HOW BURROUGH HAD THE VISION.
Burrough was thirty-five, at which age most men have closed the
romantic chapter of their lives. Most men also go forth as
knight-errants to seek their adventures; Burrough had waited for his
to come to him. He did not look his age. He was a handsome giant,
slightly over six feet in height, and broad in proportion; his face
was clean-shaven; his hair was fair; his eyes were blue. He was also
clever--too clever for the work-a-day world. He had taken classical
honours; only a second-class because his health broke down. For some
years he managed to maintain himself by contributing essays and
reviews to various periodicals, until the atmosphere of Fleet Street
became too much for his lungs, and, on the advice of an eminent
specialist, he removed to Dartmoor, where he built a tiny cottage
beside a gorge, in a dreary solitude upon the moor near the village of
Lew.
He became well and strong in the bracing air, but with the return of
health came also the sense of his loneliness. His cottage was quite
apart from the village. It was surrounded by great boulders of
granite, heather, gorse, bracken and whortleberries. He could not
afford a housekeeper. A woman came out from the village twice a week
to put the place in order. For the rest he was alone. He mended his
own clothes and prepared his own meals.
Being clever with his hands, Burrough had assisted in the building of
his cottage. He had done all the painting and made a good deal of the
furniture. The interior was really comfortable. The cottage was not
beautiful externally; it was built of granite and roofed with
corrugated iron. Creepers would not grow up it on account of the
winds. Gorse and heather were thick beside the walls. The windows
overlooked a gorge. In winter the water in this gorge would rise and
roar so loudly as to make conversation difficult. Not much
conversation took place in the cottage. Burrough had only his cat to
argue with.
Within, the change was startling. To cross the threshold was literally
to step from dreariness into comfort. One step led from the barren
moor into a room of refinement: one second it was granite, bog, and
heath; the next green curtains, shaded lamps, old books, and pictures.
Burrough was proud of his little home. Every morning he swept and
dusted it while he waited for the kettle to boil. He never allowed his
fire to go out. It was easy to smother it with a couple of turves
before going to bed, and these turves were always warm and glowing in
the morning.
Burrough felt that a change had come over him as he walked back from
the secret nook, with the hairpin in his pocket, and the measurement
of the tiny footprint in his brain. A change had come over the weather
too; black clouds were racing across the High Willhays range, and the
rain began before the ugly tin roof of the cottage beside the gorge
appeared beneath the tors. Burrough liked to feel the wind and rain.
The storm suited his mood. How foolish he had been to try and banish
the thoughts of love! He thought he had not needed it. He thought he
could live and work without it. He had kept his inclinations subdued
for years, but some force had been secretly at work undermining his
resolution all the time. He had always been a shy man in the presence
of women. He had envied the ease with which young fellows would
address girls, while he would withdraw to a corner and look on,
feeling somehow that such pleasures were not for him. He did not know
how to address young women of his own class. He had nothing to offer
them. He believed that a woman would not look at a man if he could not
give her fine clothes, jewellery, a mansion, position in society, and
as much money to spend as she wanted. That had always been his
wrong-headed idea of love. It was what the world had taught him. Love
was a thing to be bought easily, and won with difficulty.
Burrough neglected his work that evening. Outside the wind howled, and
the water in the gorge roared. He sat in his easy-chair, smoking more
than was good for him, worrying over his poverty, and thinking all the
time of the golden hairpin in his pocket and the dainty footprint in
the sand. His big black cat was seated on the rug, blinking at the
flames, and purring a short stave whenever he felt the touch of his
master’s foot.
“Advise me, King o’ the Cats,” said Burrough at length. He was
accustomed thus to address his sole companion. “Don’t you think it’s
folly and madness for a man to live alone? If there are more women
than men in the world, surely there must be one for me. I’m in love at
the present moment, King o’ the Cats, hopelessly in love, over head
and ears in love, you blinking, purring, many-wived Solomon. No man
has ever been more in love, though I don’t know who she is. Attend to
me--rake, _roué_, _blasé_ old bigamist! Why should I keep you in
affluence and much matrimony, and myself in poverty and singleness of
life? Tell me that, King o’ the Cats. I have as much right to my one
wife as you to your dozen.”
Peter yawned, and made preparations for slumber.
“She wouldn’t come here though,” Burrough went on. “She wouldn’t come
to the doll’s house, to my granite ark with its roof of tin. It would
be coming down too low, King o’ the Cats. She couldn’t do it. Fancy
her trailing silks and laces, and all the fluffy wonders women wear,
across the bog, through the heather and gorse, and over the granite.
