Master Simon's inn, the "Flowing Source"--"Good Entertainment for Man
and Beast"--leant over the riverside by the ferry, a mile and a half
above Ponteglos town. The fresh water of Cuckoo River met the salt
Channel tide right under its windows, by the wooden ladder where
Master Simon chained his ferry-boat. Fourteen miles inland, a brown
trout-stream singing down from the moors, plunged over a ledge of
rock into the cool depths of Cuckoo Valley. Thenceforward it ran by
beds of sundew, water-mint and asphodel, under woods so steeply
converging that the traveller upon the ridges heard it as the trickle
of water in a cavern. But just above Master Simon's inn the valley
widened out into arable and grey pasture land, and the river, too,
widened and grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage at
the spring tides. In summer, from the bow-window of his coffee-room,
Master Simon could follow its course down through the meadows to the
church-tower of Ponteglos and the shipping congregated there about
the wharves, and watch in the middle distance the sails of a barge or
shallow trading-ketch moving among the haymakers. But from November
to March, when the floods were out, the "Flowing Source" stood above
an inland sea, with a haystack or two for lesser islets. Then the
river's course could be told only by a line of stakes on which the
wild fowl rested. The meadows were covered. Only a few clumps of
reed rose above the clapping water and shook in the northerly gales.
And then, when no guests came for weeks together, and the salt spray
crusted the panes so thickly that looking abroad became a weariness
of the spirit, Master Simon would reach down his long gun from the
chimney-piece and polish it, and having pulled on his wading-boots
and wrapped a large woollen comforter round his throat and another
round his head, would summon his tap-boy, unmoor the ferry-boat, and
go duck-shooting. For in winter birds innumerable haunt the
riverside here--wild duck, snipe, teal, and widgeon; curlews,
fieldfares, and plovers, both green and golden; rooks, starlings,
little white-rumped sandpipers; herons from the upper woods and gulls
from seaward. Master Simon had fine sport in the short days, and the
inn might take care of itself, which it was perfectly well able to
do. Its foundations rested on sunken piles of magnificent girth--"as
stout as myself," said Master Simon modestly--and on these it stood
so high that even the great flood of 'fifty-nine had overlapped the
kitchen threshold but once, at the top of a spring tide with a
north-westerly gale behind it; and then had retreated within the
hour. "It didn't put the fire out," boasted Master Simon.
He was proud of his inn, and for some very good reasons. To begin
with, you would not find another such building if you searched
England for a year. It consisted almost wholly of wood; but of such
wood! The story went that on a blowing afternoon, in the late autumn
of 1588, two Spanish galleons from the Great Armada--they had been
driven right around Cape Wrath--came trailing up the estuary and took
ground just above Ponteglos. Their crews landed and marched inland,
and never returned. Some say the Cornishmen cut them off and slew
them. For my part, I think it more likely that these foreigners
found hospitality, and very wisely determined to settle in the
country. Certain it is, you will find in the upland farms over
Cuckoo Valley a race of folks with olive complexions, black curling
hair and beards, and Southern names--Santo, Hugo, Jago, Bennett,
Jose. . . .
At all events, the Spanyers (Spaniards) never came back to their
galleons, which lay in the ooze by the marsh meadows until the very
birds forgot to fear them, and built in their rigging. By the Roles
d'Oleron--which were, in effect, the maritime laws of that period--
all wrecks or wreckage belonged to the Crown when neither an owner
nor an heir of a late owner could be found for it. But in those days
the king's law travelled lamely through Cornwall; so that when, in
1605, these galleons were put up to auction and sold by the Lord of
the Manor--who happened to be High Sheriff--nobody inquired very
closely where the money went. It is more to the point that the
timber of them was bought by one Master Blaise--never mind the
surname; he was an ancestor of Master Simon's, and a well-to-do
wool-comber of Ponteglos.
This Master Blaise already rented the ferry-rights by Flowing Source,
and certain rights of fishery above and below; and having a younger
son to provide for, he conceived the happy notion of this hostelry
beside the river. For ground-rent he agreed to carry each Michaelmas
to the Lord of the Manor one penny in a silk purse; and the lord's
bailiff, on bringing the receipt, was to take annually of Master
Blaise and his heirs one jack of ale of the October brewing and one
smoke-cured salmon of not less than fifteen pounds' weight.
