on
furlough. I dunno what he was a-doing in this part of the world, but
there he was and he says to Mark: ‘If you be game enough, I be, and
I’ll carry you up to the churchyard on my back.’ A great stropping
feller he was. ‘You will?’ says Mark. ‘That I will,’ he says. ‘Well I
be game for ’ee,’ says Mark, and so they ups him on to the sailor’s
shoulders like a sack o’ corn and away they goos, but not another one
there was man enough to goo with them.

“They went slogging up to the churchyard gate all right, but when they
got to staggering along ’tween the gravestones Mark thought he could
see a something white sitting in the poorch, but the sailor couldn’t
see anything at all with that lump on his shoulders.

“‘What’s that there?’ Mark whispers in Pat’s ear. And Pat Crowe
whispers back, just for joking: ‘Old Nick in his nightshirt.’

“‘Steady now,’ Mark whispers, ‘go steady Pat, it’s getting up and
coming.’ Pat only gives a bit of a chuckle and says: ‘Ah, that’s him,
that’s just like him.’

“Then Levi calls out from the poorch soft like: ‘You got him then! Is
he a fat ’un?’

“‘Holy God,’ cried the sailor, ‘it _is_ the devil!’ and he chucks poor
Mark over his back at Levi’s feet and runs for his mortal life. He was
the most frittened of the lot ’cos he hadn’t believed in anything at
all—but there it was. And just as he gets to the gate he sees someone
else coming along in the dark carrying a something on its shoulder—it
was Impey wi’ the sheep. ‘Powers above,’ cried Pat Crowe, ‘it’s the Day
of Judgment come for sartin!’ And he went roaring the news up street
like a madman, and Impey went off somewheres too—but I dunno where
Impey went.

“Well, poor old Mark laid on the ground, he were a game old cock, but
he could hardly speak, he was strook dazzled. And Levi was frittened
out of his life in the darkness and couldn’t make anythink out of
nothink. He just creeps along to Mark and whispers: ‘Who be that? Who
be that?’ And old Mark looks up very timid, for he thought his last
hour was on him, and he says: ‘Be that you, Satan?’ Drackly Levi heard
that all in a onexpected voice he jumped quicker en my neighbour’s
flea. He gave a yell bigger nor Pat Crowe and he bolted too. But as he
went he dropped the little tin canister and old Mark picked it up. And
he shook the canister, and he heerd money in it, and then something
began to dawn on him, for he knowed how his brother’s fortune had been
buried.

“‘I rede it, I rede it,’ he says, ‘that was Levi Carter, the dirty
thief! I rede it, I rede it,’ he says. And he putt the tin can in his
pocket and hopped off home as if he never knowed what rheumatucks was
at all. And when he opened that canister there was the sixty golden
sovereigns in that canister. Sixty golden sovereigns! ‘Bad things ’ull
be worse afore they’re better,’ says Mark, ‘but they never won’t be
any better than this.’ And so he stuck to the money in the canister,
and that’s how he bought his cottage arter all. ’Twarn’t much of a
house, just wattle and daub, wi’ a thetch o’ straa', but ’twas what he
fancied, and there he ended his days like an old Christian man. (Good
health!)”




                            _Huxley Rustem_


Huxley Rustem settled himself patiently upon the hairdresser’s waiting
bench to probe the speculation that jumped grasshopper-like into the
field of his inquisitorial mind: ’Why does a man become a barber?
Well, what _is_ it that persuades a man, not by the mere compulsion of
destiny, but by the sweet reasonableness of inclination, to dedicate
his activities to the excision of other people’s pimples and the
discomfiture of their hairy growths? He had glanced through the two
papers, _Punch_ and _John Bull_, handed him by the boy in buttons,
and now, awaiting his turn, posed himself with this inquiry. There
was a girl at it, too, at the end of the saloon. She seemed to have
picked him out from the crowd of men there; he caught her staring, an
attractive girl. It seemed insoluble; misfortunate people may, indeed
must, by the pressure of circumstances, become sewermen, butchers,
scavengers, and even clergymen, but the impulse to barbery was, he
felt, quite indelicately ironic. How that girl stared at him—if she was
not very careful she would be clipping the fellow’s ear—did she think
she knew him? He rather hoped she would have to attend to him; would
he be lucky enough? Huxley tried to estimate the chances by observing
the half-dozen toilets in progress, but his calculations did not
encourage the hope at all. It was very charming for an agreeable woman,
a stranger, too, to do that kind of service for you. He remembered
that, after his marriage five years ago, he had tried to persuade his
wife to lather and shave him, “just for a lark, you know,” but she was
adamant, didn’t see the joke at all! Well, well, he decided that the
word barber derived in some ironic way from the words barbarism or
barbarity, expressing, unconsciously perhaps, contempt on the part of
the barber for a world that could only offer him this imposture for
a man’s sacred will to order and activity. Yet it didn’t seem so bad
for women—that splendid young creature there at the end of the saloon!
The boy in buttons approached, and Huxley Rustem was ushered to that
vacant chair at the end; the splendid young thing had placed a wrapper
about him—she had almost “cuddled” it round his neck—and stood demurely
preparing to do execution upon his poll, turning her eyes mischievously
upon his bright-hued socks, which, by a notable coincidence, were the
same colour as her own handsome hose. Huxley had a feeling that she had
cunningly arranged the succession of turns in order to secure him to
her chair—which shows that he was still young and very impressionable.
Such a feeling is one of the customary assumptions of vanity, the
natural and prized, but much-denied, possession of all agreeable
people. Huxley, as the girl had already noted, and now saw more vividly
in the mirror fronting them, _was_ agreeable, was attractive. (My dear
reader, both you and Huxley Rustem are right, the dainty barbaress
_had_ laid her nets for this particular victim.)

“How would you like it cut, sir?” she asked, placing a hand upon each
of his shoulders, and peering round at him with enamouring eyes.

“Oh, with a pair of scissors, don’t you think?” he replied at a
venture, for he was not often waggish. But it was a very successful
sally, the girl chuckled with rapture, loose fringes of her hair
tickled his cheek, and he caught puffs of her sweet-scented breath. She
was gold-haired, not very tall, and had pleasant turns about her neck
and face and wrists that almost fascinated him. When they had agreed
upon the range and extent of his shearing, the girl proceeded to the
accomplishment of the task in complete silence, almost with gravity.
Huxley began wondering how many hundreds and thousands of crops were
squeezed annually by the delicious fingers, how many polls denuded by
those competent shears. Very sad. Once a year, he supposed, she would
go holidaying for a week or ten days; she would go to Bournemouth for
the bathing or for whatever purpose it is people go to Bournemouth,
Barmouth, or Blackpool. He determined to come in again the day after
to-morrow and be shaved by her.

At the conclusion of the rite she brushed his coat collar very
meticulously, tiptoeing a little, and remarked in a bright manner upon
the weather, which was also bright. Then she went back to shave what
Huxley described to himself as a “red-faced old cockalorum,” whom he
at once disliked very thoroughly. She had given him a check with a fee
marked upon it; he took this down the stairs and paid his dues to “a
bald-headed old god-like monster”—Huxley felt sure he was—who sat in
the shop below, surrounded by fringe-nets, stuffings, moustache wax,
creams, toothbrushes, and sponges.

Two days later Huxley Rustem repeated his visit, but not all the
intrigue of the girl nor his own manœuvring could effect the happy
arrangement again, although he sat for a long time feeling sure that
there was no other establishment of its kind in which the elements
of celerity were so unreservedly abandoned, and the flunkeyism so
peculiarly viscous. The many mirrors, of course, multiplied the
objects of his factitious contempt; those male barbers were small vain
beings of disagreeable outline to whom the doom of shaving tens of
thousands of chins for ever and ever afforded a white-faced languid
happiness. Huxley was exasperated—his personality always ran so easily
to exasperation—by the care with which the wrinkled face of a sportive
old gent of sixty was being massaged with steaming cloths. He wore
pretty brown button boots and large check trousers; there was still a
vain wisp or two of white hair left upon his tight round skull and his
indescribably silly old face. In the outcome our hero had perforce to
be shaved by a youth of the last revolting assiduity, who caressed his
chin with strong, excoriating palms.

