A figure in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper parcels. That
is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddy Dorsetshire lane, and the
roan mare stared and obviously thought of a curtsey. The mare is
road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, and there is no telling what she
will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford. That was my first
meeting with Judkin, and the next time the circumstances were the same;
the same muddy lane, the same rather apologetic figure in the tweed suit,
the same--or very similar--parcels. Only this time the roan looked
straight in front of her.
Whether I asked the groom or whether he advanced the information, I
forget; but someway I gradually reconstructed the life-history of this
trudger of the lanes. It was much the same, no doubt, as that of many
others who are from time to time pointed out to one as having been
aforetime in crack cavalry regiments and noted performers in the saddle;
men who have breathed into their lungs the wonder of the East, have
romped through life as through a cotillon, have had a thrust perhaps at
the Viceroy's Cup, and done fantastic horsefleshy things around the Gulf
of Aden. And then a golden stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded
suddenly out of things, and the gods have nodded "Go." And they have not
gone. They have turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and
the marked-down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and to
encourage hens for their eggs. And Judkin was even as these others; the
wine had been suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he had stayed to
suck at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the days of his scorn
for most things he would have stared the roan mare and her turn-out out
of all pretension to smartness, as he would have frozen a cheap claret
behind its cork, or a plain woman behind her veil; and now he was walking
stoically through the mud, in a tweed suit that would eventually go on to
the gardener's boy, and would perhaps fit him. The dear gods, who know
the end before the beginning, were perhaps growing a gardener's boy
somewhere to fit the garments, and Judkin was only a caretaker,
inhabiting a portion of them. That is what I like to think, and I am
probably wrong. And Judkin, whose clothes had been to him once more than
a religion, scarcely less sacred than a family quarrel, would carry those
parcels back to his villa and to the wife who awaited him and them--a
wife who may, for all we know to the contrary, have had a figure once,
and perhaps has yet a heart of gold--of nine-carat gold, let us say at
the least--but assuredly a soul of tape. And he that has fetched and
carried will explain how it has fared with him in his dealings, and if he
has brought the wrong sort of sugar or thread he will wheedle away the
displeasure from that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive
bluebottles off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax
the fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced
beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses and the glory of its
thews. He has been in the raw places of the earth, where the desert
beasts have whimpered their unthinkable psalmody, and their eyes have
shone back the reflex of the midnight stars--and he can immerse himself
in the tending of an incubator. It is horrible and wrong, and yet when I
have met him in the lanes his face has worn a look of tedious
cheerfulness that might pass for happiness. Has Judkin of the Parcels
found something in the lees of life that I have missed in going to and
fro over many waters? Is there more wisdom in his perverseness than in
the madness of the wise? The dear gods know.
I don't think I saw Judkin more than three times all told, and always the
lane was our point of contact; but as the roan mare was taking me to the
station one heavy, cloud-smeared day, I passed a dull-looking villa that
the groom, or instinct, told me was Judkin's home. From beyond a hedge
of ragged elder-bushes could be heard the thud, thud of a spade, with an
occasional clink and pause, as if some one had picked out a stone and
thrown it to a distance, and I knew that _he_ was doing nameless things
to the roots of a pear tree. Near by him, I felt sure, would be lying a
large and late vegetable marrow, and its largeness and lateness would be
a theme of conversation at luncheon. It would be suggested that it
should grace the harvest thanksgiving service; the harvest having been so
generally unsatisfactory, it would be unfair to let the farmers supply
all the material for rejoicing.
And while I was speeding townwards along the rails Judkin would be
plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow and a
basketful of dahlias. The basket to be returned.