These conditions having been duly signed, in the year 1606 Master
Blaise laid the foundations of his inn upon the timbers of one
galleon and set up the elm keelson of the other for his roof-tree.
Its stout ribs, curving outwards and downwards from this magnificent
balk, supported the carvel-built roof, so that the upper half of the
building appeared--and indeed was--a large inverted hull, decorated
with dormer windows, brick chimneys, and a round pigeon-house
surmounted by a gilded vane. The windows he took ready-made from the
Spaniard's bulging stern-works. And for signboard he hung out,
between two bulging poop-lanterns, a large bituminous painting on
panel, that had been found on board the larger galleon, and was
supposed to represent the features of her patron, Saint Nicholas
Prodaneli. But the site of the building had always been known as
Flowing Source, and by this name and no other Master Blaise's inn was
called for over two hundred years.
By this time its timber roof had clothed itself with moss upon the
north side, and on the west the whole framework inclined over the
river, as though the timbers of the old galleon regretted their
proper element and strained towards it tenderly, quietly,
persistently. But careful patching and repairing had kept the
building to all appearance as stout as ever; and any doubts of its
stability were dispelled in a moment by a glance at Master Simon, the
landlord. Master Simon's age by parish register fell short of forty,
but he looked at least ten years older: a slow man with a promising
stomach and a very satisfactory balance at the bank; a notable
breeder of pigeons and fisher of eels. He could also brew strong
ale, and knew exactly how salmon should be broiled. He had heard
that the world revolves, and decided to stand still and let it come
round to him. Certainly a considerable number of its inhabitants
found their way to the "Flowing Source" sooner or later. Marketers
crossed the ferry and paused for a morning drink. In the cool of the
day quiet citizens rambled up from Ponteglos with rod and line, or
brought their families by boat on the high evening tide to eat cream
and junket, and sit afterwards on the benches by the inn-door,
watching the fish rise and listening to the song of the young people
some way up stream. Painters came, too, and sketched the old inn,
and sometimes stayed for a week, having tasted the salmon.
Pigeon-breeders dropped in and smoked long pipes in the kitchen with
Master Simon, and slowly matured bets and matches. And once or twice
in the summer months a company of pilgrims would arrive--queer
literary men in velveteen coats, who examined all the rooms and
furniture as though they meant to make a bid for the inn complete;
who talked with outlandish tongues and ordered expensive dinners, and
usually paid for them next morning, rather to Master Simon's
surprise. It appeared that there had been once, in the time of
Master Simon's grandfather, a certain pot-boy at the "Flowing Source"
who ran off into the world and became a great poet; and these
pilgrimages were made in his honour. Master Simon found this story
somehow very creditable to himself, and came in time to take
almost as much pride in it as in his pigeons and broiled salmon.
Regularly after dinner on these occasions he would exhibit an old
pewter pint-pot to the pilgrims, and draw their attention to the
following verse, scratched upon it--as he asserted--by the poet's own
hand:
Who buys beef buys bones,
Who buys land buys stones,
Who buys eggs buys shels,
But who buys ale buys nothing els.
And the pilgrims feigned credulity according as they valued Master
Simon's opinion of their intelligence.