In the ensuing weeks Huxley Rustem became a regular visitor to the
saloon, but he suffered repeated disappointments. He was disconsolate;
it was most baffling; not once did he secure the bliss of her
attentions. He felt himself a fool; some men could do these things
as easily as they grew whiskers, but Rustem was not one of them, for
the traditions of virtue and sweet conduct were very firmly rooted in
him; he was like a mouse living in a large white empty bath which,
if it was unscaleable, was clean, and if it was rather blank was
never terrifying. It is easy, so very easy, to be virtuous when you
can’t be anything else. But still he very much desired to take the
fair barber out to dinner, say, just for an hour or two in a quiet
place where one eats and chats and listens to the pleasant shrilling
of restaurant violins. He would be able to amuse her with tales and
recitals of his experiences and she would constantly exclaim “Really!”
as if entranced—as she probably would be. In his imagined hour her
conversational exchanges never developed beyond that, yet it was enough
to thrill him with a mild happiness. An egoist is a mystic without a
god, but seldom ever without a goddess. It was bliss to adore her, but
very heaven for her to be adoring him. To be just to Huxley Rustem
that was all he meant, but try as he would he could never make up the
happy occasion. It was a most discomfiting experience. It is true that
he saw her in the street on three or four occasions, but each time he
was accompanied by his wife, and each time he was guilty of a vain
pretence, his behaviour to his companion being extremely casual—as if
she were just an acquaintance instead of being an important alliance.
But no one could possibly have mistaken the lady for anything but
Huxley’s very own wife, and the little barber was provocatively demure
at these encounters. Once, however, he was alone, and she passed,
ogling him in a very frank way. But she did not understand egoists like
Rustem. He was impervious to any such direct challenge; he thought it
a little silly, coarse even. Had she been shy and diffident, allowing
him to be masterful instead of confusing him, he would have fluttered
easily into her flame.

So the affair remained, and would have remained for ever but that,
by the grace of fortune, he found himself one day at last actually
sitting again in front of the charming girl, who was not less aware
of the attraction than he himself. She was nervous and actually with
her shears clipped a part of his ear. Huxley was rather glad of that,
it eased the situation, but on his departure he committed the rash
act for which he never afterwards forgave himself. Her fingers were
touching his as she gave him the pay check, when he took suddenly from
his pocket a silver coin and pressed it into her hand, smiling. It
was as if he had struck her a blow. He was shocked at the surprised
resentment in the fierce glance she flung him. She tossed the coin into
a tray for catching tobacco ash and cigarette ends. He realized at once
the enormity of the affront; his vulgar act had smashed the delicate
little coil between them. Vague and almost frivolous as it was, she had
prized it. Poor as it was, it could yet deeply humiliate him. But it
was a blunder that could never be retrieved, and he turned quickly and
sadly out of the saloon, feeling the awful sting of his own contempt.
Crass fool that he was, didn’t he realize that even barbers had their
altitudes? Did he think he could buy a jewel like that, as he bought
a packet of tobacco, with a miserable shilling? Perhaps Huxley Rustem
was unduly sensitive about it, but he could never again bring himself
to enter the saloon and meet that wounded gaze. He only recovered his
balance when, a fortnight later, he encountered her in the street
wearing the weeds of a widow! Then he felt almost as indignant as if
she had indeed deceived him!




                              _Big Game_


Old Squance was the undertaker, but in the balmy, healthy, equable air
of Tamborough undertaking was not a thriving trade; its opportunities
were but an ornamental adjunct to his more vital occupation of
builder. Even so those old splendid stone-built cottages never needed
repairs, or if they did Squance didn’t do them. Storms wouldn’t visit
Tamborough, fires didn’t occur, the hand of decay was, if anything,
more deliberate than the hand of time itself, and no newcomer, loving
the old houses so much, ever wanted to build a new one: so Mrs. Squance
had to sell hard-looking bullseyes and stiff-looking fruit in a hard,
stiff-looking shop. Also knitting needles and, in their time of the
year, garden seeds. Squance was a meek person whom you would never have
credited with heroic tendencies; nevertheless, with no more romantic
background than a coffin or two, a score of scaffold poles, and sundry
hods and shovels, he had acquired in a queer, but still not unusual,
way the repute of a lion-slayer. Mrs. Squance was not so meek, she was
not meek at all, she was ambitious—but vainly so. Her ambitions secured
their fulfilment only in her nocturnal dreams, but in that sphere they
were indeed triumphant and she was satisfied. The most frequent setting
of her unconscious imagination happened to be a tiny modern flat in
which she and old Ben seemed to be living in harmony and luxury. It
was a delightful flat, very high up—that was the proper situation for
a flat, mind you, just under the roof—with stairs curling down, and
down, and down till it made you giddy to think of them. The kitchen,
well, really Mrs. Squance could expatiate endlessly on that and the
tiny corner place with two wash-basins in it and room enough to install
a bath if you went in for that kind of thing. Best of all was the
sitting-room in front, looking into a street so very far below that
Mrs. Squance declared she felt as if she had been sitting in a balloon.
Here Mrs. Squance, so she dreamed, would sit and browse. She didn’t
have to look at ordinary things like trees and mud and other people’s
windows. That was what made it so nice, Mrs. Squance declared. She had
instead a vista of roofs and chimneys, beautiful telephone standards,
and clouds. The people, too, who walked far down beneath were always
unrecognizable; a multitude of hat crowns seemed to collect her gaze,
linked with queer movements, right, left, right, left, of knees and
boots, though sometimes she would be lucky enough to observe a very
fat man, just a glimpse perhaps of his watch-guard lying like a chain
of oceanic islands across a scholastic globe. In the way of dreams
she knew the street by the name of Lather Lane. It was cobbled with
granite setts. There was a barber’s shop at one corner and a depot for
foreign potatoes and bananas at another. That flat was so constantly
the subject of her dream visitations that she came to invest it with
a romantic reality, to regard it as an ultimate real possession lying
fortuitously somewhere, at no very great remove, in some quarter she
might actually, any day now, luckily stumble across.

And it was in that very flat she beheld Mr. Squance’s heroism. It
seemed to be morning in her dream, early; it must have been early.
She and Squance were at breakfast when what should walk deliberately
and astoundingly into the room but a lion. Mrs. Squance, never having
seen a lion before, took it to be a sheepdog, and she shouted, “Go
out, you dirty thing!” waving a threatening hand towards it. But the
animal did not go out; it pranced up to Mrs. Squance in a genial way,
seized her admonishing hand and playfully tried to bite it off. Really!
Mr. Squance had risen to his startled feet shouting “Lion! lion!” and
then Mrs. Squance realized that she had to contend with a monster
that kept swelling bigger and bigger before her very eyes, until it
seemed that it would never be able to go out of that door again. It
had a tremendous head and mane, with whiskers on its snout as stiff as
knitting needles, and claws like tenpenny nails; but its tail was the
awfullest thing, long and very flexible, with a bush of hair at the end
just like a mop, which it wagged about, smashing all sorts of things.

“Ben,” said Mrs. Squance, “'ave you a pistol?”

“No, I ’ave not,” said Ben.

“Then we’re done,” she had declared. “Oh, no, we ain’t, though! You
’old ’im, Ben, and I’ll go and get a pistol; ’old ’im!”

Ben valiantly seized the lion by its mane and tail, but it did not
care for such treatment; it began to snarl and swish about the room,
dragging poor Ben as if he had been just a piece of rabbit pie.

“'Old ’im! ’old ’im!” exhorted Mrs. Squance, as she popped on her
bonnet and shawl. “You ’old 'im!”

“All right,” breathed Ben, as she ran off and began the descent of the
long narrow staircase. Almost at the bottom she met a piano coming
upwards. It was not a very large piano, but it was large enough to
prevent her from descending any further. It was resting upon the backs
of two men, one in front, whose entirely bald, perspiring, projecting
head reminded her of the head of a tortoise, and one who followed him
unseen. They crawled on all fours, while the piano was balanced by a
man who pulled it in front and another who pushed it from behind.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Squance. “I ’ope you won’t be long.”

They made no reply; the piano continued to advance, the bald man
swaying his head still more like a tortoise. She began to retire before
them, and continued retiring step by step until she became irritated
and demanded to know the owner of that piano. The men seemed to be
dumb, so she skipped up to the second floor to make enquiries, knocking
at the first door with her left hand—the right one still hurting her
very much. It was exasperating. Someone had just painted and varnished
the doors, and she was compelled to tap very lightly instead of giving
the big bang the occasion required. Consequently no one heard her,
while her hand became covered with a glutinous evil liquid. She ran up
to the third floor. Here the doors were all right, but although she
set up a vigorous cannonade again no one heard her, at least, no one
replied except some gruff voice that kept repeating “Gone, no address!
Gone, no address!” She opened the doors, but there seemed to be no one
about, although each room had every appearance of recent occupation:
fires alight, breakfast things recently used, and in the bedrooms the
disordered beds. She was now extremely annoyed. She opened all the
doors quickly until she came to the last room, which was occupied
by the old clergyman who kept ducks there and fed them on macaroni
cheese. It was just as she feared; the ducks were waiting, they flocked
quacking upon the passage and stairs before she could prevent them.

“I’m sure,” screamed Mrs. Squance, in her dreadful rage, “it’s that
lion responsible for all this!”

