There existed a few years ago, in the Yorkshire wolds, a state of
affairs in which the barometer was more consulted than the Bible, and
the only barometer in the district hung in the hall of the Vicarage
and belonged to the parson, who scanned it daily and out of its
abstruse lettering gave no hope to his pining household. The
relentless needle stood ever at “set fair,” and the terrible drought,
which had already lasted for six whole weeks, continued. The dreary
sheet of sky overhead stretched in its pitiless blueness over the
baked brown earth that lay beneath, parched and cracked and yawning
for rain. In between the rift set apart for their habitation, walked
sad human beings, sighing and complaining, full of vague physical
uneasiness and sense of stress of longing.
The Church and Vicarage of Barmoor, and the few cottages to which it
ministered, made the only break in the wilderness of moorland that
stretched away for miles to Pickering on the one side and Danby Moor
on the other. Three trees grew near the Vicarage: the boughs of one
hung over the roof of the lean-to, and made a land-mark over the moor.
In the early spring they had been fine bunches of verdure. Now their
tattered and disconsolate foliage hung motionless, shrinking day by
day into the brown semblance of what were once green leaves. A little
beck ran at the bottom of the parson’s garden, but it was now all but
dry. Everything was dried and wasted, except the heather which
sprouted and thickened and browned under the desolating shine of the
pitiless sun, while the air above it quivered with refraction.
“The air is dancing!” cried the parson’s boys, lying in the thick
tufts and looking towards the low ridges that bounded their moor to
the north. Later on it grew so hot that the very sun was veiled in
mist, and the air did not dance any more, but stood still with
weariness, so the children said, again. A lighted candle, held in the
kitchen garden, flared straight up, like a pillar.
The children tried it--they tried everything--everything permissible
under the strict system of Vicarage discipline--to amuse themselves,
in these days, when their elders were too tired and cross to undertake
to keep them happy. They wandered about together, their arms heavily
linked round each other’s shoulders, dragging their feet along the
cinder paths in an irritating unison. They stood now, in their baggy
little home-made clothes, on the path that led down the kitchen
garden, bordered with feeble flowers. It was only bordered; the middle
patch of ground was, perforce, devoted to useful vegetable
cultivation. The living of Barmoor was not a rich living, and the Rev.
Matthew Cooper, its incumbent, stood very low in position, birth, and
education.
His gardener, who was also the sexton, was digging the potatoes for
early dinner. He grunted while he dug, and his back was turned to the
children, who watched, with a kind of fascination born of ennui, the
turn of the fork and the roll of the loose mould, and the horny hand
that came down every now and then and gathered up the harvest of his
toil and flung it into a basket. Saunders was careless, and let
several potatoes roll back into the furrow, out of the eight or so
that each turn of the fork should yield.
“Oh, Saunders, look, ye’ve missed one!” piped the youngest child.
“Happen I have, Master John,” replied the old man. “It’s ower hot to
be fashed!”
The child sighed.
“Won’t it really rain soon, Saunders dear?” he asked wearily. He had
heard so much lately of this wonderful rain that was to heal all ills
and make the world a pleasant place again. Child-like, he had
forgotten what rain was like, and how he hated it, since it kept him
indoors, and spoiled his play.
“Happen it may, happen it mayn’t!” muttered the old servant sulkily.
With a sudden access of spite, he added, “Didn’t the master pray for
it i’ church last Sunda’? But some folks has no influence with the
Almighty. A’m sayin’ that the Lord ought to do it for His ain
sake--the bonny garden’s fair perished for the want of a little kindly
moisture.”
“I think it will rain soon!” said the youngest child again gravely. In
his blue eyes was something of the rapt look of a visionary.
“Well, it doesna’ look much like it,” grumbled the old fellow,
pointing up with his fork to the sky that hung above, a wall of
greyness, and coming very close to earth, somehow. “What for suld it
rain, think’st tha’?”
“Because it must in the end,” replied the child sturdily. “It wants to
rain so badly. It is like me, when I want to cry and can’t. Oh,
Saunders, there’s another potato you’ve left. What a lot you miss!”