But most welcome of all were the merchant-captains from Ponteglos,
among whom custom had made it a point of honour to report themselves
at the "Flowing Source" within twenty-four hours after dropping
anchor by Ponteglos Quay. When or why or how the custom arose nobody
was old enough to remember; but a master mariner would as soon have
thought of sailing without log or leadline as of putting in and out
of Ponteglos without tasting Master Simon's ale--"calling for
orders," as they put it. Master Simon had never climbed a sea-going
ship except to shake hands with a friend and wish him good passage
and return to shore with the pilot; but the teak walls of his parlour
were lined with charts of such very remote parts of the globe, and
his shelves with such a quantity of foreign china and marine
curiosities, and he spoke so familiarly of Galapagos, Batavia, Cape
Verde, the Horn, the Straits of Magellan, and so forth, and would
bring his telescope so knowingly to bear on the gilt weathercock over
Ponteglos church tower, that until you knew the truth you would have
sworn half his life had been spent on the quarter-deck. And while
the sea-captains--serious men, attired in blue cloth, wearing rings
in their ears--sat and smoked canaster and other queer tobaccos in
painted china pipes, and talked of countries whose very names
conjured up visions of parrots, and carved idols, and sharks, and
brown natives in flashing canoes, Master Simon would put a shrewd
question or two and wag his head over the answers as a man who hears
just what he expected. And sometimes towards the close of the
sitting, if he knew his company very well, he would reward them with
his favourite and only song, "The Golden Vanitee":
A ship I have got in the North Countree,
And I had her christened the Golden Vanitee;
O, I fear she's been taken by a Spanish Gal-a-lee,
As she sailed by the Lowlands low!
In some hazy way he had persuaded himself that the Spanish galleon of
the ballad was the very ship whose timbers over-arched him and his
audience; and for the moment, being himself inverted (so to speak) by
the potency of his own singing, he blew out his chest and straddled
out his thick calves and screwed up his eyes, quite as if his
roof-tree were right-side-up once more in blue water, and he on deck
beside the weather-rail. But the mood began to pass as soon as he
bolted the front door behind his guests, and Ann the cook poured him
out his last cup of mulled ale and withdrew with the saucepan.
And another noon would find him seated under his leaning house-front,
his eyes half-closed, his attention divided between the whisper of
the tide and the murmur in the pigeon-cotes overhead, his body at
ease and his soul content. His was a happy life--or had been, but
for two crumpled rose-leaves.
To begin with, there were those confounded pot-boys. It puzzled
Master Simon almost as much as it annoyed him; he paid fair wages and
passed for a good employer; but he could not keep a pot-boy for
twelve months. As a matter of fact, I know the river to have been
the bottom of the mischief--the river, and perhaps the talk of the
ship-captains. It might satisfy Master Simon to sit and watch the
salmon passing up in autumn towards their spawning beds, and rubbing,
as they went, their scales against his landing-stage to clear them of
the sea-lice; to watch them and their young passing seaward in the
early spring; to watch and wait and spread his nets in the due
season. But for the youngsters this running water was a constant
lure--the song of it and the dimple on it. It coaxed them, as it
coaxed the old galleon, to lean over and listen. And the moment that
listening became intolerable, they were off. Only one of them--the
poet before mentioned--had ever expressed any desire to return and
revisit--
The shining levels and the dazzled wave
Emerging from his covert, errant long,
In solitude descending by a vale
Lost between uplands, where the harvesters
Pause in the swathe, shading their eyes to watch
Some barge or schooner stealing up from sea;
Themselves in sunset, she a twilit ghost
Parting the twilit woods . .
Ah, loving God!
Grant, in the end, this world may slip away
With whisper of that water by the bows
Of such a bark, bearing me home--thy stars
Breaking the gloom like kingfishers, thy heights
Golden with wheat, thy waiting angels there
Wearing the dear rough faces of my kin!
I doubt if he meant it, any more than Virgil meant his "_flumina amem
silvasque inglorius_." At any rate, the public knew what was due to
itself, and when the time came, gave the man a handsome funeral in
Westminster Abbey. Among his pall-bearers walked the Prime Minister,
the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the Royal Academy of Arts,
and (as representing rural life) the Chief Secretary of Foreign
Affairs.
What else disturbed the placid current of Master Simon's cogitations?
Why, this: he was the last of his race, and unmarried.
For himself, he had no inclination to marry. But sometimes, as he
shaved his chin of a morning, the reflection in his round mirror
would suggest another. Was he not neglecting a public duty?
Now there dwelt down at Ponteglos a Mistress Prudence Waddilove, a
widow, who kept the "Pandora's Box" Inn on the quay--a very tidy
business. Master Simon had known her long before she married the
late Waddilove; had indeed sat on the same form with her in
infants' school--she being by two years his junior, but always a
trifle quicker of wit. He attended her husband's funeral in a
neighbourly way, and, a week later, put on his black suit again and
went down--still in a neighbourly way--to offer his condolence.