She wasted no more time upon the matter. She rapidly descended the
stairs again, treading upon innumerable indignant ducks, until she
came to the piano. Here she said not a word, but, brushing the leading
man aside, placed her foot roughly upon the slippery head of the first
crawling man and scrambled over the top of the instrument, jumping
thence upon the back part of the hindmost man, who turned his feet
comically inwards, and wore round his loins a belt as large as the
belly-band of a waggon horse.

She proceeded breathlessly until she came to the last flight, where,
behold! the stairs had all been smashed in by those awkward pianists,
and she stood on the dreadful verge of a drop into a cellar full of
darkness and disgusting smells. But she was able to leap upon the
banister-rail which was intact, and slide splendidly to the ground
floor. An unusual sight awaited her. Mrs. Squance did not remember
ever to have seen such a thing before, but there in the hall a
marvellous eustacia tree was growing out of the floor. She was not
surprised at the presence of a tree in that unwonted situation. She had
not noticed it before, but it did not seem out of place. Why shouldn’t
trees grow where they liked? They always did. Mrs. Squance invariably
took life as she found it, even in dreams. While she was surveying
the beautiful proportions of the eustacia tree, the richness of its
leaves, and its fine aroma a small bird, without warning or apology,
alighted upon her right hand—which she carried against her chest as if
it were in a sling, though it wasn’t—and laid an egg on it. It _was_
so annoying, she did not know what to do with it; she was afraid of
smashing it. She rushed from the building, and entered the butcher’s
shop a few doors away. The shop was crowded with customers, and the
butcher perspired and joked with geniality, as is the immemorial
custom with butchers. His boy, a mere tot of five or six years of age,
observed to Mrs. Squance that it was “a lovely day, ma’am,” and she
replied that it was splendid. So it was. People were buying the most
extraordinarily fleshly fare, the smelt of an ox, a rib of suet, a
fillet of liver, and one little girl purchased nineteen lambs’ tongues,
which she took away secretly in a portmanteau.

“Now Mrs. Squance, what can I do for you?” enquired the butcher.
Without comment she handed him the egg of the bird. He cast it into the
till as if it were a crown piece. “And the next thing, ma’am?”

“'Ave you got such a thing as a pistol, Mr. Verryspice?”

Mr. Verryspice had, he had got two, and drawing them from the belt
wherefrom dangled his sharpener, he laid two remarkable pieces of
ordnance before her. In her renewed agitation she would have snatched
up one of the pistols, but Mr. Verryspice prevented her.

“No, no, ma’am, I shall have to get permission for you to use it first.”

“But I really must ’ave it immediate....”

“Yes?” said the butcher.

“ ... for my husband.”

“I see,” he replied sympathetically. “Well, come along then and I’ll
get an interim permission at once.” Seizing a tall silk hat from
its hook and placing it firmly upon his head he led her from his
establishment.

“Singular that the trams are all so full this morning,” commented Mrs.
Squance as they awaited a conveyance.

“Most unusual, ma’am,” replied Mr. Verryspice. But at last they
persuaded a bathchair man to give them a lift to their destination,
where they arrived a little indecorously perhaps, for the top-hatted
butcher was sitting as unconcernedly and as upright as a wax figure
upon Mrs. Squance’s knees. The office they sought lay somewhere in a
vast cavernous building full of stairs and corridors, long, exhausting,
hollow corridors like the Underground railway, and on every floor and
turning were signposts of the turnpike variety with directions:

“To the Bedel of St. Thomas’s Basket, 3 miles.”

“Registrar of Numismatics and Obligations, 2¼.”

Along one of these passages they plunged, and after some aggravating
hindrances, including a demand from a humpty-backed clerk for a packet
of No. 19 egg-eyed sharps, and five pennyworth of cachous which she
found in her bosom, the permission was secured, and the butcher
thereupon handed the weapon to Mrs. Squance.

“What did you say you wanted it for?” he asked.

Mrs. Squance’s gratitude was great, but her indignation was deep and
disdained reply. She seized the pistol and began to run home. Rather
a stout lady, too, and the exercise embarrassed her. Her hair fetched
loose, her stockings slipped down, and her strange, hurrying figure,
brandishing a pistol, soon attracted the notice of policemen and a
certain young greengrocer with a tray of onions, who trotted in her
wake until she threatened them all with the firearm.

Breathlessly at last she mounted the tremendous staircase. Happily in
the interval the damage had been repaired, the tree chopped down, piano
delivered, and ducks recaptured. She reached her rooms only in time to
hear a great crash of glass from within. Old Ben was strutting about
with a triumphant air.

“I done ’im—I done ’im,” he called. “You can come in now; I’ve just
chucked ’im through the window!” And sure enough he had. The sash
looked as if it had been blown out by a cannon-ball. Mrs. Squance
peered out, and there, far down at the front door, curled up as if
asleep, lay the lion. At that moment the milkman arrived, with that
dissonant clatter peculiar to milkmen. He dashed down his cans close
by the nose of the lion, which apparently he had not seen. The scared
animal leaped up in its terror, and darting down an alley was seen no
more.

So far this narrative, devoid as it is of moral grandeur and literary
grace, has subjected the reader’s comprehension to no scientific
rigours; but he who reads on will discern its cunning import—a
psychological outcome with the profoundest implications. Listen. Mrs.
Squance awoke that morning in her own hard-looking little house of one
floor, with the hard-looking shop, startled to find the window of their
room actually smashed, and inexplicable pains in her right hand. She
related these circumstances in after years with so many symptoms of
truth and propriety that she herself at last vividly believed in the
figure of old Ben as a lion-slayer. “Saved my life when I was ’tacked
by a lion!” she would say to her awed grandchildren, and she would
proceed to regale them with a narration which, I regret to say, had
only the remotest likeness to the foregoing story.




                            _The Poor Man_


One of the commonest sights in the vale was a certain man on a bicycle
carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a sound as a sight,
for what distinguished him from all other men to be encountered there
on bicycles was not his appearance, though that was noticeable; it was
his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along singing each morning from
Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy Peter, Thasper, and Buzzlebury, and
so on to Trinkel and Nuncton. All sorts of things he sang, ballads,
chanties, bits of glees, airs from operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he
was leader of Thasper church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort
of rotation in their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was
hymns and anthems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular
tunes; he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love
songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest,
while on Saturday—particularly at eve, spent in the tap of “The White
Hart”—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little improper.
But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men, no questionable
liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a credit to the church,
a model even for soberer men.

Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height and of
medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler which
seemed never to belong to him, though he had worn it for years) and as
to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a baby’s elbow; he had been
born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated, though it might have
engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it was malleable, since when
nature had healed, but had not restored it. But there was ever a soft
smile that covered his ugliness, which made it genial and said, or
seemed to say: Don’t make a fool of me, I am a friendly man, this is
really my hat, and as for my nose—God made it so.

The six hamlets which he supplied with newspapers lie along the
Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabitants
adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and, in their own homes,
turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers who, somewhere
out of sight beyond the hills, endlessly make chair, and nothing but
chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a shanty built
of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair on a treadle
lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods, very solemn places,
and they survey the six little towns as a man might look at six tiny
pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.

One August morning the newspaper man was riding back to Thasper. The
day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not singing, he was
thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper parish, and the thought
of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only the tone of the sermon he had
preached on Sunday, “The poor we have always with us,” though that was
in bad taste from a man reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as
hard as a door-knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital
difference between them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev.
Faudel Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in
his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom Dan
Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs. Scroope, gloom pattered
upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least thought of her.

At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to an oldish
man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge. Scroope never wore a
hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though his face was shaven clean
it remained a regular plantation of ridges and wrinkles; there was a
stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait, and he had a voice that
howled.

“Just a moment, Pavey,” he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.

“All those years,” the parson went on talking to the hedger; “all those
years, dear me!”

“I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-third of
October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady Hesseltine
eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I worked here sin’ I
were six year old. Twalve children I have had (though five on ’em come
to naught and two be in the army) and I never knowed what was to be out
of work for one single day in all that sixty year. Never. I can’t thank
my blessed master enough for it.”

“Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good
master?”

The old man solemnly touched his hat and said: “God.”

“O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope. “Well, good health and
constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious things. The man
who has never done a day’s work is a dog, and the man who deceives his
master is a dog too.”

“I never donn that, sir.”

“And you’ve had happy days in Thasper, I’m sure?”

“Right-a-many, sir.”

“Splendid. Well ... um ... what a heavy rain we had in the night.”

“Ah, that _was_ heavy! At five o’clock this morning I daren’t let my
ducks out—they’d a bin drownded, sir.”

“Ha, now, now, now!” warbled the rector as he turned away with Dan.

“Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were more of
the same breed. I wish....” The parson sighed pleasantly as he and Dan
walked on together until they came to the village street where swallows
were darting and flashing very low. A small boy stood about, trying to
catch them in his hands as they swooped close to him. Dan’s own dog
pranced up to his master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a
greyhound, but stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was
cocky as a bird, for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run
like the wind—many a hare had had proof of that.