She would have to array her sweet self in canvas, sackcloth,
tarpaulins. She would not give up her world of fashion, and the world
of shops, for miserable me. Turn hermit in the wilderness for a
wretched man, a fool of a man, a beast of a penniless man. What a mad
idea it is, old King Peter! No wonder you yawn. I make you tired. Sit
up, my beauty, sit up in your majesty, and purr to me truly whether
there be in this rolling sphere, between the poles thereof, maid or
widow, not younger than twenty, nor yet older than thirty, who would
take John Burrough by the hand, and say, ‘I will’? Is there one who
would say, ‘I will come under your tin roof for better or for worse?’”
Peter scratched his right ear vigorously. Burrough went across the
room, and returned to his chair with an armful of classics.
“What do the poets say? Leave your ear alone, King o’ the Cats. I will
make it smart and tingle before I have done. Goddess of the golden
hairpin, goddess of the small brown shoe, what do the wise men say of
you? ‘Not any man shall escape, not even the gods. Love, thou
triumphest even over gold.’ No, no, Sophocles. It won’t do. Every man
has his price, and even Cupid is corruptible. A millionaire will buy
up the boy’s whole stock. ‘Take away the pleasures of love from life,
and there is nothing left but to die.’ That’s the opinion of Marcus
Aurelius, most excellent ear-scratcher. I observe you wink
sympathetically. ‘A woman is a great evil,’ says Euripides. ‘Faithless
is the female race.’ Out upon you, swarthy Greek. What do the gallant
Romans say? ‘Love and wisdom are incompatible.’ Do you hear that, King
o’ the Cats? We must give up our wise ways. ‘Love is full of
bitterness,’ declares Plautus, and Terence quite agrees with him; but
Plautus is man and brother enough to admit there is honey with the
gall. Ovid states that the disease is incurable, the which I doubt. It
is easily conveyed. True! It may be communicated by a hairpin, for
instance. Now let me try the Sortes Virgilianæ. ‘Love conquers all
things, and we must yield to love.’ That is the conclusion of the
whole matter.”
Burrough pushed the books from his knee, and sat frowning at the fire.
“Eh, my pussy,” he said sadly, stroking his favourite’s head. “We are
a pair of puir fules. Watch me go forth to-morrow to my sunny hollow
beyond the bog. You shall see me with my hose ungartered, my bonnet
unbanded, my sleeve unbuttoned, my shoe untied, and everything about
me demonstrating a careless desolation. That might have been all very
well in the days of chivalry, eh, _Chat Noir_? In this present
unpoetic age I should be dubbed a male slut, even if I could unbutton
my sleeve or unband my bonnet.”
Burrough indulged in a good deal of such vicious rhetoric before going
to bed. The next morning it was raining. He went down to the secret
nook beside the river, although he could not have expected to find
anything of surpassing interest. The ferns were drooping, the river
had risen, the blooms of the rowan and rose-bays looked draggled and
tawdry; they were like the artificial flowers on some Italian altar.
There was an odour of mud in the wind. Burrough climbed back to the
moorland track, and took the way which led into the village.
The vicar was standing at his garden door. The vicarage was nothing
more than a long cottage thatched with rushes. Mr. Yeoland was an old
man, weak, childish, and entirely incapable of performing his slight
duties. He clung somehow to life and office, the former a burden
because of his weakness, the latter a sinecure since all the villagers
went to chapel. The old man lived alone with a housekeeper, who
scolded him, and sometimes pushed him about roughly when she was the
worse for liquor. The old man spent most of his time in the house
sitting in a state of lethargy. Two or three times a day he would
shuffle to his garden door, which was overshadowed by a large
sycamore, and ogle the girls as they passed.
Mr. Yeoland was not alone. A girl stood beneath the sycamore talking
to him. She was of medium height, neither slender nor plump. She had
gathered up her skirts boldly, possibly on account of the mud,
possibly because a pretty ankle was not made to be hidden. A tiny tan
shoe nestled in the mud, and above was the brown silk stocking of
Burrough’s fancy. It fulfilled its purpose in a shapely manner, until
it disappeared, melted away into, or became blended with, a summer
cloud of diaphanous wonders. Her back was towards Burrough, but he
could see that her hair was dark brown, and that it was studded with
little gleaming points like fireflies. She wore a white
tam-o’-shanter. Secured to it on the left side was a jewelled
butterfly with wings outspread.
Burrough came to a stand beside the wall opposite, where he could both
see and hear. The Vicar did not appear to notice him. The old man was
chuckling in his senile way, delighted at having caught the young lady
as she passed. His speech was affected. He spoke out of the corner of
his mouth, and every word was accompanied by a grimace.
“Go along with you,” Burrough heard him say with a sly chuckle.
The young lady laughed. It was not a particularly pleasing laugh,
Burrough thought. Yet he was singularly anxious to hear it again. He
saw her put up a bare hand to brush the hair back from her forehead.
“I’ll pull it,” said the amorous old man, putting out his trembling
hand. “I will. I’ll pull it.”