Mistress Prudence received him in the best parlour, which smelt damp
and chilly in comparison with the little room behind the bar.
Master Simon remarked that she must be finding it lonely.
Whereupon she wept.
Master Simon suggested that he, for his part, had tried
pigeon-breeding, and found that it alleviated solitude in a wonderful
manner. "There's my tumblers. If you like, I'll bring you down a
pair. They're pretty to watch. Of course, a husband is different--"
"Of course," Mistress Prudence assented, her grief too recent to
allow a smile even at the picture of the late Waddilove (a man of
full habit) cleaving the air with frequent somersaults. She added,
not quite inconsequently:
"He is an angel."
"Of course," said Master Simon, in his turn.
"But I think," she went on, quite inconsequently, "I would rather
have a pair of carriers."
"Now, why in the world?" wondered Master Simon. He kept carrier
pigeons, to be sure. He kept pigeons of every sort--tumblers,
pouters, carriers, Belgians, dragons . . . the subdivisions, when you
came to them, were endless. But the carriers were by no means his
show-birds. He kept them mainly for the convenience of Ann the cook.
Ann had a cunning eye for a pigeon, and sometimes ventured a trifle
of her savings on a match; and though in his masculine pride he never
consulted her, Master Simon always felt more confident on hearing
that Ann had put money on his bird. Now, when a match took place at
some distant town or flying-ground, Ann would naturally be anxious to
learn the result as quickly as possible; and Master Simon, finding
that the suspense affected her cookery, had fallen into the habit of
taking a hamper of carriers to all distant meetings and speeding them
back to "Flowing Source" with tidings of his fortune. Apart from
this office--which they performed well enough--he took no special
pride in them. The offer of a pair of his pet tumblers, worth their
weight in gold, had cost him an effort; and when Mistress Prudence,
ordinarily a clear-headed woman, declared that she preferred
carriers, she could hardly have astonished him more by asking for a
pair of stock-doves.
"Oh, certainly," he answered, and went home and thought it over.
Women were a puzzle; but he had a dim notion that if he could lay
hand on the reason why Mistress Prudence preferred ordinary carriers
to prize tumblers, he would hold the key to some of the secrets of
the sex. He thought it over for three days, during which he smoked
more tobacco than was good for him. At about four o'clock in the
afternoon of the third day, a smile enlarged his face. He set down
his pipe, smacked his thigh, stood up, sat down again, and began to
laugh. He laughed slowly and deliberately--not loudly--for the
greater part of that evening, and woke up twice in the night and
shook the bedclothes into long waves with his mirth.
Next morning he took two carriers from the cote, shut them in a
hamper, and rowed down to Ponteglos with his gift. But Mrs.
Waddilove was not at home. She had started early by van for
Tregarrick (said the waitress at the "Pandora's Box") on business
connected with her husband's will. "No hurry at all," said Master
Simon. He slipped a handful of Indian corn under the lid, and left
the hamper "with his respects."
Then he rowed home, and spent the next two days after his wont; the
only observable difference being the position of his garden chair.
It stood as a rule under the shadow of the broad eaves, but now
Master Simon ordered the tap-boy to carry it out and set it by a
rustic table close to the river's brink, whence, as he smoked, he
could keep comfortable watch upon the pigeon-cote.
"You'll catch a sunstroke," said Ann the cook. "I hope you're not
beginning to forget how to take care of yourself."
"Well, I hope so too," Master Simon answered; but he did not budge.
On the morning of the third day, however, he saw that which made him
step indoors and mount to the attic under the cote. Having opened
with much caution a trap-door in the roof, he slipped an arm out and
captured a carrier pigeon.
The bird carried a note folded small and bound under its wing with a
thread of silk. Master Simon opened the note and read:
If you loves me as I loves you,
No knife can cut our loves in two.
