day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not singing, he was
thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper parish, and the thought
of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only the tone of the sermon he had
preached on Sunday, “The poor we have always with us,” though that was
in bad taste from a man reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as
hard as a door-knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital
difference between them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev.
Faudel Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in
his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom Dan
Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs. Scroope, gloom pattered
upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least thought of her.
At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to an oldish
man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge. Scroope never wore a
hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though his face was shaven clean
it remained a regular plantation of ridges and wrinkles; there was a
stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait, and he had a voice that
howled.
“Just a moment, Pavey,” he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.
“All those years,” the parson went on talking to the hedger; “all those
years, dear me!”
“I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-third of
October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady Hesseltine
eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I worked here sin’ I
were six year old. Twalve children I have had (though five on ’em come
to naught and two be in the army) and I never knowed what was to be out
of work for one single day in all that sixty year. Never. I can’t thank
my blessed master enough for it.”
“Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good
master?”
The old man solemnly touched his hat and said: “God.”
“O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope. “Well, good health and
constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious things. The man
who has never done a day’s work is a dog, and the man who deceives his
master is a dog too.”
“I never donn that, sir.”
“And you’ve had happy days in Thasper, I’m sure?”
“Right-a-many, sir.”
“Splendid. Well ... um ... what a heavy rain we had in the night.”
“Ah, that _was_ heavy! At five o’clock this morning I daren’t let my
ducks out—they’d a bin drownded, sir.”
“Ha, now, now, now!” warbled the rector as he turned away with Dan.
“Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were more of
the same breed. I wish....” The parson sighed pleasantly as he and Dan
walked on together until they came to the village street where swallows
were darting and flashing very low. A small boy stood about, trying to
catch them in his hands as they swooped close to him. Dan’s own dog
pranced up to his master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a
greyhound, but stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was
cocky as a bird, for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run
like the wind—many a hare had had proof of that.
Said Mr. Scroope, eyeing the dog: “Is there much poaching goes on
here?”
“Poaching, sir?”
“I am told there is. I hope it isn’t true for I have rented most of the
shooting myself.”
“I never heard tell of it, sir. Years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury chaps
one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I’ve heard, but I
shouldn’t think there’s an onlicensed gun for miles around.”
“I’m not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his warren
netted by someone last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits. There’s
scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go. It’s a
crime like anything else, you know,” Scroope’s voice was loud and
strident, “and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any kind. O
yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. O yes. There was a man in my last
parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the worst type, never did a
stroke of work, and _he_ had a dog, it wasn’t unlike your dog—this _is_
your dog, isn’t it? You haven’t got your name on its collar, you should
have your name on a dog’s collar—well, he had a perfect brute of a dog,
carried off my pheasants by the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated
them. Man never did anything else, but we laid him by the heels and in
the end I shot the dog myself.”
“Shot it?” said Dan. “No, I couldn’t tell a poacher if I was to see
one. I know no more about 'em than a bone in the earth.”
“We shall be,” continued Scroope, “very severe with them. Let me
see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?“
”_He Shall Feed His Flock_—sir—_like a Shepherd_.”
“Splendid! _Good_-day, Pavey.”
Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog, pedalled home to a little
cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own thatch; it had
eaves a yard wide, and birds’ nests in the roof at least ten years old.
Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he had never married.
She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of sweets, vinegar, boot
buttons and such things, and was a very excellent old dame, but as
naïve as she was vague. If you went in to her counter for a newspaper
and banged down a halfcrown she would as likely as not give you change
for sixpence—until you mentioned the discrepancy, when she would
smilingly give you back your halfcrown again.
Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner, threw off
his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was making a heavy
succession of journeys between the table and a larder.
“Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.
“What did _she_ want?”
“She wanted to reprimand me.”
“And what have _you_ been doing?”
Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”
“What do you mean, mother?”
“She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right
of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a
rabbit pie, “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do
give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”
“I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for
to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their
feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more
awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I
lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”
“Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say
as I ain’t reprimanded you.”
“Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’
the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he
shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though
he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid.
Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that
he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s
the rich to serve? The rich we have always with _us_, that’s _our_
responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be
proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for
something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches
you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t
desert you.”
“It’s no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it’s
folly.”
“If I had my way I’d be an independent man and live by myself a hundred
miles from anywheres or anybody. But that’s madness, that’s madness,
the world don’t expect you to go on like that, so I do as other
folks do, not because I want to, but because I a’nt the pluck to be
different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never taught me
courage and I wasn’t born with any, so I drinks with a lot of fools who
drink with me for much the same reason, I expect. It’s the same with
other things besides drink.”
His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the shed
in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang not one
note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger. Towards evening
he recovered his amiability and began to sing with a gusto that
astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk humming like a
bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the Rev. Scroope found a
dead hare tied by the neck to his own door-knocker, and at night (it
being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier than ever in “The White Hart.”
If he was not drunk he was what Thasper calls “tightish,” and had
never before sung so many of those ribald songs (mostly of his own
composition) for which he was noted.
A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Church Men’s Guild.
A group of very mute countrymen sat in the village hall and were goaded
into speech by the rector.
“Thasper,” declared Mr. Scroope, “has a great name for its singing. All
over the six hamlets there is surprising musical genius. There’s the
Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band.”
“It is that,” interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzlebury,
“it can play as well at nine o’clock in the morning as it can at nine
o’clock at night, and that’s a good band as can do it.”
“Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival next
year. Thasper is going to show those highly trained choristers what
a native choir is capable of. Yes, and I’m sure our friend Pavey can
win the tenor solo competition. Let us all put our backs into it and
work agreeably and consistently. Those are the two main springs of
good human conduct—consistency and agreeability. The consistent man
will always attain his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my
last parish, Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was
not only the best cricketer in our village, he was the best for miles
around. He revelled in cricket, and cricket only; he played cricket
and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he never
dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger every year
and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on, consistent
as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6 and he seldom
bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled. For a season or
two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the last man in! After that
he became umpire, then scorer, and then he died. He had got a little
money, very little, just enough to live comfortably on. No, he never
married. He was a very happy, hearty, hale old man. So you see? Now
there is a cricket club at Buzzlebury, and one at Trinkel. Why not a
cricket club at Thasper? Shall we do that?... Good!”
The parson went on outlining his projects, and although it was plain
to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little, if any, compassion for
the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an extravagant
value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency, and, above all,
loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet his intentions
were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consistently grateful.
“One thing, Pavey,” said Scroope when the meeting had dispersed, “one
thing I will not tolerate in this parish, and that is gambling.”
“Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn’t tell you
hardly the difference between spades and clubs.”
“I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey.”
“Now that’s a thing I never see in my life, Mr. Scroope.”
“Ah, you need not go to the races to bet on horses; the slips of paper
and money can be collected by men who are agents for racing bookmakers.
And that is going on all round the six hamlets, and the man who does
the collecting, even if he does not bet himself, is a social and moral
danger, he is a criminal, he is against the law. Whoever he is,” said
the vicar, moderating his voice, but confidently beaming and patting
Dan’s shoulder, “I shall stamp him out mercilessly. _Good_-night,
Pavey.”
Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here and there
had fancied that a man with such a misshapen face would be capable of
committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you wouldn’t take notice of
that, of course—but a solid substantial misdemeanour like murder. And
it was true, he _was_ capable of murder—just as everybody else is,
or ought to be. But he was also capable of curbing that distressing
tendency in the usual way, and in point of fact he never did commit a
murder.
These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily, and
he still sang gaily and beautifully on his daily ride from Cobbs Mill
along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The hanging richness
of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn
hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the
brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge
and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily
ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes
could lie—Dan said—as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with
tiny ecstasies too incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.