Said Mr. Scroope, eyeing the dog: “Is there much poaching goes on
here?”

“Poaching, sir?”

“I am told there is. I hope it isn’t true for I have rented most of the
shooting myself.”

“I never heard tell of it, sir. Years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury chaps
one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I’ve heard, but I
shouldn’t think there’s an onlicensed gun for miles around.”

“I’m not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his warren
netted by someone last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits. There’s
scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go. It’s a
crime like anything else, you know,” Scroope’s voice was loud and
strident, “and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any kind. O
yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. O yes. There was a man in my last
parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the worst type, never did a
stroke of work, and _he_ had a dog, it wasn’t unlike your dog—this _is_
your dog, isn’t it? You haven’t got your name on its collar, you should
have your name on a dog’s collar—well, he had a perfect brute of a dog,
carried off my pheasants by the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated
them. Man never did anything else, but we laid him by the heels and in
the end I shot the dog myself.”

“Shot it?” said Dan. “No, I couldn’t tell a poacher if I was to see
one. I know no more about 'em than a bone in the earth.”

“We shall be,” continued Scroope, “very severe with them. Let me
see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?“

”_He Shall Feed His Flock_—sir—_like a Shepherd_.”

“Splendid! _Good_-day, Pavey.”

Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog, pedalled home to a little
cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own thatch; it had
eaves a yard wide, and birds’ nests in the roof at least ten years old.
Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he had never married.
She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of sweets, vinegar, boot
buttons and such things, and was a very excellent old dame, but as
naïve as she was vague. If you went in to her counter for a newspaper
and banged down a halfcrown she would as likely as not give you change
for sixpence—until you mentioned the discrepancy, when she would
smilingly give you back your halfcrown again.

Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner, threw off
his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was making a heavy
succession of journeys between the table and a larder.

“Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.

“What did _she_ want?”

“She wanted to reprimand me.”

“And what have _you_ been doing?”

Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right
of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a
rabbit pie, “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do
give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”

“I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for
to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their
feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more
awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I
lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”

“Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say
as I ain’t reprimanded you.”

“Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’
the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he
shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though
he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid.
Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that
he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s
the rich to serve? The rich we have always with _us_, that’s _our_
responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be
proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for
something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches
you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t
desert you.”

“It’s no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it’s
folly.”

“If I had my way I’d be an independent man and live by myself a hundred
miles from anywheres or anybody. But that’s madness, that’s madness,
the world don’t expect you to go on like that, so I do as other
folks do, not because I want to, but because I a’nt the pluck to be
different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never taught me
courage and I wasn’t born with any, so I drinks with a lot of fools who
drink with me for much the same reason, I expect. It’s the same with
other things besides drink.”

His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the shed
in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang not one
note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger. Towards evening
he recovered his amiability and began to sing with a gusto that
astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk humming like a
bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the Rev. Scroope found a
dead hare tied by the neck to his own door-knocker, and at night (it
being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier than ever in “The White Hart.”
If he was not drunk he was what Thasper calls “tightish,” and had
never before sung so many of those ribald songs (mostly of his own
composition) for which he was noted.

A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Church Men’s Guild.
A group of very mute countrymen sat in the village hall and were goaded
into speech by the rector.

“Thasper,” declared Mr. Scroope, “has a great name for its singing. All
over the six hamlets there is surprising musical genius. There’s the
Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band.”

“It is that,” interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzlebury,
“it can play as well at nine o’clock in the morning as it can at nine
o’clock at night, and that’s a good band as can do it.”

“Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival next
year. Thasper is going to show those highly trained choristers what
a native choir is capable of. Yes, and I’m sure our friend Pavey can
win the tenor solo competition. Let us all put our backs into it and
work agreeably and consistently. Those are the two main springs of
good human conduct—consistency and agreeability. The consistent man
will always attain his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my
last parish, Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was
not only the best cricketer in our village, he was the best for miles
around. He revelled in cricket, and cricket only; he played cricket
and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he never
dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger every year
and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on, consistent
as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6 and he seldom
bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled. For a season or
two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the last man in! After that
he became umpire, then scorer, and then he died. He had got a little
money, very little, just enough to live comfortably on. No, he never
married. He was a very happy, hearty, hale old man. So you see? Now
there is a cricket club at Buzzlebury, and one at Trinkel. Why not a
cricket club at Thasper? Shall we do that?... Good!”

The parson went on outlining his projects, and although it was plain
to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little, if any, compassion for
the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an extravagant
value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency, and, above all,
loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet his intentions
were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consistently grateful.

“One thing, Pavey,” said Scroope when the meeting had dispersed, “one
thing I will not tolerate in this parish, and that is gambling.”

“Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn’t tell you
hardly the difference between spades and clubs.”

“I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey.”

“Now that’s a thing I never see in my life, Mr. Scroope.”

“Ah, you need not go to the races to bet on horses; the slips of paper
and money can be collected by men who are agents for racing bookmakers.
And that is going on all round the six hamlets, and the man who does
the collecting, even if he does not bet himself, is a social and moral
danger, he is a criminal, he is against the law. Whoever he is,” said
the vicar, moderating his voice, but confidently beaming and patting
Dan’s shoulder, “I shall stamp him out mercilessly. _Good_-night,
Pavey.”

Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here and there
had fancied that a man with such a misshapen face would be capable of
committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you wouldn’t take notice of
that, of course—but a solid substantial misdemeanour like murder. And
it was true, he _was_ capable of murder—just as everybody else is,
or ought to be. But he was also capable of curbing that distressing
tendency in the usual way, and in point of fact he never did commit a
murder.

These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily, and
he still sang gaily and beautifully on his daily ride from Cobbs Mill
along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The hanging richness
of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn
hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the
brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge
and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily
ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes
could lie—Dan said—as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with
tiny ecstasies too incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.

On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the space
opposite “The White Hart.” Snow was falling; it was not freezing
weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road. Dan was
returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light from the
bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn genially and
curiously, for the recumbent hart upon the balcony had a pad of snow
upon its wooden nose, which somehow made it look like a camel, in spite
of the huddled snow on its back which gave it the resemblance of a
sheep. A few boys stood with bemused wrinkled faces before the roaring
warmth. Dan dismounted very carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny
boy rode on the back of the bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame
by a long scarf; very small, very silent, about five years old. A red
wool wrap was bound round his head and ears and chin, and a green scarf
encircled his neck and waist, almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey
wool were drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and
stood him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he
could scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he
moved a few paces and turned to stare at his footmarks in the snow.

“Cold?” asked Dan.

The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand in
Dan’s and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the
longlashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.

“Hungry?”

The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys brought
him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up into his arms
and pushed the cycle across the way into his own home.

Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and rammed
them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some terrible knots
of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour of vinegar—always
some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey’s home—she had covered the top
of the crock with a shield of brown paper, pinioned that with string,
licked a label: “Cabege Novenbr 5t,” and smoothed it on the crock, when
the latch lifted and Dan carried in his little tiny boy.

“Here he is, mother.”

Where Dan stood him, there the child remained; he did not seem to see
Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big crock with the
white label—and he kept it there.

“Whoever’s that?” asked the astonished Meg with her arms akimbo as Dan
began to unwrap the child.

“That’s mine,” said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from the
curls on its forehead.

“Yours! How long have it been yours?”

“Since ’twas born. No, let him alone, I’ll undo him, he’s full up wi’
pins and hooks. I’ll undo him.”

Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.

“But it is not your child, surely, Dan?”

“Ay, I’ve brought him home for keeps, mother. He can sleep wi’ me.”

“Who’s its mother?”

“’Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it.”

“You’re making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is she? You’re
fooling, Dan, you’re fooling!”

“I’m making no mock of anyone. There, there’s a bonny grandson for you!”

Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, perhaps to
find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar likeness.
But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at all resembled
her rugged Dan’s.

“Who are you? What’s your little name?”

The child whispered: “Martin.”

“It’s a pretty, pretty thing, Dan.”

“Ah!” said her son, “that’s his mother. We were rare fond of each
other—once. Now she’s wedd’n another chap and I’ve took the boy, for
it’s best that way. He’s five year old. Don’t ask me about her, it’s
_our_ secret and always has been. It was a good secret and a grand
secret, and it was well kept. That’s her ring.”

The child’s thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small green
stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring safely.

For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She pressed it
tenderly to her bosom.

But the long-kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle
with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he seemed to
rejoice in his paternity of the quiet, pretty, illegitimate creature.
As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound him he was taken
a week later in the act of receiving betting commissions and heavily
fined in the police court, although it was quite true that he himself
did not bet, and was merely a collecting agent for a bookmaker who
remained discreetly in the background and who promptly paid his fine.

There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these
things—there is no more rhadamanthine formation than that which can
mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden to an
interview at the “Scroopery.” After some hesitation he visited it.