“Gan awa’! Gan awa’,” said Saunders impatiently, “and let me get done.
Gan awa’ an tew Hannah!”
He shook his pitchfork at them with playful savagery, and they turned
away.
“Listen, Willie,” said the child called John, confidentially taking
his brother’s arm, and leading him towards the kitchen, a low,
one-storied outhouse attached to the house, overshadowed by the
biggest of the elm trees. “Listen, Willie; I think the sky is like a
great wall, very thick, and yet very brittle. There’s all sorts of
queer things going on the other side of it, that we can’t see.”
“Tell us,” said the elder boy, dimly interested.
“There’s great bulls roaring, and sparks flying, like in Hobbie
Noble’s forge, and a noise--such a noise! If there comes a hole in the
wall; we shall see it.” His eyes dilated; he squeezed his less
poetical minded brother’s hand.
“Hout!” said the listener, “I don’t care for that story much. Let us
go in, and bide with Hannah a bit.”
The Vicarage rooms were damp and insufficiently lighted, but the
Vicarage kitchen was bright and pleasant. Hannah’s lime and marl floor
was freshly washed, her copper vessels as bright as the mirror in Mrs.
Cooper’s best bedroom; but in spite of all these signs of previous
activity the girl herself was sitting in a limp and weary attitude,
her knees apart, and a great bowl of peas between them, which she was
“podding” for dinner. Her eyes were heavy; her big lump of flaxen hair
hung on one side of her head; her clumsy red hands moved among the
pods lazily and inattentively. “Deary me--a deary me!” she murmured to
herself at short intervals.
“Now, bairns!” She roused herself as the two slunk in. “I’ve not time
for none of you. Gan awa’ and play, there’s good childer!”
“Don’t be cross, Hannah!” said the eldest timidly. “We’ve only comed
in for a sup of milk.”
“The milk is all gone sour,” she replied shortly. “Ye mun just content
yersel’s wi’ a drink of water from the pump. Now be off with you!”
She gave the thin, inoffensive house-cat a hoist with her foot, and
settled down to her peas again.
The pump in the garden had gone dry long since and Hannah knew it. The
water they used in the household--that all the village used--came from
one place, the well at the bottom of the village, which had luckily
continued its functions in spite of the drought.
The children, as Hannah knew well enough, did not really want anything
to drink, they wanted nothing but the antidote of human conversation
to the restlessness and uneasiness that they shared with Hannah and
Saunders, and what their father was apt to call “the lower animals.”
The house-dog was as restless as they, and would neither play with
them nor stay quiet in his kennel. The hens fluttered brusquely in the
hen-house, and the feverish rushing of wings that went on there made
it an unpleasant abiding-place for the children. They sometimes amused
themselves by going in to hunt for eggs, but they left them alone
to-day, and wandered on to the open study window, where the Reverend
Matthew Cooper, in hot, black clothes, was working at his sermon for
next Sunday, putting his hand up to his head every now and again.
The two little boys were always somewhat in awe of their stern father,
and all they dared do now was to stand and watch him, until the
intermittent scraping of their feet on the walk in front of the window
roused him from his meditations. He looked up; his brow was pained.
“Well, my laddies, what do you want?” He spoke kindly enough, but his
voice dragged with fatigue and oppression.
“Father,” asked the eldest child, “Father, tell us; why don’t they
send rain when you pray for it?”
“You had better go and ask your mother,” said the Vicar, with the sort
of grim humour in which he usually dealt. He was by nature a hard,
cold, God-fearing, painstaking, undeveloped man, conscious of having a
wife who managed him. “What about your lessons? Willie, I gave you a
chapter to write out. Go and do some work if you can’t play.”
“But we’ve got a headache, Father.”
“So have I--splitting. Run away now, and let me go on with my sermon.
