churchyard,” he answered; “ye’ll find th’ door there yet, all red wi’
rust and green wi’ verdigris.”
“Don’t fool me,” I cried; and with that the keeper turned fairly on me.
“So ye willn’t let it bide? Very well.--There’s little gossip i’
Skelf-Mary now, by reason o’ there being few folk, but I’ll be rid o’
what I know. They say it’ll be Eustace he sees, that was a priest; but
ye needn’t tak’ that fro’ me. When he had th’ vault oppened he asked
this and that and t’other, and if he says th’ men was flayed, he’s
right.--They couldn’t sort out which were which--ye understand--and th’
breed’s as ugly living as dead to my way o’ thinking. He talked about
nowt but ‘knees’ ... faugh! Whose knees he wanted ye know as much as me;
but th’ sexton lives ower at Windlesea. Mysel’, I’m a decent wed man,
and tak’ no count o’ ghosts and such, ye understand?”...
And Watt’s way of thinking being a good deal my own, I troubled him no
further. But, busy as I was, I had found time within three days to see
the sexton (who, professionally, had little reluctance), and had pieced
roughly together this delusion of the afflicted Master’s. I know not
whether it was Eustace who walked the library. That to all intents and
purposes his mind conjured up some figure I was as convinced as I was
that I myself should never see it. It has been enough for me that,
looking where he looked, I have seen but air, while he has seen,
stumping across a floor of boards, a shape on thighs that were broken
midway.
And with this I come to my own confounding.
III.
My own apartment was one that had been made in the vaulting of the
chapel by the insertion of a ceiling; and this ceiling or floor, having
no underdrawing, but consisting simply of planks laid athwart the
baulks, was little hindrance to the passage of sound. I now did most of
my work here, and it was now my turn to hear him babbling half the night
beneath me. Many times I could have raged to hear him; but, my wages
being good, my own folly, had I quitted his service, would scarce have
been less than his, and I began to welcome as a diversion each journey
to Kingston or Beverley, where I had to consult with agents and lawyers.
For a good part of the estate was like to be well disposed of, and I had
negotiations in hand for the fishing and shooting of the Decoy. Also,
with the estate charged with the cost of proper draining, there was no
bad prospect of farming, water-carriage being excellent and cheap. Now
and then, for form, I went to see the Master in his bed; but the doctor
and the servant knew more of his condition than I, and it was only
afterwards that I learned how suddenly and alarmingly he had altered
for the worse.
The Christmas Eve of that year I remember better than I wish. There was
frost enough in the air to set the fires burning brightly, and to give
to the stars a wonderful keenness; and so exhilarating was the night
that I had taken a walk, returning by way of the forsaken village. But,
home again, I noticed as I crossed the courtyard that an unusual number
of lights were burning, and with a vague apprehension I made haste to
enter.
The Master lay rigid on the bed, and the servant bathed his temples from
a kitchen-vessel of vinegar; but it was less of vinegar than of a
surgeon that he stood in need. It was useless to address him, seeing how
his eyes again were; but when, coherently, though in a very weak voice,
he spoke to me, it flashed upon me what had happened. He had, as I take
it, strained the muscles of them, and was now cramped so; and even as I
stood in awe of the stroke, gazing on the harpy-face, he made as if to
point with his finger, and fell back in a fit with a horrid noise of
gargling in his throat.
The doctor was due on the morrow, and I arranged with the servant watch
and watch for the night. He took the first, and I retired to bed without
undressing, and fell into a broken sleep.
I think the noise as of blows with a hammer must have mingled with some
dream I had, for although I was conscious of it I did not readily
awake. Then I heard a cry. It was midnight by my watch, and I sprang
from my bed and hurried to the library. As I set my hand to the rosewood
door it was flung open, and the servant, blubbering like a child, all
but embraced me. I pushed past him, and stopped.
Six feet within, in a huddle of blankets on the floor, lay the form of
the Master of Skelf; I had to glance at the empty bed to realise it. One
taper was overturned by his side, but the other showed the heavy poker
that had been the cause of the knocking. The servant moaned that he had
not dozed--had not dozed; but I know not how else the Master could have
found opportunity, as he had found strength in his extremity (acting on
who knows what revelation of his mad brain) to rise from his bed, reach
the other end of the library, and to prise up a plank from the floor.
Into the opening he had made his arm was plunged to the shoulder. I saw
at once that he was dead; then I took the taper and peered down into the
hole.
I withdrew his arm and composed his body; then deliberately I set to
work to pull up the adjoining plank. It came half way up with a harsh
noise, and the rusty nails bent and held it so; and all at once the
poker fell from my hand, a violent shiver passed through me, and I found
myself gazing stupidly at the older floor that lay a couple of feet
beneath.
LAD-LASS.
The white walls of the farmhouse were hot and blinding to look upon in
the sunlight, and the row of scoured dairy-pans and vessels that leaned
against them blazed in spots like the sun himself. The hills across the
narrow Dale quivered in the June afternoon as if seen over a furnace of
charcoal, and no sounds were heard but the soft clucking of poultry and
the heavy droning of the bees as they spun in and out of the bass-hives.
The sky was of a bleached blue; the dripping from the spout of the pump
dried where it fell on the baked earth; the smell of hay and hot dust
filled the air; and in the grey limestone village lower down the valley
not a soul was to be seen abroad.
Harriet Stubbs stood in her dairy at an upright churn. The lime-washed
walls glowed with imprisoned sunlight, and only a narrow strip of shade
lay without the door. She was six-and-thirty, too tall, too thin, too
quick-moving. Rusty freckles gathered thickly over the bridge of her
nose and spread over a face that was of the hue of washleather. Her lips
had no red; the lower one was dented with an old frost-bite, now healed;
and over the upper one a few straggling hairs showed. Her arms as she
churned were sinewy as those of a man; and her bluntly-lidded grey eyes
were searching and shrewish.
A rank whiff of tobacco came on the hot air, and a man of fifty crossed
the bright yard and entered the dairy. She did not stop churning.
“Put that pipe out, Henry Butler; I’ll ha’ no reek i’ my dairy,” she
cried; “I had a kern o’ butter as rank as owd hippins last week wi’ one
o’ yon gormless wenches settin’ a stinkin’ cheese o’ th’ shelf; th’
De’il himself couldna watch some o’ ye.--An’ what brings ye up fro’ th’
Cotes?”
“I put a owd apron ower th’ horse’s head an’ rade up,” said the farmer,
mopping his brow with an old snuff-handkerchief; “it’s blistering hot!”
“If ye cam’ thro’ th’ Cotes to tell me that I’m obliged to ye, but I
kenned it, thank ye.”
“Nay, I come for a bit crack wi’ ye, Harriet, aboot yon lad o’ mine.”
“Ay?--Tak’ a turn at th’ kern, for ye could wring my shift.”
The farmer took the poss-stick in his knotted hands, and she mopped her
freckled brow with her apron; then she sat a-straddle on the corner of
the stone table and said: “what’s wrang wi’ Harry?”
“Wrang?” said the farmer, making the churn rock with his energy. “And
what should be wrang wi’ short o’ ane-and-twenty but ye perdition
women?”
“Ay,” said Harriet composedly, “we’re winsome things, an’ ye canna
resist us; not that I’ve seen ye sweat overmuch wi’ trying. Is’t----?”
“Ay, is’t: yon black-haired besom, Bessie Wyatt; but th’ sullen trash is
packing to-neet.”
“Packin’! An’ what’s Harry say?”
Farmer Butler scowled out over the hot stackyard.
“’Tis what I cam’ to talk to ye aboot.--Now i’ one word, Harriet: wad ye
ha’ him?”
A little blood came into her dry cheeks.
“Ha’ him? Dost mean wed him?”
“Ay, and join the farms--there wadna be another property like it this
side o’ Pateley Brigg.”
“He’s not sent thee?--Not he,” she said sourly; “I’d liefer he did his
own courtin’.”
The farmer churned angrily, and she watched him keenly.
“Then by ----, he shall,” he cried, “or I’ll sell out and build a kirk!”