He had prepared himself for a hearty chuckle; but he broke out with a
profuse perspiration instead. "Oh, this is hustling a man!" he
ingeminated, staring round the empty attic like a rabbit seeking a
convenient hole. "Not three weeks buried!" he added, with another
groan, and began to loosen his neck-cloth.
While thus engaged, he heard a flutter above the trap-door, and a
second pigeon alighted, with a second note, also bound with a silken
thread.
"Lor-a-mercy!" gasped Master Simon.
But the second note was written in a different hand, and ran as
follows:
"_I could die of shame. It was all that hussy of a girl. She did it
for a joke. I'll joke her. But what will you be thinking?--P. W._"
Master Simon rowed down to Ponteglos that very afternoon, and the two
carriers went back with him. Happiness seemed to have shaken its
wings and quite departed from "Pandora's Box"; but a twinkle of
something not entirely unlike hope lurked in the corners of the
waitress's eyes--albeit their lids were red and swollen--as she
ushered Master Simon into the best parlour.
"What can you be thinking of me?" began the widow. _Her_ eyes were
red and swollen, too.
"I've brought back the pigeons."
"I can never bear the sight of them again!"
"You might begin different, you know," suggested Master Simon,
affably. "Some little message about the weather, for instance.
Have you given that girl warning to leave?"
"You see, I'm so lonely here . . ."
Some three months after this, and on an exceptionally fine morning in
September, Master Simon put Harmony, his celebrated almond hen, into
her travelling hamper, and marched over to the crossroads to take
coach for Illogan, in the mining district, where the matches for the
championship cup were to be flown that year.
Now Ann the cook had ventured no less than five pounds upon Harmony.
Five pounds represented a half of her annual wage, and a trifle less
than half of her annual savings. Therefore she spent the greater
part of the following afternoon at her window, gazing westward in no
small perturbation of spirit.
It wanted a few minutes to five when a carrier pigeon came travelling
across the zenith, shot downwards suddenly, and alighted on the roof.
Ann climbed to the trap-door and put out a hand. The bird was
preening his feathers, and allowed himself to be taken easily.
In circumstances less agitating Ann had not failed to observe that
the thread about the messenger's wing was not of the kind that Master
Simon used. But her eyes opened wide as they fell on the
handwriting, and still wider as she read:
"_It is all for the best, perhaps. If only people have not begun to
talk_.--Prudence."
A second messenger arrived towards evening with word of Harmony's
success. But the news hardly relaxed Ann's brow, which kept a
pensive contraction even when her master arrived next evening and
poured out her winnings on the table from the silver challenge cup.
She wore this frown at intervals for a fortnight, and all the while
maintained an unusual silence which puzzled Master Simon. Then one
morning he heard her in the kitchen scolding the tap-boy with all her
pristine heartiness. That night, after mulling her master's ale, she
turned at the door, saucepan in hand, and coughed to attract
attention.
"Well, Ann; what is it?"
"You've been philanderin'."
"Hey! Upon my word, Ann--"
Ann produced the Widow Waddilove's note and flattened it out under
Master Simon's eyes. And Master Simon blushed painfully.
"Are you goin' to marry the woman?" Ann demanded.
"I think not."
"I reckon you will."
"Well, you see, there has been a hitch. She won't leave the
'Pandora's Box,' and I'm not going to budge from 'Flowing Source.'
If a woman won't put herself out to that extent--Besides, she cooks
no better than you."
"Not so well. You wasn't thinking, by any chance, o' marrying _me_?"
"Ann, you're perfectly brazen! Well, no; to tell you the plain
truth, I wasn't."
"That's all right; because I've gone and promised myself to a young
farmer up the valley."
"What's his name?"
"I shan't tell you; for the reason that I've a second to fall back
on, if I find on acquaintance that the first won't do. But first or
second, I'll marry one or t'other at the month-end, and so I give you
notice."
Master Simon sighed. "Well! well! I must get on as best I can with
Tom for a while." Tom was the tap-boy.
"Tom's going, too. I bullied him so this morning that he means to
give notice to-morrow; that is, if he don't save himself the trouble
by running off to sea."
"The twelfth in five years!" ejaculated Master Simon, stopping his
pipe viciously.