“Ah, Pavey,” said the rector, not at all minatory but very subdued
and unhappy. “So the blow has fallen, in spite of my warning. I am
more sorry than I can express, for it means an end to a very long
connection. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to
deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now, you must
understand that. I offer no judgment upon these unfortunate events, no
judgment at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my clear duty. Your
course of life is incompatible with your position in the choir, and I
sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemeanour but a religious
one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God.”

The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands. Pavey sat
opposite him, and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.

“You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I’ve never mocked God.
For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I never ate
the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It’s a way of life, a poor
man has but little chance of earning more than a bare living, and
there’s many a dirty job there’s no prosecution for, leastways not in
this world.”

“Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me than
the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judgment upon
the matter, your acknowledgment of him is only right and proper. But
the fact of his existence at all cannot be disregarded; that at least
is flagrant, and as far as concerns your position in my church, it is a
mockery of God.”

“You may be right, sir, as far as your judgment goes, or you may not
be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure other people by
our own scales, and as we can never understand one another entirely, so
we can’t ever judge them rightly, for they all differ from us and from
each other in some special ways. But as for being a mocker of God, why
it looks to me as if you was trying to teach the Almighty how to judge
me.”

“Pavey,” said the rector with solemnity, “I pity you from the bottom
of my heart. We won’t continue this painful discussion, we should both
regret it. There was a man in the parish where I came from who was an
atheist and mocked God. He subsequently became deaf. Was he convinced?
No, he was not—because the punishment came a long time after his
offence. He mocked God again, and became blind. Not at once: God has
eternity to work in. Still he was not convinced. That,” said the rector
ponderously, “is what the Church has to contend with; a failure to
read the most obvious signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that
failure. Klopstock was that poor man’s name. His sister—you know her
well, Jane Klopstock—is now my cook.”

The rector then stood up and held out his hand. “God bless you, Pavey.”

“I thank you, sir,” said Dan. “I quite understand.”

He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village minded his
misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none condemned him. On the
contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen, there was nothing that he
could now do, the shock of it had been anticipated, but it was severe.
And the pang would last, for he was deprived of his chief opportunity
for singing, that art in which he excelled, in that perfect quiet
setting he so loved. Rancour grew upon him, and on Saturday he had a
roaring audacious evening at “The White Hart” where, to the tune of
“The British Grenadiers,” he sung a doggerel:

    Our parson loves his motor car
      His garden and his mansion,
    And he loves his beef for I’ve remarked
      His belly’s brave expansion;
    He loves all mortal mundane things
      As he loved his beer at college,
    And so he loves his housemaid (not
      With Mrs. parson’s knowledge.)

    Our parson lies both hot and strong,
      It does not suit his station,
    But still his reverend soul delights
      In much dissimulation;
    Both in and out and roundabout
      He practises distortion,
    And he lies with a public sinner when
      Grass widowhood’s his portion.

All of which was a savage libel on a very worthy man, composed in anger
and regretted as soon as sung.

From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted himself to
the boy, little Martin, who, a Thasper joker suggested, might have some
kinship with the notorious Betty of that name. But Dan’s voice was now
seldom heard singing upon the roads he travelled. They were icy wintry
roads, but that was not the cause of his muteness. It was severance
from the choir; not from its connoted spirit of religion—there was
little enough of that in Dan Pavey—but from the solemn beauty of the
chorale, which it was his unique gift to adorn, and in which he had
shared with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from
that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the opportunity
of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his own.

With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town some miles
away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan Pavey journeyed
to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church that lay seven or
eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound secret from Thasper
until his appearance at the county musical festival, where he won the
treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan was himself again. To his
crude apprehension he had been vindicated, and he was heard once more
carolling in the lanes of the Vale as he had been heard any time for
these twenty years.

The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about the
village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of hair
about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg said—was like
“ollobarster”: it was soft and unfreckled, always pale. His eyes were
two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were dark and ever questioning.
As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his chin, Meg could do no other
than call it the face of a blessed saint; and indeed, he had some of
the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so gentle, so shy. The golden ring he
no longer wore; it hung from a tintack on the bedroom wall.

Old John, who lived next door, became a friend of his. He was very
aged—in the Vale you got to be a hundred before you knew where you
were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle standing upon its
handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.

Martin was staring up at the roof of John’s cottage.

“What you looking at, my boy?”

“Chimbley,” whispered the child.

“O ah! that’s crooked, a’nt it?”

“Yes, crooked.”

“I know ’tis, but I can’t help it; my chimney’s crooked, and I can’t
putt it straight, neither, I can’t putt it right. My chimney’s crooked,
a’nt it, ah, and I’m crooked, too.”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“I know, but I can’t help it. It _is_ crooked, a’nt it?” said the old
man, also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of
conviviality.

“Yes.”

“That chimney’s crooked. But you come along and look at my beautiful
bird.”

A cock thrush inhabited a cage in the old gaffer’s kitchen. Martin
stood before it.

“There’s a beautiful bird. Hoicks!” cried old John, tapping the bars of
the cage with his terrible finger-nail. “But he won’t sing.”

“Won’t he sing?”

“He donn make hisself at home. He donn make hisself at home at all, do
’ee, my beautiful bird? No, he donn’t. So I’m a-going to chop his head
off,” said the laughing old man, “and then I shall bile him.”

Afterwards Martin went every day to see if the thrush was still there.
And it was.

Martin grew. Almost before Dan was aware of it the child had grown
into a boy. At school he excelled nobody in anything except, perhaps,
behaviour, but he had a strange little gift for unobtrusively not doing
the things he did not care for, and these were rather many unless his
father was concerned in them. Even so, the affection between them was
seldom tangibly expressed, their alliance was something far deeper than
its expression. Dan talked with him as if he were a grown man, and
perhaps he often regarded him as one; he was the only being to whom he
ever opened his mind. As they sat together in the evening while Dan
put in a spell at turning chair—at which he was astoundingly adept—the
father would talk to his son, or rather he would heap upon him all the
unuttered thoughts that had accumulated in his mind during his adult
years. The dog would loll with its head on Martin’s knees; the boy
would sit nodding gravely, though seldom speaking: he was an untiring
listener. “Like sire, like son,” thought Dan, “he will always coop his
thoughts up within himself.” It was the one characteristic of the boy
that caused him anxiety.

“Never take pattern by me,” he would adjure him, “not by me. I’m a
fool, a failure, just grass, and I’m trying to instruct you, but you’ve
no call to follow in my fashion; I’m a weak man. There’s been thoughts
in my mind that I daren’t let out. I wanted to do things that other men
don’t seem to do and don’t want to do. They were not evil things—and
what they were I’ve nigh forgotten now. I never had much ambition, I
wasn’t clever, I wanted to live a simple life, in a simple way, the
way I had a mind to—I can’t remember that either. But I did not do
any of those things because I had a fear of what other people might
think of me. I walked in the ruck with the rest of my mates and did
the things I didn’t ever want to do—and now I can only wonder why I
did them. I sung them the silly songs they liked, and not the ones I
cherished. I agreed with most everybody, and all agreed with me. I’m a
friendly man, too friendly, and I went back on my life, I made nought
of my life, you see, I just sat over the job like a snob codgering an
old boot.”

The boy would sit regarding him as if he already understood. Perhaps
that curious little mind did glean some flavour of his father’s tragedy.

“You’ve no call to follow me, you’ll be a scholar. Of course I know
some of those long words at school take a bit of licking together—like
elephant and saucepan. You get about half-way through ’em and then
you’re done, you’re mastered. I was just the same (like sire, like
son), and I’m no better now. If you and me was to go to yon school
together, and set on the same stool together, I warrant you would win
the prize and I should wear the dunce’s cap—all except sums, and there
I should beat ye. You’d have all the candy and I’d have all the cane,
you’d be king and I’d be the dirty rascal, so you’ve no call to follow
me. What you want is courage, and to do the things you’ve a mind to. I
never had any and I didn’t.”

Dan seldom kissed his son, neither of them sought that tender
expression, though Meg was for ever ruffling the boy for these pledges
of affection, and he was always gracious to the old woman. There was
a small mole in the centre of her chin, and in the centre of the mole
grew one short stiff hair. It was a surprise to Martin when he first
kissed her.

Twice a week father and son bathed in the shed devoted to chair. The
tub was the half of a wooden barrel. Dan would roll up two or three
buckets of water from the well, they would both strip to the skin, the
boy would kneel in the tub and dash the water about his body for a
few moments. While Martin towelled himself Dan stepped into the tub,
and after laving his face and hands and legs he would sit down in it.
“Ready?” Martin would ask, and scooping up the water in an iron basin
he would pour it over his father’s head.