“Th’ Butlers’ll build a lot o’ kirks,” she remarked drily. “Wad I ha’
him? Well, I’ll answer him that when he asks me; but I’ll answer ye this
now, Henry: They say th’ De’il likes to muck o’ a gurt lump, an’ th’ twa
farms wad mak’ a pretty property; but a bonnie thing ’twad be to hear
th’ love he’d whisper to th’ flawpin’ Lad-lass Harriet Stubbs! ‘My own
four-hundred acre! My darlin’ twenty-score head o’ beasts! My lovely
farm an’ house an’ first mortgage o’ three rows o’ cottages i’ Pateley
Town!’ A bonnie wooin’!--When he whispered ‘Bessie!’ at th’ side o’ me
at neet I’d say: ‘’Tisna Bessie, love; ’tis thy precious ninety pund a
year i’ th’ bank; kiss thy owd Skipton market; kiss thy butter an’ eggs;
kiss thy bit o’ horse-trade!’ A pretty wooin’!--Happen I’d see him
lookin’ yonderly-like i’ th’ chimley-corner, thinkin’ why I didna bring
him a bairn; I’d say, ‘There’s young blood an’ bairns enow; we’ll adopt
one, an’ thou can call it Bessie.’--Tch!--’Tis naughbut ye owd nontkates
that thinks all women’s th’ same i’ th’ dark! Wadna I ken? Wadna I ken
when I were his Bessie? Wadna I brak my heart, bein’ his Bessie? Wadna I
brak all three o’ we’r hearts?--Not I, as it chances, for I’m any kind
o’ a fool but that kind, so get thy kirk built, Henry. They ha’na named
me Lad-lass for naught.”
“Thou doesna ken right what thou’s sayin’,” said the farmer.
“No? So we live and learn, but I thought I did,” she replied
imperturbably. “Now thou’s had thy bit crack, an’ there’ll be a mug o’
ale for thee at th’ loupin’-stane.--When wilt call an’ mak love o’ thy
own account, Henry? ’Twad be a rare thing to be wed i’ your ain kirk.”
The farmer passed out, and she turned to the churn again.
The butter would not come, and now and then she muttered a man’s oath.
The strip of shade outside the door became narrower as the sun crept
round. A burnished cock mounted a fence and shrilled out a call that
rang over the hot valley, and she unbuttoned her bodice at the throat
and fumed.
Suddenly the figure of a girl appeared in the doorway.
She was heavily, moodily handsome, and her coal-black hair escaped from
a cotton bonnet that had been pink but was now almost white with washing
and exposure to the sun. Her lad’s clogs were white with dust, her round
arms were brown and bare above the elbow, and her dark beauty showed
brilliantly in the cool light of the dairy.
“I ha’ come to say good-bye, Miss Stubbs,” she said timidly; “I leave
to-night.”
Harriet pursed her faded, cracked lips, and blinked her eyes at the
other’s shrinking loveliness.
“And thou’s come to say good-bye to me? Well, God grant we may al’ays
ha’ more friends nor we ken; I thank ye.”
“I’m Bessie Wyatt, an’ I’ve slipped out unknown o’ purpose to see ye.”
“An’ that’s a jade’s trick, dodgin’ th’ last o’ your wark instead of
straightenin’ up for them that’s to follow ye.”
“’Tis what I wad do--straighten up for her that’s to follow me--wi’
Harry.”
The last words were almost inaudible, and Harriet Stubbs let go the
poss-stick.
“My garters, but here’s a coil about this Harry to-day! First his father
wi’ his kirk-building, an’ then a milkin’-wench comin’ to say good-bye
to neist to a stranger!--How’st mean, to follow ye wi’ Harry?”
Bessie’s bosom rose rapidly.
“An’ if a milkin’-wench makes bold for once wi’ th’ mistress o’ her own
house an’ lands, ’tis that I ha’ lile time to waste. Miss Stubbs, ye’ll
be--oh!--ye’ll be kind to him!” She buried her face in her sleeve
against the white wall, and Harriet, bewildered, seized the poss-stick
again.
“Is th’ lass gane daft? Here’s another doin’ thy courtin’ for thee,
Harriet; thou’ll dee a wed woman yet, th’ next earthquake or th’ next
after that.--Now, thou foolish wench, when thou’s done greetin’ happen
thou’ll gi’e thy tongue a chance?”
“I am na’ greetin’,” said the girl, raising her big eyes that were quite
dry, “an’ I’ll tell ye i’ four words. He wad ha’ borne me on to Rigg
village, i’ Scotland, where Davie Laing th’ blacksmith weds ’em for a
crown; but I wadna. He maun wed wi’ his father’s goodwill, if it braks
my heart; an’ I ken who that is. ’Twad be a sin to lo’e him, another’s;
I winna think mair o’ him, an’ I’ll see him na mair.”
Harriet bent her eyes on her.
“So that’s it? Thou’s like Joss Tait, th’ cobbler, who says fowk’s
welcome to what he doesn’t want. I’m obliged to ye, Miss Elizabeth
Wyatt.--Why, thou hussy,” she broke out suddenly, but she looked away
from Bessie, “hast th’ face to come here wi’ thy handin’s-on? Daur ye
tell me I canna choose where I like? D’ye tell me I’m six-and-thirty,
an’ ha’ packthread o’ my lip, an’ maun be thankful for what I can
get?--Ay, but I ken Harry Butler better nor ye, an’ he’s a bonnie ’un to
ken--a bonnie ’un to ken!”
“Ye ken na wrang o’ him!” the girl said, flashing her handsome eyes
suddenly.
“Tch, ye baggage, dinna tell me what I ken, chance I fetch ye a thwack
wi’ th’ poss-stick! I maun tak’ ower thy cast-off an’ be kind to
him!--Are his kisses o’ thy lips this day?”
“Ay, are they!” the girl replied proudly, “an’ wad they were branded
there wi’ a coal if I could remember him th’ longer for it!”
Harriet winced, and fixed her shrewish eyes on Bessie.
“So that’s thy forgettin’ him that’s another’s! Well, I bless th’ Lord
for every freckle I’ve got, for ye red and black witches, good men
losses their heads at th’ blink o’ th’ de’il i’ your een! Scotland! Are
ye na feared o’ Rebecca an’ her Sweepin’s, then?”
“I’d ha’ feared naught; but ’tis ower.”
“Nor th’ men-women ye mought meet at any Pike?”
“I’d ha’ feared naught; but I’m leavin’ him.”
“An’ ye cam to say good-bye to me?”
Bessie turned half away, and spoke over her shoulder.
“Ay, an’ to tell one that I thought were a woman that which if onnybody
told it to me wad ha’ been gentler ta’en, an’ happen a tear betwixt th’
two on us.”
Harriet laughed a short, dry laugh.
“I kenned it when I saw ye come in, bairn; an’ now here’s a makkin’ o’
butter settled an’ spoiled. Nay, nay; ye cam’ to gi’e me naught; ye cam’
to greet o’ this bosom o’ mine, if I naughbut had one. Well, greet,
bairn.--Thou fool!” she whispered, as Bessie laid her cheek, sobbing, on
her flat breast, “up-saddle to-neet, an’ off wi’ him! De’il tak’ me, he
lo’es thee; up-saddle an’ off! Rebecca wadna mell on ye; ’tis for the
poor fowk she sweeps--th’ poor fowk that bides at home an’ pays under
th’ Pike Act for th’ roads that th’ rich gads about on. Has--has he said
he lo’es ye?”
“Ay, a thousand times!” Harriet closed her eyes for a moment.
“Then, up an’ off, wer’t i’ thy sark! Harry wad never ha’ had me, e’en
if I’d ha’ had him; I’m naughbut an owd shoe to fling at others’
weddings; I’m ... up an’ off, to-neet, Bessie; ’tis odds a blacksmith
can weld as strong a hoop as a parson!”
* * * * *
The hot June night had fallen two hours back, and the full moon bathed a
dozen dales in a soft brilliance. The hills swam in mysterious shadows,
and not a breath stirred the tall field-flowers in the meadows. Now and
then the cry of a nightjar was heard or that of a corn-crake; and now
and then a tree would seem to sigh gently of itself in the still night.
The road, of a silver-grey, dipped and wound and disappeared,
reappearing a mile or two ahead where it crept over the shoulder of some
moonlit moss.
The young man drove the quick-trotting mare in the trap with his right
hand, and his left held the girl. Her face was heavy with drowsiness.