“You will not,” said the young lady, rather coldly Burrough thought,
as she stepped back from the uninviting caress.
“If I was forty years younger,” mumbled the Vicar out of the corner of
his mouth, “I’d take off my white tie, and we’d go on the spree.”
“Are you so sure I would come with you?” said she.
A gust of wind passed through the sycamore and brought down a shower
of big drops. The young lady moved and cried, “What have you in the
garden--anything? May I go in and pick some flowers for my room?”
“Nothing but weeds,” mumbled the Vicar. “The garden’s like me--rough
and ready.”
“But I can see some syringa,” said she, raising herself on tip-toe.
“There are snakes in that long grass,” the Vicar warned her, as she
was about to enter.
“I’m not afraid of them. I like them,” came the answer.
“Afraid of mice?” he chuckled.
“Love them,” she declared.
“And men?” he went on.
“Silly apes,” she laughed.
They went into the garden. Burrough crossed the road, whipped the
tape-measure from his pocket, and measured the tiny imprint in the
mud.
“It is she,” he murmured.
He waited about beside the wall. From time to time he heard a merry
laugh, and the mumbling of old Yeoland, who was probably trying to
steal a kiss among the syringa. Burrough could not believe she would
permit that dirty and unpleasant old man to approach her. While he
waited the rain ceased and a flash of sunlight pierced the clouds. It
struck upon the garden, and he heard the exclamation, “The sun! I must
go.”
A moment later the girl stood in the doorway, and Burrough saw her
face at last.
She was like a bride with orange-blossoms. She held a quantity of
syringa covered with pearly rain-drops. The rain was in her dark-brown
hair too, and upon her face, and it was sprinkled upon her
tam-o’-shanter where the jewelled butterfly quivered in the sunshine.
She was not pretty. She had not a single good feature. Her skin was
brown. Her nose was not straight. It was a maddening face. No one who
fell in love with that face could ever love another.
When she saw Burrough she swished round, and said to the Vicar, who
was hobbling amorously in her wake, “Thanks very much for the syringa,
but I don’t know what I shall do with it now I’ve got it. The scent is
too heady for a room.”
“Have it beside your bed. Then you’ll dream of me,” the old man
muttered.
“I should wake with a headache, and pitch it out of the window.”
“As Gerard did,” said Burrough as the Vicar appeared, addressing
himself to the old man. “Good morning, Mr. Yeoland.”
“Good morning,” said the Vicar, somewhat gruffly, as he did not like
to have such little affairs interrupted.
“Good morning,” murmured the young lady. “As Mr. Yeoland does not
introduce me. As a matter of fact I’ve never been introduced to him.
One doesn’t stand upon ceremony much in a mountain village.”
Her eyes said plainly enough, “You spoke to me first.” Which was true.
“Gerard. Who’s he?” mumbled the Vicar.
“The sixteenth-century herbalist,” Burrough replied.
“Bookworm, pedant, scholar, idiot,” was what he thought the girl’s
eyes were saying to him then.
“I must go and take my auntie for a stroll,” was what her tongue said,
as she moved away a step, shaking the rain from her dainty skirts.
“She’s like a butterfly. Comes out when the sun shines. Goes in when
it doesn’t. It sounds giddy.”
“Go along! Naughty girl!” chuckled the Vicar.
“I see you are out in all weathers,” Burrough ventured, yet without
looking at her.
“Morning, noon, and night,” she laughed. “Up with the lark, out all
day, and in with the--what are the things that fly about at night, Mr.
Yeoland?”
“Bats,” croaked the Vicar.
“Beast!” she cried.
“Owls,” he chuckled, his face distorted with mirth.
“My eyes are not big and round, and I do not shriek at nights.”
“I think you mean moths,” Burrough said nervously.
“Moths. Yes, the stupid things fly into our lamp and roast themselves.
Auntie says, ‘poor dears,’ and tries to rescue them. I say, let the
idiots grill if it gives them such enjoyment. They ought to have the
sense to keep in the dark. Directly they come into the light they lose
their heads.”
“And their lives,” Burrough added.
“But I like the beetles,” the girl rattled on. “They are such jolly
old boys. I believe they are always on the spree, and they never know
what they’re doing. Last night I was out and I heard one coming--boom!
He came crack upon my nose, nearly splitting it, and it’s crooked
enough already, then he fell on the road, and cussed. Presently a lot
of clockwork or something went whirr inside him. He got up, fell back
again, said he was all right, then tried again. He got off that time,
boomed hard for a dozen yards, then charged a wall--bang! I left him
lying on his back in the road, kicking and swearing. Really he wanted
someone to look after him.”
“Like me,” mumbled the Vicar.
“I must run,” said the girl. “Good-bye.”
She nodded, laughed, and was off at full speed.