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.