From time to time she glanced at the trees and fields and shapes of hill
and dale in the dreamy moonlight; and as they passed under the dark
hawthorn hedges she murmured: “Th’ flowers looks like spirits.... How
far are we now, love?”
“Yon’s Newton Moss, an’ ower it Lang Preston. We’se be at Litton Pike i’
an hour, an’ Horton by day-leet. We’ll put up i’ Sedbergh till to-morn
th’ neet.--What is’t, love?”
She drew closer to him.
“I tell’d Harriet I wadna be feared, but Rebecca dresses i’ women’s
clothes, an’ blacks her face, an’ burns yetts an’ toll-houses.--Hark!
Dost hear naught at th’ back o’ us?”
“Again, my precious! Nay, there’s naught; an’ I doubt Rebecca wadna
sweep as far as Litton. True, she might; she’s busy these nights; but
’tis time enow to meet trouble when it meets ye. Sitha; thou can see
into Lancashire; yon’s Pendle.”
The girl took a sharp breath at the sight of the great valley on the
left flooded with moonlight, and at the dim mountain rising fifteen
miles away; then she pressed close to Harry and said: “I’se gan to sleep
awhile; I can scarce keep my een oppen.”
“Then sleep, sweetheart.”
He kissed her, and she slept almost immediately. Slowly the moon touched
the summit of her arc and began to decline; the hour of midnight came
faintly over the hills from some distant church-tower; and the mare sped
tirelessly along the road towards Litton Turnpike.
* * * * *
The setting moon showed no more than half her shape over the crest of
Litton Wood, and the old grey stone village under the Brow was lost in
night. No sound broke the profound stillness of the Dale, not so much as
the rustle of a stalled beast nor the moving of a bird in its nest; and
the Bear lay low over the dark fell across the valley. The single stroke
of a bell broke from the church belfry, pealed, spread away and failed
over the Dale as ripples spread over a still pond; and the silence
closed in again.
A faint confused noise, a mile and more away, arose, hardly audible at
first. Slowly the noise drew nearer, and snatches of singing could be
heard, and a dull thumping on a drum or tub. As it swelled and drew
still nearer a light appeared in an upper window, and a man’s head was
pushed forth from the casement. Candles showed in other windows; more
heads appeared; single voices could now be distinguished in the
approaching hubbub; and a street door was thrown open and a man in his
shirt and trousers shouted: “Th’ Rebeccas!”
In ten minutes three-score men had swarmed up the village street.
You would hardly have known they were men save by their voices. Their
faces were hideously smeared with soot, all but their eyelids, which
showed grotesquely white when they blinked. They wore the petticoats of
women, gaping, fastened with belts or hitched up with string, and they
carried lighted lanterns. Half of them bore faggots on their shoulders,
other brooms of rush and twig. They thumped on tubs, sang doggerel
songs, and whooped up at windows; and at the clamour they made many of
the Litton folk retired within their houses, barring the doors and
watching the commotion from the windows.
“Mun t’ poor mak rooads for t’ rich to use?” a voice bawled; and in a
kind of droning singsong came a chorus of “Sweep, Rebecca, Sweep!”
Their feet caught in their skirts as they capered, and some had rolled
their petticoats about their waists, showing their men’s legs beneath.
Some had shawls tied over their head, others bonnets; and they lighted
pipes at the lanterns. A big fellow demanded the name of the
toll-keeper.
“’Tis Matthy Lee, an owd man,” a piping voice replied. “What gars
Rebecca sweep so far fro’ hame?”
“Shoo’ll sweep fro’ here to London Town afore shoo sets t’ broom back i’
t’ corner.--I wish there were more wind; a bit o’ breeze mak’s a merry
sweepin’.”
“Eh, all’s as dry as kin’lin’-wood this weather. Which is t’ road?”
“This road; step out, lads.”
The leaders set off through the village towards the pike that lay a
little way beyond it. The others followed; the singing sounded fainter
and fainter down the road, and a few of the Litton men, half dressed,
walked after them at a distance.
The single-storied, white-painted toll-house was in darkness, and the
white bar-gate glimmered across the road. The dancing lanterns and the
singing drew near it, and the hubbub roused the old pike-keeper, who
unbarred his door and peered forth, his nightcap on his head. He had
lighted a candle, and his nutcracker face showed scared in the light of
it. “The Lord save us!” he said tremblingly; and then the begrimed faces
of the Rebeccas, their white eyelids blinking ludicrously, swarmed at
the pike.
“Gate! Gate!” they bawled; “three score noblemen’s come to pay their
gatecloys!” and one fellow shouted: “If thou wants to save thy bits o’
sticks, owd man, out wi’ ’em into th’ road!”
“My garden! My garden!” the old man whimpered. “Dinna walk ower my
garden!”
They laughed. He was thrust aside, and a dozen men climbed the gate and
poured into the toll-house. They began to strip walls, to tear up
matting, to bundle out bed and bedding, tables and chairs, and pans, and
crockery. Others set faggots against the bar-gate, the wooden
window-shuts, and the fuel-shed at the back of the house; and the old
man sat among his chattels in the road and moaned: “My garden, my
garden!”
Soon every faggot was disposed, and the men stood round.
“Ready?” they cried; and fire was laid to the twigs and faggots in a
dozen places at once.
* * * * *
“Listen!” said Bessie Wyatt fearfully; “I’m sure there’s wheels at th’
back o’ us, Harry--I ha’ heard ’em this half-hour!”
“Ay, I hear ’em,” Harry replied grimly; “but th’ mare’s doin’ th’ best
she can, an’ it’s what’s afore us that’s troublin’ me, sitha!”
She caught her breath.
“Yon’s never th’ dawn, Harry!”
“Not wi’out th’ dawn’s come i’ th’ north for once,” he muttered. “Come
up, then, Polly!”
The mare sprang more quickly forward at the trailing of the whiplash
over her quarters, and the dark hedges made a long blur on either hand.
The odd brightness rose and sank over the distant fell.
“Rebecca afore, an’ th’ father ahint,” he said to himself, “an’ we canna
hide th’ trap; we maun chance it. Come up, Polly!--Hark!--Ay, yon’s
Beeswing; I ken her trot; thou canna leave Beeswing, Polly, poor lass;
we can but go forrard. Polly’s my own, but I ha’ borrowed th’ trap. Come
closer, Bess.”
“Oh, Harry, ha’ a care; we were a’most i’ th’ dike then! Sitha, how th’
hills swing!--Yon leet’s growin’ breeter.”
“We’se see at th’ next turn,” he said between his teeth.
“Ho’d me close.”
Again he touched the mare; the sombre fell seemed to close in on them,
and then to open out again into a further fold. The luminousness ahead
grew brighter, and an outlying barn flashed past. They took the dip at
Litton village and the rise on the other side without a check; two of
the trap wheels left the ground at the turn, touching again twenty yards
further on; the light leaped; they saw the blazing toll-bar and the
figures that moved about it; and Harry muttered, “We can but go
forrard--nay, we maun stop. I could ha’ ta’en yon burnin’ yett alone,
but wi’ lass and trap--we’re done!”
He drew up within a dozen yards of the blazing toll-house.
“Where are ye for?” the shape of a woman demanded, laying a man’s hand
on the bridle.
“Horton--Sedbergh--Carlisle. For God’s sake, fling yon yett back!”
“Wi’ whose leave?”
“Th’ leave o’ Rebecca--aught--oppen th’ yett! ’Tisna th’ likes o’ us ye
want to keep. We’re poorer nor ye, an’ followed. Fling th’ yett back,
an’ let’s be on!”
The man looked the vehicle up and down.
“A tidy trap an’ mare for a poor man! Followed, are ye? Down ye get,
both on ye--a lass, begow! We’re that mony lasses to-neet a man gits
mixed ameng ’em.--Followed, are ye? I’m none so capped at that; poor men
doesn’t drive traps an’ mares like yon; we arena thieves.--Tak’ th’ mare
out.”
The mare was fastened to a tree, and Harry--Bessie wide-eyed at his
side--watched the spectacle. Cattle gazed over walls, and moths and
buzzards fluttered here and there. The ceiling-baulks of the toll-house
bulged beneath the weight of the flagged roof, and the red glare of the
fire lighted the filthy faces on which the sweat had trickled and run
into the soot. Sparks and flame streamed straight upwards, and a fierce
crackling mingled with the shouts of the men. The old toll-keeper on his
heap of furniture held his head in his hands and moaned, “My garden, my
garden!”