I haven’t even chosen my text yet.… ‘_Who doeth great things and
unsearchable.… Behold, He withholdeth the waters and they dry up.… He
bindeth the waters in His thick clouds, and the cloud is not rent
under them.… He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.… If the scourge
slay suddenly, He will laugh at the trial of the innocent!_’”
The children left him, in desperation, and, going down to the bottom
of the garden, took off their socks and sat with their feet in the
diminished brook. The dog would not come with them, but snapped and
growled at John when he tried to make overtures to it. Hannah, who
came to look for them to fetch them to early dinner, could not find
them, though they were only under the shade of the big rowan-bush near
the brook-head. But she did not trouble herself to look very far, she
herself could not have told you what ailed her.
“I cannot find them, mistress,” she said to their mother sitting,
carving-knife in one hand and fork in the other, before the family
joint, which Hannah had set before her, previous to going in search of
the truants.
“Oh, very well! if they don’t choose to come in to their meals!”
Mrs. Cooper helped her husband to a plateful, and sent it in to him to
his study, which he had intimated he was too busy to leave. She ate a
small portion herself--not much--it was too hot to be hungry. She was
a hard woman, and the absence of her two little sons did not affect
her appetite in the least.
The kind-hearted maid gave them what she called “a bite and a sup”
later on, when they came and put their apprehensive heads round the
door cheek. She did not scold them. The youngest boy looked very pale
and white, and avoided her eyes.
“Poor bairn!” she said, “he wants setting up with the sea air.”
The two children lay down after they had eaten, and slept on a heap of
sacking, very clean and dry, near the woodstack. Their little bedroom
was over the kitchen, and easy of access, but very dreary in the
daytime because of the huge tree that overshadowed it. Hannah did not
think of sending them up there, but flung a sack over their bare legs
as they lay, and did not disturb them.
As the afternoon wore on to evening the hush became oppressive. Not a
breath, not a sound of birds twittering, of fowls fluttering. Only the
far-away moo of a discontented cow in an outhouse somewhere in the
hills sounded like a faint trumpet call, and emphasized the stillness.
The sky seemed nearer than ever now, and oppressively near, and
all-encompassing.
As Hannah crossed the yard, just before supper, to throw a pail of
scrapings into the pig-trough, she heard a noise. It was not Hodgson’s
cow.… It might have been the grinding of one of Miller Farsyde’s flour
wagons on the quartz that sprinkled the road up there beyond the
brow--half-a-mile away. She did not know what it was--a very faint
rumble. She thought no more of it, but as she crossed the courtyard on
her way back something dropped on to the back of her hand which she
could have sworn was a rain-drop.…!
The thought passed. Her country mind again was a blank. She gave the
boys a shake as she passed in. “Come now, wake up! ’Tis supper time!”
The youngest boy stirred and frowned.
“Is it come?” he said--“the hole in the wall?”
“Whatten hole? Whatten wall? Whatten rubbish is the child talking
about?” she said carelessly, brushing the loose straws off his jacket
with strong sideway pats, and leading him in to the dining-room where
supper was spread. Willie, the elder and more prosaic of the two,
manifested some interest in the items of the meal. It was beans and
bacon and porridge, too solid fare for such a day as this had been.
The Vicar had finished his sermon, and was sitting in his place, as
pale as his white tie, but otherwise placable enough. The eldest child
went round to his own high chair in silence, but the youngest crossed
the room to his mother’s side and pulled her by the sleeve.
“What ails ye, laddie?” she asked not unkindly.
“Will you give me a kiss, Mammy?” he asked shamefacedly and in a low
voice, lest his brother should hear, and taunt him for being a “mammy
pet.”
“What nonsense!” Mrs. Cooper said, with all the helpless shyness of a
hard woman. She stooped down and kissed her little appealing son,
nevertheless. “Now, sit down, and eat your supper quietly. Well, Mr.
Cooper, how have ye got on with your sermon?”
“Badly!” replied her husband. “I seem to have such a weight on my
brain--an oppression! It is quite dreadful. It is so bad, it really
can’t last--something must happen. Eat your supper, John, and don’t
stare.”
For the youngest child’s eyes were constantly fixed on his father, and
little questions seemed to be trembling on his lips. He said nothing
until supper was over, when he begged his mother to read to them, in
which request he was seconded by his elder brother.