“Name O’ God, that’s sharpish this morning,” Dan would say, “it would
strip the bark off a crocodile. Broo-o-o-oh! But there: winter and
summer I go up and down the land and there’s not—Broo-o-o-oh!—a mighty
difference between ’em, it’s mostly fancy. Come day, go day, frost
or fair doings, all alike I go about the land, and there’s little in
winter I havn’t the heart to rejoice in. (On with your breeches or I’ll
be at the porridge pot afore you’re clad.) All their talk about winter
and their dread of it shows poor spirit. Nothing’s prettier than a
fall of snow, nothing more grand than the storms upending the woods.
There’s no more rain in winter than in summer, you can be shod for it,
and there’s a heart back of your ribs that’s proof against any blast.
(Is this my shirt or yours? Dashed if they buttons a’nt the plague of
my life.) Country is grand year’s end to year’s end, whether or no. I
once lived in London—only a few weeks—and for noise, and for terror,
and for filth—name O’ God, there was bugs in the butter there, once
there was!”

But the boy’s chosen season was that time of year when the plums
ripened. Pavey’s garden was then a tiny paradise.

“You put a spell on these trees,” Dan would declare to his son every
year when they gathered the fruit. “I planted them nearly twenty years
ago, two 'gages and one magny bonum, but they never growed enough to
make a pudden. They always bloomed well and looked well. I propped ’em
and I dunged 'em, but they wouldn’t beer at all, and I’m a-going to cut
’em down—when, along comes you!”

Well, hadn’t those trees borne remarkable ever since he’d come there?

“Of course, good luck’s deceiving, and it’s never bothered our family
overmuch. Still, bad luck is one thing and bad life’s another. And
yet—I dunno—they come to much the same in the end, there’s very little
difference. There’s so much misunderstanding, half the folks don’t know
their own good intentions, nor all the love that’s sunk deep in their
own minds.”

But nothing in the world gave (or could give) Dan such flattering joy
as his son’s sweet treble voice. Martin could sing! In the dark months
no evening passed without some instruction by the proud father. The
living room at the back of the shop was the tiniest of rooms, and
its smallness was not lessened, nor its tidiness increased, by the
stacks of merchandise that had strayed from Meg’s emporium into every
corner, and overflowed every shelf in packages, piles, and bundles.
The metalliferous categories—iron nails, lead pencils, tintacks, zinc
ointment, and brass hinges—were there. Platoons of bottles were there,
bottles of blue-black writing fluid, bottles of scarlet—and presumably
plebeian—ink, bottles of lollipops and of oil (both hair and castor).
Balls of string, of blue, of peppermint, and balls to bounce were
adjacent to an assortment of prim-looking books—account memorandum,
exercise, and note. But the room was cosy, and if its inhabitants
fitted it almost as closely as birds fit their nests they were as happy
as birds, few of whom (save the swallows) sing in their nests. With
pitchpipe to hand and a bundle of music before them Dan and Martin
would begin. The dog would snooze on the rug before the fire; Meg
would snooze amply in her armchair until roused by the sudden terrific
tinkling of her shop-bell. She would waddle off to her dim little
shop—every step she took rattling the paraffin lamp on the table, the
coal in the scuttle, and sometimes the very panes in the window—and the
dog would clamber into her chair. Having supplied an aged gaffer with
an ounce of carraway seed, or some gay lad with a packet of cigarettes,
Meg would waddle back and sink down upon the dog, whereupon its awful
indignation would sound to the very heavens, drowning the voices even
of Dan and his son.

“What shall we wind up with?” Dan would ask at the close of the lesson,
and as often as not Martin would say: “You must sing ‘Timmie.’”

This was “Timmie,” and it had a tune something like the chorus to
“Father O’Flynn.”

              O Timmie my brother,
              Best son of our mother,
    Our labour it prospers, the mowing is done;
              A holiday take you,
              The loss it won’t break you,
    A day’s never lost if a holiday’s won.

              We’ll go with clean faces
              To see the horse races,
    And if the luck chances we’ll gather some gear;
              But never a jockey
              Will win it, my cocky,
    Who catches one glance from a girl I know there.

              There’s lords and there’s ladies
              Wi’ pretty sunshadies,
    And farmers and jossers and fat men and small;
              But the pride of these trips is
              The scallywag gipsies
    Wi’ not a whole rag to the backs of ’em all.

              There ’s cokernut shying,
              And devil defying,
    And a racket and babel to hear and to see,
              Wi’ boxing and shooting,
              And fine high faluting
    From chaps wi’ a table and thimble and pea.

              My Nancy will be there,
              The best thing to see there,
    She’ll win all the praises wi’ ne’er a rebuke;
              And she has a sister—
              I wonder you’ve missed her—
    As sweet as the daisies and fit for a duke.

              Come along, brother Timmie,
              Don’t linger, but gimme
    My hat and my purse and your company there;
              For sporting and courting,
              The cream of resorting,
    And nothing much worse, Timmie—Come to the fair.

On the third anniversary of Martin’s homecoming Dan rose up very early
in the dark morn, and leaving his son sleeping he crept out of the
house followed by his dog. They went away from Thasper, though the
darkness was profound and the grass filled with dew, out upon the hills
towards Chapel Cheary. The night was starless, but Dan knew every trick
and turn of the paths, and after an hour’s walk he met a man waiting
by a signpost. They conversed for a few minutes and then went off
together, the dog at their heels, until they came to a field gate. Upon
this they fastened a net and then sent the dog into the darkness upon
his errand, while they waited for the hare which the dog would drive
into the net. They waited so long that it was clear the dog had not
drawn its quarry. Dan whistled softly, but the dog did not return. Dan
opened the gate and went down the fields himself, scouring the hedges
for a long time, but he could not find the dog. The murk of the night
had begun to lift, but the valley was filled with mist. He went back to
the gate: the net had been taken down, his friend had departed—perhaps
he had been disturbed? The dog had now been missing for an hour. Dan
still hung about, but neither friend nor dog came back. It grew grey
and more grey, though little could be distinguished, the raw mist
obscuring everything that the dawn uncovered. He shivered with gloom
and dampness, his boots were now as pliable as gloves, his eyebrows
had grey drops upon them, so had his moustache and the backs of his
hands. His dark coat looked as if it was made of grey wool; it was
tightly buttoned around his throat and he stood with his chin crumpled,
unconsciously holding his breath until it burst forth in a gasp. But he
could not abandon his dog, and he roamed once more down into the misty
valley towards woods that he knew well, whistling softly and with great
caution a repetition of two notes.

And he found his dog. It was lying on a heap of dead sodden leaves.
It just whimpered. It could not rise, it could not move, it seemed
paralysed. Dawn was now really upon them. Dan wanted to get the dog
away, quickly, it was a dangerous quarter, but when he lifted it to his
feet the dog collapsed like a scarecrow. In a flash Dan knew he was
poisoned, he had probably picked up some piece of dainty flesh that a
farmer had baited for the foxes. He seized a knob of chalk that lay
thereby, grated some of it into his hands, and forced it down the dog’s
throat. Then he tied the lead to its neck. He was going to drag the
dog to its feet and force it to walk. But the dog was past all energy,
it was limp and mute. Dan dragged him by the neck for some yards as a
man draws behind him a heavy sack. It must have weighed three stone,
but Dan lifted him on to his own shoulders and staggered back up the
hill. He carried it thus for half a mile, but then he was still four
miles from home, and it was daylight, at any moment he might meet
somebody he would not care to meet. He entered a ride opening into some
coverts, and, bending down, slipped the dog over his head to rest upon
the ground. He was exhausted and felt giddy, his brains were swirling
round—trying to slop out of his skull—and—yes—the dog was dead, his old
dog dead. When he looked up, he saw a keeper with a gun standing a few
yards off.

“Good morning,” said Dan. All his weariness was suddenly gone from him.

“I’ll have your name and address,” replied the keeper, a giant of a
man, with a sort of contemptuous affability.

“What for?”

“You’ll hear about what for,” the giant grinned. “I’ll be sure to let
ye know, in doo coorse.” He laid his gun upon the ground and began
searching in his pockets, while Dan stood up with rage in his heart and
confusion in his mind. So the Old Imp was at him again!

“Humph!” said the keeper. “I’ve alost my notebook somewheres. Have you
got a bit of paper on ye?”

The culprit searched his pockets and produced a folded fragment.

“Thanks.” The giant did not cease to grin. “What is it?”

“What?” queried Dan.

“Your name and address.”

“Ah, but what do you want it for. What do you think I’m doing?”
protested Dan.

“I’ve a net in my pocket which I took from a gate about an hour ago. I
saw summat was afoot, and me and a friend o’ mine have been looking for
’ee. Now let’s have your name and no nonsense.”

“My name,” said Dan, “my name? Well, it is ... Piper.”

“Piper is it, ah! Was you baptized ever?”

“Peter,” said Dan savagely.

“Peter Piper! Well, you’ve picked a tidy pepper-carn this time.”