“’Tis awful!” said Bessie, shuddering and pressing closer to Harry.
Suddenly a dozen voices burst forth in a cry of “Heigh, there--stop!”
The man who had spoken to Harry turned to him and said, “Yon’s som’b’dy
after a trap an’ mare”; and Farmer Butler roared, “D---- ye, hands off!
Where is he?”
“Rebecca hes him, same as shoo hes thee,” somebody replied; and Farmer
Butler and Harriet Stubbs descended from the trap. Harriet’s sharp eyes
scanned the rabble eagerly; they met Harry’s; and while the men-women
gathered about Butler with questions she slipped quickly to his side.
“I couldna’ set him wrang--there’s naughbut one road--ye’s get awa’
yet,” she said low and rapidly. “De’il be good to us, what a seet!--Get
ye amang th’ villagers yonder, Harry, an’ dinnat be seen; I’se manage
for ye. Can th’ mare carry th’ two o’ ye a post or so? Awa’, an’ dinnat
be seen. Wait for me yonder, an’ dinnat let him see ye.... Now, Henry,
her’s ane o’ ’em, an’ t’ither winna be far off.”
“Bide ye wi’ this unskelped hussy while I find him!” cried the farmer.
“Nay--I spy him!” said Harriet. “Yonder he is!” She darted off, and
mingled with the men. Her eyes shone, and she seemed to set herself to
some effort.
A huge fellow barred her way.
“Where for, i’ such a hurry?” and she broke into a shrill laugh.
“My ain gait, my owd love--kiss thy Nancy!” She took the man’s bleared
face between her hands, and set her own cheek against it.
“Out, ye trollop!”
“An’ out yoursel’, ye greasy muck-slut; tch, ye filthy dozen! Here’s my
man.--Doady, come, let’s shak’ a leg, Doady! Wilt dance wi’ thy Nancy?
‘Shak’ it a little, a little, a little. An’ turn ye roundabout!’” she
sang, and flung her arms about another fellow. “Nay, thou’s beslubbered
my face, chuck; never heed; ain muck’s sweet, an’ thou’s my ain Charlie;
a kiss, now! Sink, but we’re as threng as three i’ a bed! Hey, my bonnie
black boys!” She turned this way and that among the men, making herself
outrageous; and then she slipped out of the ring and sought Harry.
She found him, hidden from the leaping of the fire behind the old
pike-keeper’s heap of furniture.
“Whatever are ye doin’ here, Harriet?” he whispered.
“Tch! Dinnat waste a minute,” she replied hoarsely; “come, thy face.
There’s th’ muck o’ a dozen greasy rascals here,” she chattered, as she
besmirched him. “I’ll lend thee brass for another trap i’
Horton--whisht! ye gormless fool; tak’ it an’ owe it! I ha’ scarce grime
enow; we maun mak’ it do. Faugh, what a stock-pot it is! But ’tis worth
a crown a scrape. Lig thy cheek agen mine, Harry.--There, there, twa
seconds; all th’ muck we can!” He felt how she trembled throughout her
frame. “Now thou’s foul enow for hell-kitchen.--O my heart!--Come, don
this, quick!”
Her hands fumbled at her waist, and she thrust a petticoat down
hurriedly. He stared like a wittol.
“Dinnat stand there gapin’ like a throttled cat; step into ’t, an’ put
this about thy shoulders. De’il tak’ me if th’ Lad-lass isna mair a man
nor onny o’ em! But woman maist: O Harry!--Awa’ wi’ thee now! I’ll go
smear Bessie, an’ ye maun off o’ th’ mare. Here’s brass--an’ bless ye!”
She was off with her hand at her breast.
“Where is he?” the farmer roared. He was at Harry’s elbow, but did not
recognise him; and Harriet drew Bessie towards the tree where the mare
stood, and fouled her face. “Up ye get; leave room for him i’ front; he
can swing up by th’ branch. Nay, he’d best lead her ower by yon
pasture.” Bessie flung her arms about Harriet’s neck.
“Oh, Harriet!” she said chokingly; “whether we get awa’ or not, how I
lo’e thee!”
“Ho’d thy whisht; dinnat begin to be a fool now! He’ll hire a trap i’
Horton; ye’ll be i’ Sedbergh to-morn; nay, to-day, for sitha at th’
hills yonder. I’ll tak’ th’ linchpins out o’ both traps. Here, rub this
bit o’ earth on, an’ tee th’ han’kercher round thy chin! And now kiss me
afore I go find him.--Th’ hengments! What’s yon?”
A sudden new roaring and crackling had broken forth from the toll-house.
The roof stones had crashed through the burnt baulks, and from the
standing walls fountains of fire and sparks shot high into the sky, as
if from a huge Jack-in-the-box. The rioters shouted and danced madly,
the old pike-keeper looked up with a dazed look, and the birds hopped in
the illuminated trees. “Now I’ll send him, while that’s amusin’ ’em,”
Harriet muttered; she pressed Bessie’s hand--all of her she could
reach--against her cheek for a moment; then she disappeared among the
shouting crowd.
* * * * *
The hills in the east were revealed against the grey sky. A light breeze
drifted the smoke from the toll-house in the direction of Litton
village, and the glow shone luridly on the rolling masses. A cock gave a
rousing call, and was answered from farm to farm throughout the grey
dale. “Barnaby Bright, langest day an’ shortest night,” a farmer
muttered; and russet frets appeared over the hills. The fire burned
down, and the embers glowed through a white ash. The Rebeccas were
gathered together for departure; and Harriet Stubbs, a grimy, ungainly
figure, in a short under-petticoat that revealed her sharp tibias, stood
a little apart and watched a man in a woman’s attire who led a horse
with a figure upon it quietly round by a wall and down a pasture to the
open northward road. Farmer Butler was cursing here and there, and
shouting, “Harriet! Harriet Stubbs!”
The high hills to the east showed a vast and mysterious shape, with an
edge that burned. The two figures on the mare waved their hands to
Harriet, and disappeared down the road. For many minutes she stood
gazing after them; the birds twittered loudly; and then she laughed her
short hard laugh.
“A Lad-lass to some purpose!” she muttered. “An’ his cheek were agen
mine. O my love!--De’il tak’ me, I’m whinin’ again! Get thy face washed,
Harriet Stubbs, an’ seek a house an’ mak’ a decent woman o’ thyself, an’
cover them shallacky ankles, for thou’s a offald thing i’ th’ dayleet.
Speed ye, Harry! Happen he’ll call th’ bairn Harriet--or Harry--th’
Lad-lass wad serve for auther--an’ ’tis better nor calling mine
Bessie.--Now I’ll find Henry.”
The sky flamed in hues of amber and coral, and she turned again to where
the last of the Rebeccas were departing from the ruins of the
toll-house.
THE FAIRWAY.
Except that he called the gipsies the “Johnnie Faws,” there was little
of the rustic in his speech; and as he told the tale we seemed to see
them, these Johnnie Faws, coming down the hill on that wild January
forenoon. They did not come by the Portsannet road--it would have passed
mortal eyes to find a road in the whirl and scurry and drift of white he
described--but spread out like pheasant-beaters, crying one to another
in the Romany, sometimes flung forward by the tempest, sometimes huddled
down and covered over almost entirely by the snow. Perhaps the fact that
he had been a schoolmaster accounted for an occasional positiveness in
his manner,--it seems to remain with schoolmasters to the end of their
days,--and he was an old man, who must be let talk after his own
fashion. He told us how the wind swept out the tracks of the Johnny Faws
behind them, and how the South Ness women looked compassionately on
their wilder sisters, who did not cover their breasts once in ten
years, but who had sought refuge from the storm, as the hares and foxes
had done before them; and then he wandered off again, schoolmaster-wise,
to tell us how the footprints of a fox over the snow made but a single
line, and how a hare would lie at form, and what sort of tracks a robin
made.... By and by he took up his tale again.