On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the space
opposite “The White Hart.” Snow was falling; it was not freezing
weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road. Dan was
returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light from the
bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn genially and
curiously, for the recumbent hart upon the balcony had a pad of snow
upon its wooden nose, which somehow made it look like a camel, in spite
of the huddled snow on its back which gave it the resemblance of a
sheep. A few boys stood with bemused wrinkled faces before the roaring
warmth. Dan dismounted very carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny
boy rode on the back of the bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame
by a long scarf; very small, very silent, about five years old. A red
wool wrap was bound round his head and ears and chin, and a green scarf
encircled his neck and waist, almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey
wool were drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and
stood him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he
could scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he
moved a few paces and turned to stare at his footmarks in the snow.
“Cold?” asked Dan.
The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand in
Dan’s and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the
longlashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.
“Hungry?”
The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys brought
him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up into his arms
and pushed the cycle across the way into his own home.
Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and rammed
them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some terrible knots
of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour of vinegar—always
some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey’s home—she had covered the top
of the crock with a shield of brown paper, pinioned that with string,
licked a label: “Cabege Novenbr 5t,” and smoothed it on the crock, when
the latch lifted and Dan carried in his little tiny boy.
“Here he is, mother.”
Where Dan stood him, there the child remained; he did not seem to see
Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big crock with the
white label—and he kept it there.
“Whoever’s that?” asked the astonished Meg with her arms akimbo as Dan
began to unwrap the child.
“That’s mine,” said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from the
curls on its forehead.
“Yours! How long have it been yours?”
“Since ’twas born. No, let him alone, I’ll undo him, he’s full up wi’
pins and hooks. I’ll undo him.”
Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.
“But it is not your child, surely, Dan?”
“Ay, I’ve brought him home for keeps, mother. He can sleep wi’ me.”
“Who’s its mother?”
“’Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it.”
“You’re making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is she? You’re
fooling, Dan, you’re fooling!”
“I’m making no mock of anyone. There, there’s a bonny grandson for you!”
Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, perhaps to
find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar likeness.
But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at all resembled
her rugged Dan’s.
“Who are you? What’s your little name?”
The child whispered: “Martin.”
“It’s a pretty, pretty thing, Dan.”
“Ah!” said her son, “that’s his mother. We were rare fond of each
other—once. Now she’s wedd’n another chap and I’ve took the boy, for
it’s best that way. He’s five year old. Don’t ask me about her, it’s
_our_ secret and always has been. It was a good secret and a grand
secret, and it was well kept. That’s her ring.”
The child’s thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small green
stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring safely.
For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She pressed it
tenderly to her bosom.
But the long-kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle
with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he seemed to
rejoice in his paternity of the quiet, pretty, illegitimate creature.
As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound him he was taken
a week later in the act of receiving betting commissions and heavily
fined in the police court, although it was quite true that he himself
did not bet, and was merely a collecting agent for a bookmaker who
remained discreetly in the background and who promptly paid his fine.
There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these
things—there is no more rhadamanthine formation than that which can
mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden to an
interview at the “Scroopery.” After some hesitation he visited it.
“Ah, Pavey,” said the rector, not at all minatory but very subdued
and unhappy. “So the blow has fallen, in spite of my warning. I am
more sorry than I can express, for it means an end to a very long
connection. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to
deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now, you must
understand that. I offer no judgment upon these unfortunate events, no
judgment at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my clear duty. Your
course of life is incompatible with your position in the choir, and I
sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemeanour but a religious
one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God.”
The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands. Pavey sat
opposite him, and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.
“You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I’ve never mocked God.
For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I never ate
the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It’s a way of life, a poor
man has but little chance of earning more than a bare living, and
there’s many a dirty job there’s no prosecution for, leastways not in
this world.”
“Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me than
the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judgment upon
the matter, your acknowledgment of him is only right and proper. But
the fact of his existence at all cannot be disregarded; that at least
is flagrant, and as far as concerns your position in my church, it is a
mockery of God.”