Again he was searching his pockets. There was a frown on his face.
“You’d better lend me a bit o’ pencil too.”

Dan produced a stump of lead pencil and the gamekeeper, smoothing the
paper on his lifted knee, wrote down the name of Peter Piper.

“And where might you come from?” He peered up at the miserable man, who
replied: “From Leasington”—naming a village several miles to the west
of his real home.

“Leasington!” commented the other. “You must know John Eustace, then?”
John Eustace was a sporting farmer famed for his stock and his riches.

“Know him!” exclaimed Dan. “He’s my uncle!”

“O ah!” The other carefully folded the paper and put it into his breast
pocket. “Well, you can trot along home now, my lad.”

Dan knelt down and unbuckled the collar from his dead dog’s neck. He
was fond of his dog, it looked piteous now. And kneeling there it
suddenly came upon Dan that he had been a coward again, he had told
nothing but lies, foolish lies, and he had let a great hulking flunkey
walk roughshod over him. In one astonishing moment the reproving face
of his little son seemed to loom up beside the dog, the blood flamed in
his brain.

“I’ll take charge of that,” said the keeper, snatching the collar from
his hand.

“Blast you!” Dan sprang to his feet, and suddenly screaming like a
madman: “I’m Dan Pavey of Thasper,” he leapt at the keeper with a fury
that shook even that calm stalwart.

“You would, would ye?” he yapped, darting for his gun. Dan also seized
it, and in their struggle the gun was fired off harmlessly between
them. Dan let go.

“My God!” roared the keeper, “you’d murder me, would ye? Wi’ my own
gun, would ye?” He struck Dan a swinging blow with the butt of it,
yelling: “Would ye? Would ye? Would ye?” And he did not cease striking
until Dan tumbled senseless and bloody across the body of the dog.

Soon another keeper came hurrying through the trees.

“Tried to murder me—wi’ me own gun, he did,” declared the big man, “wi’
me own gun!”

They revived the stricken Pavey after a while and then conveyed him to
a policeman, who conveyed him to a gaol.

The magistrates took a grave view of the case and sent it for trial at
the assizes. They were soon held, he had not long to wait, and before
the end of November he was condemned. The assize court was a place of
intolerable gloom, intolerable formality, intolerable pain, but the
public seemed to enjoy it. The keeper swore Dan had tried to shoot
him, and the prisoner contested this. He did not deny that he was
the aggressor. The jury found him guilty. What had he to say? He had
nothing to say, but he was deeply moved by the spectacle of the Rev.
Scroope standing up and testifying to his sobriety, his honesty, his
general good repute, and pleading for a lenient sentence because he was
a man of considerable force of character, misguided no doubt, a little
unfortunate, and prone to recklessness.

Said the judge, examining the papers of the indictment: “I see there is
a previous conviction—for betting offences.”

“That was three years ago, my lord. There has been nothing of the kind
since, my lord, of that I am sure, quite sure.”

Scroope showed none of his old time confident aspect, he was perspiring
and trembling. The clerk of the assize leaned up and held a whispered
colloquy with the judge, who then addressed the rector.

“Apparently he is still a betting agent. He gave a false name and
address, which was taken down by the keeper on a piece of paper
furnished by the prisoner. Here it is, on one side the name of Peter
Pope (Piper, sir!) Piper: and on the other side this is written:

  _3 o/c race. Pretty Dear, 5/- to win. J. Klopstock._

Are there any Klopstocks in your parish?”

“Klopstock!” murmured the parson, “it is the name of my cook.”

What had the prisoner to say about that? The prisoner had nothing to
say, and he was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard
labour.

So Dan was taken away. He was a tough man, an amenable man, and the
mere rigours of the prison did not unduly afflict him. His behaviour
was good, and he looked forward to gaining the maximum remission of his
sentence. Meg, his mother, went to see him once, alone, but she did
not repeat the visit. The prison chaplain paid him special attention.
He, too, was a Scroope, a huge fellow, not long from Oxford, and Pavey
learned that he was related to the Thasper rector. The new year came,
February came, March came, and Dan was afforded some privileges. His
singing in chapel was much admired, and occasionally he was allowed to
sing to the prisoners. April came, May came, and then his son Martin
was drowned in a boating accident, on a lake, in a park. The Thasper
children had been taken there for a holiday. On hearing it, Pavey sank
limply to the floor of his cell. The warders sat him up, but they could
make nothing of him, he was dazed, and he could not speak. He was taken
to the hospital wing. “This man has had a stroke, he is gone dumb,”
said the doctor. On the following day he appeared to be well enough,
but still he could not speak. He went about the ward doing hospital
duty, dumb as a ladder; he could not even mourn, but a jig kept
flickering through his voiceless mind:

    In a park there was a lake,
    On the lake there was a boat,
    In the boat there was a boy.

Hour after hour the stupid jingle flowed through his consciousness.
Perhaps it kept him from going mad, but it did not bring him back
his speech, he was dumb, dumb. And he remembered a man who had been
stricken deaf, and then blind—Scroope knew him too, it was some man who
had mocked God.

    In a park there was a lake,
    On the lake there was a boat,
    In the boat there was a boy.

On the day of the funeral Pavey imagined that he had been let out of
prison; he dreamed that someone had been kind and set him free for an
hour or two to bury his dead boy. He seemed to arrive at Thasper when
the ceremony was already begun, the coffin was already in the church.
Pavey knelt down beside his mother. The rector intoned the office,
the child was taken to its grave. Dumb dreaming Pavey turned his eyes
from it. The day was too bright for death, it was a stainless day.
The wind seemed to flow in soft streams, rolling the lilac blooms. A
small white feather, blown from a pigeon on the church gable, whirled
about like a butterfly. “We give thee hearty thanks,” the priest was
saying, “for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother
out of the miseries of this sinful world.” At the end of it all Pavey
kissed his mother, and saw himself turn back to his prison. He went by
the field paths away to the railway junction. The country had begun to
look a little parched, for rain was wanted—vividly he could see all
this—but things were growing, corn was thriving greenly, the beanfields
smelled sweet. A frill of yellow kilk and wild white carrot spray lined
every hedge. Cattle dreamed in the grass, the colt stretched itself
unregarded in front of its mother. Larks, wrens, yellow-hammers. There
were the great beech trees and the great hills, calm and confident,
overlooking Cobbs and Peter, Thasper and Trinkel, Buzzlebury and
Nuncton. He sees the summer is coming on, he is going back to prison.
“Courage is vain,” he thinks, “we are like the grass underfoot, a blade
that excels is quickly shorn. In this sort of a world the poor have no
call to be proud, they had only need be penitent.”

    In the park there was a lake,
    On the lake ... boat,
    In the boat....




                               _Luxury_


Eight o’clock of a fine spring morning in the hamlet of Kezzal Predy
Peter, great horses with chains clinking down the road, and Alexander
Finkle rising from his bed singing: “O lah soh doh, soh lah me doh,”
timing his notes to the ching of his neighbour’s anvil. He boils a
cupful of water on an oil stove, his shaving brush stands (where it
always stands) upon the window-ledge (“Soh lah soh do-o-o-oh, soh
doh soh la-a-a-ah!”) but as he addresses himself to his toilet the
clamour of the anvil ceases and then Finkle too becomes silent, for the
unresting cares of his life begin again to afflict him.

“This cottage is no good,” he mumbles, “and I’m no good. Literature is
no good when you live too much on porridge. Your writing’s no good,
sir, you can’t get any glow out of oatmeal. Why did you ever come here?
It’s a hopeless job and you know it!” Stropping his razor petulantly as
if the soul of that frustrating oatmeal lay there between the leather
and the blade, he continues: “But it isn’t the cottage, it isn’t me, it
isn’t the writing—it’s the privation. I must give it up and get a job
as a railway porter.”

And indeed he was very impoverished, the living he derived from his
writings was meagre; the cottage had many imperfections, both its
rooms were gloomy, and to obviate the inconvenience arising from its
defective roof he always slept downstairs.