“----So we knew it was bad when the Johnnie Faws came down. Queer
people--dark, whipcord-looking fellows, and one singularly handsome
woman, very swarthy and black-eyed. I remember our women looked at her
as if--as if--but our women lived in houses, you see.... Well, first of
all we asked them about the _Lizzie Martin_; but they’d never heard of
her. Was she a South Ness boat? they asked. Next we asked them if there
was much snow on the Heights; and they answered, No; the Heights were
swept clean, but a man could not stand upright there for the wind. No
snow was falling, they told us; all was being whirled up from the ground
again, dry and powdery. There was one fellow they called Nunan. He
carried a knife and wore gold earrings and talked in a shrill, eager
voice; and he told us how up there the white world and the pale
apple-green sky was one brilliant intermingling that spun and sparkled
in the cold sunlight and smoked.... We asked them where they had left
their horses. It seemed they’d dug a way for them under what looked
like the lee of an old quarry, in an immense drift: they would weather
it as best they could, as sheep do.
“The Johnnie Faws moved restlessly up and down the village; but most of
them gathered at the ‘Dotterel,’ though they drank nothing. The greater
part of the time they were silent, but occasionally they all talked at
once in their own tongue; and I dare say we shouldn’t have had any
tidings of Portsannet at all if the group about the door of the
‘Dotterel’ hadn’t quarrelled, or seemed to. It was something about a
slipper-brake. It appeared that one of their men, Osa Couper, had turned
down into Portsannet earlier in the day, before the storm had got quite
so bad, to get a new hook or rivet for this brake. He had promised to
overtake them; but (they said) somewhere over yonder--over the
Heights--a man with a pair of long wooden runners on his feet (it was
Andrews, we learned afterwards, mate of an old Norwegian timber-barque,
turned farmer)--Andrews--had suddenly appeared among them from nowhere
in particular,--just dropped in on them from out of the smothering
white, and had advised them to avoid the shelter of the hollows: the
hollows, you see, were drifted, but the short brown grass showed on the
tops. Then Andrews had reported that a tall, Egyptian-looking fellow had
flung himself into the Portsannet boat as she had put forth for the
second time that morning; and then all at once the Johnnie Faws had
missed him. He had seemed to vanish while they had all thought he was
talking to Osa Couper’s woman yonder.... Of course we asked again if it
was the _Lizzie Martin_ they had put out for; but they didn’t know.
“You know what South Ness is like,--houses at all levels, and how you
can step from the door of Broadwood’s house yonder almost on to the
‘Dotterel’ chimneys. Well, if the Heights were swept, we had the
sweepings. We were blocked with snow up to the chamber windows,--the
bedroom windows,--and there was right of way through anybody’s yard or
passage or kitchen that was convenient. I remember it interested me
(perhaps it won’t interest you) the way the wind seemed to have been
deflected from the houses in a sort of backwash. It had made great
scoops and trenches, ten foot high and clean-cut at the edges, as if
shaped in marble; and men and women passed up and down these trenches.
These cliffs, as you might call them, darkened the interiors of the
cottages; and the wind hooted in the chimneys just as lads blow across
the barrel of a key. Farmers with shovels, frozen over white as snow
men, returned from digging out their cattle, but the fishermen idled
moodily. The cobles and smacks tossed down in the harbour; but the wind
drowned most noises except that of the surf away out on the Spit, and
that was like continuous explosions. This was only midday, you know, but
you could see nothing but white--white; bits of ice like diamonds on
your lashes; and here and there a bit of blue or apple-green sky, all
tossed together. I thought I had never seen anything so wild and
beautiful; but then, I hadn’t a _Lizzie Martin_ out....”
“Lizzie Martin--the woman, not the boat--kept the ‘Dotterel.’ She was a
pleasant body, plump (when she was twelve or thirteen she had one of
these creases round her neck that means a double chin later on), and she
was very honest and comfortable and motherly, though she hadn’t a
child--just then. About two o’clock three of the gipsies had come into
the ‘Dotterel,’--four, if you reckon the babe at the handsome woman’s
breast,--and they sat over by the snowed-up window. There would be a
dozen or so men round the hearth; but nobody was drinking, and nobody
said anything in Lizzie’s presence about what we’d heard of this Osa
Couper and the Portsannet boat, you understand. Now and then the child
gave a little throaty cry, and once or twice Willie Harverson--he was a
young giant, and his curly head always looked too little for his
shoulders when he’d got his two or three winter ganseys on,--Willie had
told her to bring the child nearer the fire. But she had only shaken her
head and pointed behind her at the window. The panes had warmed a
little, and the snow had peeled a couple of inches from them and then
frozen again. Except for that narrow gleam of cold light, you’d have
thought it was evening, for the candles were lighted, and they swealed
and guttered every time the door opened. The gipsy woman had opened her
breast again,--a sort of sling to carry the babe passed across it,--and
she looked straight before her, like a handsome statue, a beautiful
animal--like everything, else in nature except this self-conscious
creature man.... I can’t tell you; never mind....
“Willie told her again to come near the fire, and then up piped Nunan in
his high, eager voice. She’d do there till her man came back from
Portsannet, he said (they didn’t seem to doubt that he’d gone out with
the boat). I remember Willie muttered, ‘Christ rest his soul for a brave
man if ...’ You see, the Portsannet boat was an old Greathead boat,
nearly as old as the century, fit for chopping up for kindling any time
this five-and-twenty years; but ours at South Ness was a new,
thirty-three-foot boat, mahogany, double-banked, self-emptying,
self-righting, nearly seven hundred pounds with belts and tackle and
carriage. She’d only been out twice, and there wasn’t a scratch on her
blue and white. John Broadwood was cox. I knew what John thought of
their chances of getting round the Spit if they were to put out; but
they were so proud of the new boat that they were eager as lads to try
it. Men were watch and watch about down at the boathouse, where they
could see if Reuben Ward signalled from the station on the hill; but it
wasn’t our day. With the wind due north, if a boat cleared Portsannet
Head she cleared the Spit too. It was Portsannet’s turn, and the old
boat’s....
“The men in the ‘Dotterel’ then were talking about the boat, when
suddenly I heard John Broadwood say ‘Whisht!’ Lizzie stood there in the
doorway, under a model of a brig in a glass case there used to be. ‘Did
some of ye call?’ she said; and the men shuffled their feet and shifted
about on stools and benches.--‘We told ye not to bother, Lizzie,’
Broadwood says; ‘we’ll wait on we’rsels.’--‘It must ha’ been the babe I
heard,’ says Lizzie; ‘let her bring it near th’ fire, Willie.’ But the
woman said again that she’d do till Osa Couper came; and Lizzie asked
Nunan if he wasn’t her husband.”
* * * * *
He paused; and when in a minute he resumed again, there was the same
magisterial, slightly querulous note in his voice that we had heard
before--the schoolmaster’s note.
* * * * *
“Before we go further, let’s understand one another,” he said. “When I
said that Nunan had a knife, I saw some of you anticipating--making
ready--saying to yourselves, Ah! knives mean stabbing; never mind your
comments; come to the tale and the knife!--Well, you’re wise in your
day and generation, but for all that I think you’re a little wrong too.
The tale’s a good deal, but the man who tells it is also something. I
could show you Willie Harverson’s house, and you’d gape round for five
minutes with your caps in your hands, thinking--well, goodness knows
what you’d be thinking! You’ve seen ’em, perhaps, tourists,
open-mouthed, in the room where somebody was born or died. To me it
would always seem stupid if it weren’t so comical. Facts are neither the
most interesting nor the most important things in the world--not that
sort of fact. The knife was a fact, and we’re coming to the knife; but
it’s a good deal like other things in life you look forward to--nothing
when you get it. One of these new writers I don’t pretend to understand
says there are two tragedies in life--not getting what you want, and
getting it. I know I used to think that if ever I became head of a
decent grammar-school ... well, I’ve been head of a grammar-school. When
I’d got that I wanted something else; and so on. And here I am, back
again where I was born, with grammar-schools and suchlike all behind me.
Garrulous too.... But tragedy or not, there’s little satisfaction in
getting things. You see, you don’t drop dead in the perfect, glorious,
fit moment when you attain ’em. Life goes on, a dull, stretched-out
anti-climax; and there seems to be only one finish to it all. I’m an
old man, and probably nearer it than you....