"And small blame to them! Married man or mariner--that's what a boy
is born for. Better dare wreck or wedlock than sit here and talk
about both. Take my advice, master, and marry the widow!"
Ann carried out her own matrimonial programme, at any rate, with
spirit and determination. Finding the first young farmer
satisfactory, she espoused him at the end of the month, and turned
her back on "Flowing Source." And Tom the tap-boy fulfilled her
prophecy and ran away to sea. And the old inn leaned after him until
its timbers creaked. And the autumn floods rose and covered the
meadows.
Master Simon sat and smoked, and made his own bed, and accomplished
some execrable cookery in the intervals of oiling his duck-gun.
Even duck-shooting becomes a weariness when a man has to manage gun
and punt single-handed. One afternoon he abandoned the sport in an
exceedingly bad temper, and pulled up to the jaws of Cuckoo Valley.
Here he landed, and after an hour's trudge in the marshy bottoms had
the luck to knock over two couple of woodcock.
He rowed back with his spoil, and was making fast to the ferry steps,
when a thought struck him. He shipped the paddles again, and pulled
down to Ponteglos. The short day was closing, and already a young
moon glimmered on the floods.
The woodcock were cooked to a turn; juicier birds never reclined on
toast. The waitress removed the cloth and returned with a kettle;
retired and returned again with a short-necked bottle, a glass and
spoon, sugar, a nutmeg, and a lemon; retired with a twinkle in her
eye.
"To fortify you!" said Mistress Prudence, rubbing a lump of sugar
gently on the lemon-rind.
"The night air," Master Simon murmured.
"--Against the damp house you're going back to," the lady corrected.
"You talk without giving it a trial."
"As you talk, in your parlour, of deep-sea voyages."
"As a ship's captain you would respect me perhaps?"
"No, for you haven't the head. But I should like your pluck.
If I saw you setting off for sea in earnest, I would run out and give
you a chance to steer a woman instead of a ship. You would find her
safer."
Master Simon emptied his glass, rose, and wound his great comforter
about his neck. The widow saw him to the door.
"You're a very obstinate woman," he said.
And with this he unmoored his boat and rowed resolutely homewards.
A strong wind came piping down on the back of a strong tide, and
Master Simon arched his shoulders against it.
"Married man or mariner!" it piped, as he rounded the first bend.
"I know my own mind, I believe," said Master Simon to himself.
"There's as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and for
salmon, 'Flowing Source' will beat Christchurch any day, I've always
maintained."
"Married man or mariner!" piped the wind in the words of Ann the
cook.
Master Simon pulled his left paddle hard and rounded the second bend.
"Married man or mar--"
Crash!
His heels flew up and his head struck the bottom-boards. Then, in a
moment, the boat was gone, and a rush of water sang in his ears and
choked him. He saw a black shadow overhanging, and clutched at it.
Mistress Prudence stood in her doorway on the quay, as Master Simon
had left her. In the room above, the waitress blew out her candle,
drew up the blind, and opened her window to the moonlight.
"Selina!" the mistress called.
Selina thrust out her head.
"What's that coming down the river?"
A black, unshapely mass was moving swiftly down towards the quay.
"I think 'tis a haystack," Selina whispered, and then, "Lord save us
all, there's a man on it!"
"A man?" cried the widow, shrilly. "What man?"
A voice answered the question, calling for help out of the river--a
voice that she knew.
"What is it?" she called back.
"I think," quavered Master Simon, "I think 'tis the roof o' 'Flowing
Source'!"
Mistress Prudence ran down the quay steps, cast off the first boat
that lay handy, and pulled towards the dark mass sweeping seaward.
As it crossed ahead of her bows, she dropped the paddles, ran to the
painter, and flung it forward with all her might.
The "Pandora's Box" Inn stands on Ponteglos Quay to this day. And
all that is left of "Flowing Source" hangs on the wall of its best
parlour--four dark oak timbers forming a frame around a portrait, the
portrait of a woman of middle age and comfortable countenance.
In the right-hand top corner of the picture, in letters of faded
gold, runs the legend--VXOR BONA INSTAR NAVIS.