Two years ago he had been working for a wall-paper manufacturer in
Bethnal Green. He was not poor then, not so very poor, he had the
clothes he stood up in (they were good clothes) and fifty pounds in
the bank besides. But although he had served the wall-paper man for
fifteen years that fifty pounds had not been derived from clerking,
he had earned it by means of his hobby, a little knack of writing
things for provincial newspapers. On his thirty-first birthday Finkle
argued—for he had a habit of conducting long and not unsatisfactory
discussions between himself and a self that apparently wasn’t him—that
what he could do reasonably well in his scanty leisure could be
multiplied exceedingly if he had time and opportunity, lived in the
country, somewhere where he could go into a garden to smell the roses
or whatever was blooming and draw deep draughts of happiness, think
his profound thoughts and realize the goodness of God, and then sit
and read right through some long and difficult book about Napoleon
or Mahomet. Bursting with literary ambition Finkle had hesitated no
longer: he could live on nothing in the country—for a time. He had
the fifty pounds, he had saved it, it had taken him seven years, but
he had made it and saved it. He handed in his notice. That was very
astonishing to his master, who esteemed him, but more astonishing to
Finkle was the parting gift of ten pounds which the master had given
him. The workmen, too, had collected more money for him, and bought
for him a clock, a monster, it weighed twelve pounds and had a brass
figure of Lohengrin on the top, while the serene old messenger man who
cleaned the windows and bought surreptitious beer for the clerks gave
him a prescription for the instantaneous relief of a painful stomach
ailment. “It might come in handy,” he had said. That was two years ago,
and now just think! He had bought himself an inkpot of crystalline
glass—a large one, it held nearly half a pint—and two pens, one for
red ink and one for black, besides a quill for signing his name with.
Here he was at “Pretty Peter” and the devil himself was in it! Nothing
had ever been right, the hamlet itself was poor. Like all places near
the chalk hills its roads were of flint, the church was of flint, the
farms and cots of flint with brick corners. There was an old milestone
outside his cot, he was pleased with that, it gave the miles to London
and the miles to Winchester, it was nice to have a milestone there like
that—your very own.

He finished shaving and threw open the cottage door; the scent of
wallflowers and lilac came to him as sweet almost as a wedge of newly
cut cake. The may bloom on his hedge drooped over the branches like
crudded cream, and the dew in the gritty road smelled of harsh dust in
a way that was pleasant. Well, if the cottage wasn’t much good, the bit
of a garden was all right.

There was a rosebush too, a little vagrant in its growth. He leaned
over his garden gate; there was no one in sight. He took out the fire
shovel and scooped up a clot of manure that lay in the road adjacent to
his cottage and trotted back to place it in a little heap at the root
of those scatter-brained roses, pink and bulging, that never seemed to
do very well and yet were so satisfactory.

“Nicish day,” remarked Finkle, lolling against his doorpost, “but
it’s always nice if you are doing a good day’s work. The garden is all
right, and literature is all right, and life’s all right—only I live
too much on porridge. It isn’t the privation itself, it’s the things
privation makes a man do. It makes a man do things he ought not want to
do, it makes him mean, it makes him feel mean, I tell you, and if he
feels mean and thinks mean he writes meanly, that’s how it is.”

He had written topical notes and articles, stories of gay life (of
which he knew nothing), of sport (of which he knew less), a poem about
“hope,” and some cheerful pieces for a girls’ weekly paper. And yet his
outgoings still exceeded his income, painfully and perversely after two
years. It was terrifying. He wanted success, he had come to conquer—not
to find what he _had_ found. But he would be content with encouragement
now even if he did not win success; it was absolutely necessary, he
had not sold a thing for six months, his public would forget him, his
connection would be gone.

“There’s no use though,” mused Finkle, as he scrutinized his worn
boots, “in looking at things in detail, that’s mean; a large view is
the thing. Whatever is isolated is bound to look alarming.”

But he continued to lean against the doorpost in the full blaze of the
stark, almost gritty sunlight, thinking mournfully until he heard the
porridge in the saucepan begin to bubble. Turning into the room he felt
giddy, and scarlet spots and other phantasmagoria waved in the air
before him.

Without an appetite he swallowed the porridge and ate some bread and
cheese and watercress. Watercress, at least, was plentiful there, for
the little runnels that came down from the big hills expanded in the
Predy Peter fields and in their shallow bottoms the cress flourished.

He finished his breakfast, cleared the things away, and sat down to
see if he could write, but it was in vain—he could not write. He could
think, but his mind would embrace no subject, it just teetered about
with the objects within sight, the empty, disconsolate grate, the
pattern of the rug, and the black butterfly that had hung dead upon
the wall for so many months. Then he thought of the books he intended
to read but could never procure, the books he had procured but did not
like, the books he had liked but was already, so soon, forgetting.
Smoking would have helped and he wanted to smoke, but he could not
afford it now. If ever he had a real good windfall he intended to buy a
tub, a little tub it would have to be of course, and he would fill it
to the bung with cigarettes, full to the bung, if it cost him pounds.
And he would help himself to one whenever he had a mind to do so.

“Bah, you fool!” he murmured, “you think you have the whole world
against you, that you are fighting it, keeping up your end with
heroism! Idiot! What does it all amount to? You’ve withdrawn yourself
from the world, run away from it, and here you sit making futile dabs
at it, like a child sticking pins into a pudding and wondering why
nothing happens. What _could_ happen? What? The world doesn’t know
about you, or care, you are useless. It isn’t aware of you any more
than a chain of mountains is aware of a gnat. And whose fault is
that—is it the mountains’ fault? Idiot! But I can’t starve and I must
go and get a job as a railway porter, it’s all I’m fit for.”

Two farmers paused outside Finkle’s garden and began a solid
conversation upon a topic that made him feel hungry indeed. He
listened, fascinated, though he was scarcely aware of it.

“Six-stone lambs,” said one, “are fetching three pounds apiece.”

“Ah!”

“I shall fat some.”

“Myself I don’t care for lamb, never did care.”

“It’s good eating.”

“Ah, but I don’t care for it. Now we had a bit of spare rib last night
off an old pig. ’Twas cold, you know, but beautiful. I said to my dame:
‘What can mortal man want better than spare rib off an old pig? Tender
and white, ate like lard.’”

“Yes, it’s good eating.”

“Nor veal, I don’t like—nothing that’s young.”

“Veal’s good eating.”

“Don’t care for it, never did, it eats short to my mind.”

Then the school bell began to ring so loudly that Finkle could hear
no more, but his mind continued to hover over the choice of lamb or
veal or old pork until he was angry. Why had he done this foolish
thing, thrown away his comfortable job, reasonable food, ease of mind,
friendship, pocket money, tobacco? Even his girl had forgotten him.
Why had he done this impudent thing, it was insanity surely? But he
knew that man has instinctive reasons that transcend logic, what a
parson would call the superior reason of the heart.

“I wanted a change, and I got it. Now I want another change, but
what shall I get? Chance and change, they are the sweet features of
existence. Chance and change, and not too much prosperity. If I were an
idealist I could live from my hair upwards.”

The two farmers separated. Finkle staring haplessly from his window saw
them go. Some schoolboys were playing a game of marbles in the road
there. Another boy sat on the green bank quietly singing, while one in
spectacles knelt slyly behind him trying to burn a hole in the singer’s
breeches with a magnifying glass. Finkle’s thoughts still hovered over
the flavours and satisfactions of veal and lamb and pig until, like
mother Hubbard, he turned and opened his larder.

There, to his surprise, he saw four bananas lying on a saucer. Bought
from a travelling hawker a couple of days ago they had cost him
threepence halfpenny. And he had forgotten them! He could not afford
another luxury like that for a week at least, and he stood looking at
them, full of doubt. He debated whether he should take one now, he
would still have one left for Wednesday, one for Thursday, and one
for Friday. But he thought he would not, he had had his breakfast
and he had not remembered them. He grew suddenly and absurdly angry
again. That was the worst of poverty, not what it made you endure, but
what it made you _want_ to endure. Why shouldn’t he eat a banana—why
shouldn’t he eat all of them? And yet bananas always seemed to him
such luxuriant, expensive things, so much peel, and then two, or not
more than three, delicious bites. But if he fancied a banana—there it
was. No, he did not want to destroy the blasted thing! No reason at
all why he should not, but that was what continuous hardship did for
you, nothing could stop this miserable feeling for economy now. If he
had a thousand pounds at this moment he knew he would be careful about
bananas and about butter and about sugar and things like that; but he
would never have a thousand pounds, nobody had ever had it, it was
impossible to believe that anyone had ever had wholly and entirely to
themselves a thousand pounds. It could not be believed. He was like a
man dreaming that he had the hangman’s noose around his neck; yet the
drop did not take place, it did not take place, and it would not take
place. But the noose was still there. He picked up the bananas one
by one, the four bananas, the whole four. No other man in the world,
surely, had ever had four such fine bananas as that and not wanted to
eat them? O, why had such stupid, mean scruples seized him again? It
was disgusting and ungenerous to himself, it made him feel mean, it
_was_ mean! Rushing to his cottage door he cried: “Here y’are!” to the
playing schoolboys and flung two of the bananas into the midst of them.
Then he flung another. He hesitated at the fourth, and tearing the peel
from it he crammed the fruit into his own mouth, wolfing it down and
gasping: “So perish all such traitors.”

When he had completely absorbed its savour, he stared like a fool
at the empty saucer. It was empty, the bananas were gone, all four
irrecoverably gone.

“Damned pig!” cried Finkle.

But then he sat down and wrote all this, just as it appears.


[Illustration: Publisher's device]

        LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
              CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber’s note:

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Variations in hyphenation have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.





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