“So when Lizzie asked Nunan if he wasn’t the handsome gipsy’s husband,
there was John Broadwood shaking a great fist with a blue anchor on it
over Lizzie’s shoulder, and Willie making foolish shapes with his mouth
without a sound, and Jemmy Wild hawking in his throat and knocking his
pipe out noisily; ... but Nunan popped out with it--about Osa and the
guns at Portsannet, and so on--and then he spluttered out a ‘Hey! Would
ye do that, man?’ You see, Willie had clapped his hand over his mouth,
and there was a wicked gleam in Nunan’s eyes, and his hand went to the
small of his back where the knife was; and that’s all about the knife,
except that the woman told Nunan to sit still.
“But Lizzie was trembling pitifully; and when I saw her eyes go round
the men I backed away behind the settle, so that somebody else might
tell her. Then her head came down on her arms and thumped on the table,
while Nunan sulked. We watched her broad back heaving; and then all at
once she threw up her head. ‘Oh, hear it goyling down th’ chimley!’ she
cried; and I saw John Broadwood biting his pipe hard; ‘Frank--Frank o’
th’ _Lizzie Martin_--ye were his mates, and here ye sit--he called her
after me--she were Lizzie Martin afore I were--I were Lizzie Collison
o’ th’ Heights----’ ...Broadwood bade her Whisht! whisht! but she went
on. ‘It were a Valentine’s day, a Thursday, and he came into th’ kitchen
that morning--Jess never barked when he came courting, but she’d never
let him go without I took him to th’ gate----’ ...And so on, young
gentlemen. Lizzie and Frank had seen the valentine from the top of the
hill, on the sea below, as if on a sheet of glass. ‘Don’t, Lizzie!’ says
Broadwood, choking; ‘we can’t bide to hear ye!’...
“John Broadwood was a fine, independent, self-sufficient sort of fellow,
with a good deal of John Broadwood about him altogether, but he broke
down. Lizzie’s eyes, wandering wildly, fell on the gipsy woman and the
babe. The gipsy’s husband, for anything we knew, was in peril too; but I
think it was something else that came over Lizzie--the sight of the
child: I see you understand. She sobbed something;--I didn’t hear
what--and the gipsy woman turned, quite unmoved, and looked at Lizzie
from head to heel. ‘I see your time’s coming,’ she said, ‘and them that
lives in chambers of stone need comfort; come then.’ And with that she
moved the babe in the sling, and produced an old pack of cards. Strange
folk....
“They say symbols are what you take them for, or else a cross might just
as well be a gallows, but those cards looked very secular to me. It was
a grim, cheerless power that those were a symbol of. I think Lizzie
thought so too, for the sight of them seemed to bring her round a
little. She knitted her fat fingers together on the gipsy’s knee and
sank to the floor. ‘Nay, woman,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a surer comfort
than that, you and I;’ and the woman glanced from the cards, as she cut
and cut them, to Lizzie’s head on her knee, incuriously.... I went out.
I’d seen one or two of the men glancing at the door, as if they’d have
liked to be on the other side of it; but I just walked out. I thought
I’d take a walk--to see Reuben Ward at the station.
“Coming out of the candle-light, I blinked like a flittermouse. The sky
was still a keen blue, with the snow whirling and glittering and
dancing; but the light was dying, and I guessed it would be about
half-past four--the hands of the school-house clock were fast frozen to
its face. I turned up the blacksmith’s alley to get a shovel: it was
smooth to the eaves with snow, and little wisps and curls played on the
surface like smoke. The wind was blowing big guns intermittently, and in
the intervals I could hear the thunder of the Spit. I set out for the
station, and in a dozen yards was up to my waist in a river of snow.
“There was a windmill before you came to the station. There’s one yet,
but it’s a dummy--a sailing-mark for ships, and the Board of Trade looks
after it. It worked in those days, and belonged to a fellow called
Rhodes. I was a strongish chap, you must know, not so tall as Willie
Harverson, but as broad, or thereabouts; but by the time I reached the
mill I was glad enough of its shelter. And then I looked up, and backed
away again. The sail-shutters were open, and the wind screamed through
them; but the gearing--all those cranks and elbows about the pin--that
had gone; and two or three blades of the steering-fan hummed like bits
of ribbon in the wind. The whole thing had swung round like a
weathercock, and the heavy top storey rocked and lifted, like a mouth
opening and shutting. Underneath it a man was lying on his back in the
snow, watching it as if it were a plaything.
“I shook him and bawled in his ear. He didn’t speak. His face glittered
all over with ice particles, and I knew who he would be by his hair and
eyes. I dragged him out from under the toppling mill; by his mouth I
could make out that he was saying something about ‘my people,’ and I
nodded, and shouted, ‘What about Portsannet?’
“I made out a few words: ‘Twice--oars broke--old boat--help.’ And then I
asked, ‘What about the station?’ It seemed Reuben was helpless. The mast
and cones and drums had gone; he’d been firing, but we hadn’t heard, and
he was waiting for dark to signal with the rockets. ‘D’ye know what
boat?’ I shouted, putting my arm round his neck and my mouth at his ear;
and he tried two or three times to tell me, but had lost his voice. He
stooped down and wrote in the snow with his finger, ‘SN, 102.’ Seeing
that that was the _Lizzie’s_ number, I didn’t bother about Reuben and
the station. I collared him, and off we blundered into the drifts
between Rhodes’s mill and South Ness.
“They were much as I’d left them when Osa and I got to the ‘Dotterel.’
The tall Johnnie Faw wouldn’t touch brandy, I remember. The two women
were not to be seen. I told them to stir themselves, and they were on
their feet in an instant. John Broadwood, who had said she could never
live round the Spit, was first at the door. ‘Out o’ the road, ye
farmers!’ he grunted; and I was for telling Osa to go into the kitchen
to his wife, when all at once I saw Lizzie in the doorway. ‘Reuben’s
signalled, then?’ she said; and somebody said ‘Ay.’ The gipsy woman
didn’t take her eyes off Osa, who was talking to Nunan in the Romany;
but she didn’t speak.”
* * * * *
He stopped for so long that we thought he wasn’t going on again. It was
minutes before he resumed; but evidently he had got his digression over
within himself, for he went straight on.
* * * * *
“There were lights and moving figures down by the boat-house, but they
were blotted out from time to time: the night had fallen. The cobles and
craft were huddled close in, and they were tossing and hissing and
groaning--fenders grunting and rubbing on wood, blocks banging, tackle
shrieking, parted ropes cracking like whips.... The little jetty seemed
to run out a yard or two into the night. The surf thundered out on the
Spit, a deep solemn sound. A fellow was bawling through a trumpet: his
voice sounded throttled, something like a bassoon. The moon wasn’t due
up for a couple of hours yet.
“We ran her down on the carriage,--men at the wheels and life-lines and
at the horse’s heads,--and then we stood in the knee-deep water to see
her lift. She lifted, and every man flung himself headlong out of the
way. She came up from the carriage in a monstrous cant, and then she
came down broadside in the broken, boiling wave. I heard the snapping of
the port oars,--it was a short crackle in the tempest,--and then I was
thirty yards away, scrambling among the carriage and horses and men. A
broken shaft danced up and down in the white backwash.
“We beached her by hand, and already the wheelwright had a wrench and
was unscrewing the nuts of the broken shaft. We carried four men to the
boathouse, two of them with their hands on their chests where the broken
oars had caught them. Eh? Oh yes, they’d jackets on.... We tried again,
waiting till the breaker had spread away roaring in the darkness, and
she rose again. She seemed to hang for a dreadful long time between the
two crests of curling white that rushed together to meet her,--the wave
was a slanting wall all laced over with a pattern of grey foam,--and
then she disappeared. But she was on the wrong side still, and her
rudder was smashed. A man struck at me as I dragged him out of the
water: it was John Broadwood. I’d got hold of his right wrist, and it
dangled when I let it go; so I took him by the other arm. We headed the
horses round to try again, edging close under the shelter of the jetty
and the plunging cobles; and that time I turned my face away as she
lifted--she was so frightfully near the jetty. But when I looked again,
there she was. She’d neither ridden it nor got through it; and the Spit,
booming a mile away, seemed to mock us that we couldn’t get through the
breakers.