“You may be right, sir, as far as your judgment goes, or you may not
be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure other people by
our own scales, and as we can never understand one another entirely, so
we can’t ever judge them rightly, for they all differ from us and from
each other in some special ways. But as for being a mocker of God, why
it looks to me as if you was trying to teach the Almighty how to judge
me.”
“Pavey,” said the rector with solemnity, “I pity you from the bottom
of my heart. We won’t continue this painful discussion, we should both
regret it. There was a man in the parish where I came from who was an
atheist and mocked God. He subsequently became deaf. Was he convinced?
No, he was not—because the punishment came a long time after his
offence. He mocked God again, and became blind. Not at once: God has
eternity to work in. Still he was not convinced. That,” said the rector
ponderously, “is what the Church has to contend with; a failure to
read the most obvious signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that
failure. Klopstock was that poor man’s name. His sister—you know her
well, Jane Klopstock—is now my cook.”
The rector then stood up and held out his hand. “God bless you, Pavey.”
“I thank you, sir,” said Dan. “I quite understand.”
He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village minded his
misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none condemned him. On the
contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen, there was nothing that he
could now do, the shock of it had been anticipated, but it was severe.
And the pang would last, for he was deprived of his chief opportunity
for singing, that art in which he excelled, in that perfect quiet
setting he so loved. Rancour grew upon him, and on Saturday he had a
roaring audacious evening at “The White Hart” where, to the tune of
“The British Grenadiers,” he sung a doggerel:
Our parson loves his motor car
His garden and his mansion,
And he loves his beef for I’ve remarked
His belly’s brave expansion;
He loves all mortal mundane things
As he loved his beer at college,
And so he loves his housemaid (not
With Mrs. parson’s knowledge.)
Our parson lies both hot and strong,
It does not suit his station,
But still his reverend soul delights
In much dissimulation;
Both in and out and roundabout
He practises distortion,
And he lies with a public sinner when
Grass widowhood’s his portion.
All of which was a savage libel on a very worthy man, composed in anger
and regretted as soon as sung.
From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted himself to
the boy, little Martin, who, a Thasper joker suggested, might have some
kinship with the notorious Betty of that name. But Dan’s voice was now
seldom heard singing upon the roads he travelled. They were icy wintry
roads, but that was not the cause of his muteness. It was severance
from the choir; not from its connoted spirit of religion—there was
little enough of that in Dan Pavey—but from the solemn beauty of the
chorale, which it was his unique gift to adorn, and in which he had
shared with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from
that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the opportunity
of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his own.
With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town some miles
away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan Pavey journeyed
to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church that lay seven or
eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound secret from Thasper
until his appearance at the county musical festival, where he won the
treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan was himself again. To his
crude apprehension he had been vindicated, and he was heard once more
carolling in the lanes of the Vale as he had been heard any time for
these twenty years.
The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about the
village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of hair
about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg said—was like
“ollobarster”: it was soft and unfreckled, always pale. His eyes were
two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were dark and ever questioning.
As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his chin, Meg could do no other
than call it the face of a blessed saint; and indeed, he had some of
the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so gentle, so shy. The golden ring he
no longer wore; it hung from a tintack on the bedroom wall.
Old John, who lived next door, became a friend of his. He was very
aged—in the Vale you got to be a hundred before you knew where you
were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle standing upon its
handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.
Martin was staring up at the roof of John’s cottage.
“What you looking at, my boy?”
“Chimbley,” whispered the child.
“O ah! that’s crooked, a’nt it?”
“Yes, crooked.”
“I know ’tis, but I can’t help it; my chimney’s crooked, and I can’t
putt it straight, neither, I can’t putt it right. My chimney’s crooked,
a’nt it, ah, and I’m crooked, too.”
“Yes,” said Martin.
“I know, but I can’t help it. It _is_ crooked, a’nt it?” said the old
man, also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of
conviviality.
“Yes.”
“That chimney’s crooked. But you come along and look at my beautiful
bird.”