“We all gathered in the boathouse again--farmers, fishermen, injured
men, gipsies. Osa Couper was talking to old Joe Barker, and a fellow who
was listening turned suddenly away and pulled out his pipe. That cut
us--cut those who saw him: it seemed all there was to do--to light your
pipe. And then we heard women’s voices again: Lizzie and the gipsy woman
were among us. What were we waiting for? they asked; and the man who was
lighting his pipe nodded at the injured men. Lizzie’s bosom lifted, and
she began to talk again. She talked as she had talked before in the
‘Dotterel’....
“The boat was high on the beach, and they’d taken the horses out; they
put them in again and made a fourth attempt--a fifth--a sixth. After the
sixth we went back to the boathouse; another man had given it up now,
and had taken up an old lobster-pot and was setting the broken ends
straight. Useful occupation....
“I told you--did I tell you?--about old Joe Barker. He had turned sixty
then. He’d a wrinkled, nut-cracker face, and his mouth and chin chopped
up and down together when he spoke, like one of these talking dolls;
he’d deep furrows from the corners of his mouth, just like one of these
ventriloquist’s dolls. He was chopping and chewing now to Osa Couper;
and all at once he cried out, ‘Have ye done all ye can, ye fishermen?’
They scowled at him.
“‘Then let th’ farmers have a try; Jerry--Tom--Matthy Dodd----’ He
jumped about here and there, singling out men and giving orders, all
about horses. Broadwood sprawled on a locker, and he raised himself on
his sound arm. ‘Yours is no good if ours won’t face it,’ he cried; but
Joe took no notice. He and Dodd began to fetch out sweeps and spars and
ropes and tackle, and the men outside pitched them into the boat. ‘Up!’
he cried to Broadwood; and John slid down while he got a stone jar of
brandy and a couple of pannikins out of the locker. Some walked slowly
out and up the beach, looking back over their shoulders, and then all
at once a man broke into a quick trot. A dozen hangers-about followed,
questioning as they ran. In ten minutes the clattering of horses was
heard on the beach; and a man, coming in for more ropes, said that a
hundred shovels were clearing the village street....
“Well, you’ve heard the tale, or you wouldn’t have come to me: you know
what we did and how it ended. What more do you want? To be told what you
don’t know, you’ll say. Not you. Nobody wants to be told what they don’t
know. They want to be told what they do know, or think they know. Why,
all the fellows we glorify are those who tell us in the main what we
already know--tell us we’re nearly quite right; a bit--eh?--here, or a
trifle there that our worships have overlooked in our general rightness,
but wonderfully right on the whole. You’ll listen as long as I tell this
tale as you already know it; then you’ll go away and say, Queer old
chap; been master of a grammar-school--disappointed--disillusioned; but
for all that he was one of ’em.... Well, just as you like.
“A hundred yards out of the village we turned the women back. All of a
sudden Willie Harverson’s wife sprang forward and kissed him, and then
the pent cheer broke out. It was as if for the first time we had all
thought clearly what we had begun to do. The wind scattered it, but our
hearts rose passionately. We hadn’t spoken coming up through the
village; we had started beaten, or at least just to endure as much as
men could endure; and now that shout made all the difference. It was
arrogant, boastful, young, foolish, victorious. Heigho! You see, we
forget all the shouts of the same sort that end in failure: we only
remember them when they come off. The other sort are like the revolts
that never succeed: they’re revolutions when they do. But then, I
suppose we could never endure to remember all our pride and confidence
that’s come to nothing.... So the men kissed their wives. I had nobody
to kiss--I’ve never been married. I saw Reuben’s rocket rise clear above
the gale, and then we started.
“We had twenty horses, and perhaps twice as many men with shovels. We’d
lashed a spar to the boat-carriage, a sort of whiffle-tree, and from
that to the ten pair of horses ran such a tackle of ropes and traces as
you never saw--all thicknesses, plain and hawser, pieced out and
joined everywhere with sailors’ knots and hitches. Willie Harverson,
on the frame of the carriage, was shouting orders through the
speaking-trumpet--to find the ridge past the mill, to rouse High Lee
village on the way--I don’t suppose anybody heard half he said, for
already the digging had begun. Old Joe Barker had donned a cork jacket
for warmth, and was flat on the fore air-chamber: he was directing, and
Willie, off and on the carriage continually, was his spokesman. Without
a captain, you see, forty diggers are little better than a dozen. The
men who weren’t digging were scouting, starting her after each halt, or
standing by to see that the traces didn’t get mixed.
“I said the snow was dry: it was so dry that half of it fell from the
shovels of the diggers, blown away by the wind. That meant twice as much
stooping, and the men were up to their waists in it. The fellows who
scouted for rising ground appeared and disappeared in the drifts, and
the snow crusted on their lanterns, melting and freezing both at once.
We couldn’t hear the sea now; instead there rose the shrill notes of
trees and the silky soft whistle of the ice particles over the snow. We
came to a quickset hedge: they dug through the drift to it, slapped the
quarters of the horses with the shovels, and we came through with
branches of briar and thorn caught in the trace-ropes.
“It’s seven miles to Portsannet, with High Lee village half way, and
after that the Heights, seven hundred feet of them. I came on to shovel
with the second shift. You can dig till you can’t straighten your back.
I thought myself strong, but--well, a grammar-school was what I was
really working for in those days. You may be strong, but you can’t pitch
stuff behind you at three times the ordinary rate with men who are
always forking hay, or hoeing turnips, or loading peats; and by the time
my turn came round to dig for the second time and the third, I wasn’t
the only one who was fagging. Then you can go on digging till you don’t
mind so much; you’re getting stupid then--what employers of bodily
labour call a ‘good man’; and I began to be a good man--except that a
good man shouldn’t quarrel with his tools, and at the last change I’d
got hold of a garden spade instead of a flanged shovel--a thing that
carried about half a pound--and a self-emptier, like the new boat. I
became so good a man that when a fellow took that spade from me I asked
him what an odd hum of vibrating iron was that I’d heard for some time
past; and he pointed to Rhodes’s mill not a dozen yards away. It was the
pin-shaft that hummed. I can’t tell you how it had managed to stop up
there while the rest of the top storey lay a heap of wreckage below; I
suppose things don’t smash quite as you expect ’em to.... During my rest
I’d been hanging on to one of the flapping life-lines of the boat.
Another man had now got it, and I felt irritated, as if he might have
found one of his own; but I clutched the next one, and by and by noticed
that the moon was rising. And somewhere about that time we struck the
ridge to High Lee.
“The moon showed a grotesque procession. She rose, a bloated disc of
dull orange, over the steaming horses and labouring figures, over the
big boat squatted among the drifted hills.... The wind wasn’t blowing
quite in such gusts neither, and I remember thinking that if it would
only stop for an hour the snow might pack. We had eased on the digging
with the beginning of the ridge, and with the help of the men at the
wheels were going at a good three miles an hour. Soon I let go my
life-line: I hadn’t come as a passenger. There was digging--always more
or less digging; a ridge of land isn’t the same thing as a ridge on a
second-form school-map. And there were walls too, and cross-walls, and
drifts at each. But it only took a minute or two to uncape and break the
walls. As I say, we were going nicely; and as the moon mounted and the
wind dropped more and more, we could hear the coughing of the horses and
the creaking and straining of the tackle on the spar.... And now let me
see; let me see....
“H’m! Never mind. It doesn’t matter so much about Nunan the gipsy; but
Nunan was daft about his horses--the Johnnie Faws’ horses. He thought
the quarry where they’d left them would be somewhere about there. He
wanted us to stop and look for them, and climbed up into the boat to put
the matter in a reasonable light to Joe. He woke Osa Couper--did I say
that Osa was asleep in the boat? He was; but of course Joe wasn’t going
to burrow up and down the headland for the Johnnie Faws’ horses, and
Nunan became morose. By and by Joe packed him off with another fellow to
rouse Hadwen--he was a farmer--and to meet us with the farm-horses at
the Beck; and I began to envy Osa in the boat myself. Let me see....”
* * * * *
He tapped with his lean fingers, as if continuing to himself: it is not
unlikely we missed part of the tale. He was very old; and when at last
he went on again, it was with a little rousing and pulling of himself
together.
* * * * *
“Well, we saw it at last, when the moon got high--what the wind had done
to the snow. It was glorious, that mounting ... all in a frost of
brilliant stars, ... and it showed us a miracle. We could see half over
the Head now. Acre after acre was fluted and rippled and ravelled, all
so still and quiet and spotless; ... and only thin copses, a mile, two,
four miles away, broke the whiteness. The wind had touched and left it
in tresses and flounces; ... far away it was channeled like billows, and
again thick and smooth; ... and trees and bushes were as if something
thick and white had been poured over them, all coronets and garlands.
The lanterns were murky orange spots, and every detail of the boat, the
horses, the harnessing, old Joe’s artificial chin over the gunnel....
The _Lizzie Martin_ might be driftwood by this time on the other side of
the Heights. I didn’t think of the _Lizzie Martin_; I didn’t think of
that grammar-school I was going to have one day; I only wanted to look
at the snow and the serene moon.... Ah well!...
“From the top of the next rise we could see Lee Wood, black below us,
and the grey Heights beyond. For the first time the grass showed in
patches, and the boat rocked on the carriage, and we dragged back as we
descended the slope. Then all at once Joe Barker shouted, ‘Don’t turn
’em!’
“It seemed that a cart-track ran through the wood that would save a mile
and more. In the deep dip at the bottom Nunan was waiting with Hadwen’s
horses; and we had taken the dip and risen again on the other side
through a gap in a wall before anybody had fairly counted the risk. It
was too late to turn them, or perhaps worth chancing--a thirty-foot
boat, and all that tangle of cordage.... Anyway, we went on, and the
wood closed in behind us.
“I think Joe saw his mistake as soon as a branch whipped his hat from
his head, for he began to dance and curse. We could hear him blundering
about in the boat for the one carpenter’s axe we carried. Lifeboats are
specially made with a big beam, and they’ve no business in woods anyway.
There was now little snow, but that only made the wood the darker.
“So, soon our spar fetched up against an elm or something, and startled
a screeching white owl: we backed the horses and freed it. The shouting
and smashing and ripping of branches must have been heard a mile off;
and then the check came. She wedged between two ash-trees, and Joe
sprang down with his axe.
“‘For God’s sake, keep them cattle to th’ track!’ he screamed, beside
himself; and a young farmer snatched the axe from him and ran round to
the nearest ash. The delay cost us a quarter of an hour, and then we
moved forward again. We were savage now, and the farmers flogged the
horses and kicked them cruelly under their bellies. The next check was a
deep ravine with a beck at the bottom, and the team was in heaps,
slipping, stumbling, pulling all ways at once. We lifted her
over,--lifted her, with shoulders at spokes, sweeps and spars for
levers, men at the ropes among the horses. Then Joe served brandy round.
Nunan trotted off to warn the men of High Lee that we were coming, and
to get their help. We didn’t stop. We forced back bushes with our
bodies, and tore at branches, and wedged the wheels with stones while we
chopped partly through trees and then fetched them down with ropes. A
rage of cursing took us as we laboured, and some shook torn and bleeding
fists at trees. Joe Barker gesticulated impotently, and whimpered that
this was bird-nesting, nutting, black-berrying; and he danced up and
down whenever a sapling gave with a loud crack, or twenty yards of clear
track showed ahead.
“I don’t know how long we were in the wood,--no very great time, I
suppose, as time is reckoned; and then all at once I seemed to see John
Swire of High Lee among us, and Nunan again, and a dozen axes going at
once. Dreaming? Oh no, I wasn’t; there really were the axes. The High
Lee men had come to help us out, and their horses were waiting at the
edge of the wood. We soon came through then, of course, and saw, a
field’s-length away, dark shapes and lanterns in the snow.
“John Swire was right: she didn’t look much like a new boat by this
time. Not that she was splintered much,--double cross mahogany from
gunnel to gunnel doesn’t splinter much,--but half her life-lines were
gone from the ring-bolts, and her new paint was fouled with bark and
earth and tree-scrapings--a sight to see. Men swarmed up and overhauled
her anxiously; but she was little the worse save in appearance, and they
swarmed down again and began to take out our exhausted horses and to put
in their own. They were at the knotted cordage thick as flies round a
treacle-string in summer--lengthening, splicing, piecing, sheepshanking,
stretching all out, it seemed interminably; for they had twice our
number of horses--too many, I think. They fixed another spar for a
double-tree, and set oars across at intervals to keep that monstrous
cat’s-cradle in something like position: men were told off specially to
watch it. A fellow came shouting up with some oxen; but we couldn’t
begin to make yokes for his oxen--the fool hadn’t brought any; and they
were sent back with the lads and worn-out horses to High Lee.
“I forget lots of things that happened just then; but I remember one
thing distinctly--I laughed at the High Lee men when we set off again,
for they cheered. I suppose it seemed silly to me. Cheer when you’ve
done things, if you’ve nothing better to do; but where on earth is the
sense in.... We knew what cheering was worth. Cheering didn’t help Nunan
much, who was fretting again about his horses; nor Joe Barker, who was
bewailing the time his blunder had lost us--for we remembered now and
then that we were going to Portsannet. It didn’t help anybody except
perhaps the High Lee men themselves, and they’d come to their senses
before we were over the moonlit Heights.... We let them do the work for
a bit: it was digging, digging again, and the rise and fall of their
backs was wearisome to watch. There was little choice of roads now, Osa
said (we woke him to ask him). As nearly as he could tell, he’d come
fairly straight past the alum-works; and for the alum-works we made.
Soon our feet felt the rise....”
* * * * *
He seemed very tired, as if the memory of the weariness wearied him
again. He rested for three or four minutes. He nodded; and it is
possible that again he had lost the direct thread of his tale, for when
he resumed after his rest it was apparently nowhere.
* * * * *
“You need purpose, you see. No amount of work kills if you have the
purpose. You needn’t achieve it; they say it’s often as well for you
when you don’t; but without it you’re hitting the air. Practically, you
must have a little reward, too--just enough to make it worth your while
to go on; it’s only once in five centuries that a hero’s born who can
see his work apparently swallowed up in the ocean with equanimity. Yes,
yes; principle’s the biggest thing--the vision, the ideal; nobody denies
that. But, as the world’s arranged, it’s much if you can get forward a
step at a time and catch a glimpse of your vision between whiles. If
you’d asked us, we should have told you, of course, that we were going
to Portsannet. We should have thought you a fool; and yet I doubt if it
really occurred to us. I don’t say that I myself didn’t think (if you
call it that) of the _Lizzie Martin_. We’ve all thought we’ve been
thinking things all our lives, till one day something happens and we
think them really and piercingly; but I do say I think we went on mainly
because we’d started. It wasn’t what we thought--it was what we didn’t
think: we didn’t think of stopping.... They used to call me ambitious
when, as a youngster, I sometimes spoke of my grammar-school. Well,
every fool’s ambitious, if ambition is only thinking that your
grammar-school, whatever it is, would be a nice comfortable thing to
have. Ambition--purpose--means a lot more than that to me. It’s a
positive, a vital thing--not mere patience and endurance. It’s never to
forget that first presumptuous cheer; it’s both to see your goal and
never to lose sight of the means to it. You haven’t got to let the work
get its grind in.... But we were half way there, you say?--we had a
little reward to encourage us? Yes, more than half way. We were past the
first lift of the Heights. But what besides? Twice the boat had slid
clean off the tail of the carriage, spilling belts and jackets and
paraphernalia in the snow; and twice we lashed her on again; and there’s
so mighty little carriage to lash a big lifeboat to that we had to
tauten up every few minutes, and men were hauling direct on the boat to
keep her somewhere near the wheels. And what besides? Till we’d come to
the Heights we hadn’t done enough work to keep us warm, and the High Lee
men were frenzied, as we’d been in the wood. Nunan was seeing his quarry
every hundred yards, and looking for air-holes, as if his horses had
been sheep. Willie Harverson had been left half a mile back at a
house--ribs crushed the first time the boat shifted. We digged and
hauled and righted the boat, and digged again. The horses rolled with
their legs among the ropes; ... the load, ... the keel alone weighed
half a ton.... Men were sleeping as they went, and shoving as they
slept.... I tell you, you don’t know anything about it. It’s the
purposeless work that kills, and practically we had no purpose. You
can’t have purpose and be frantic.... Wait a bit....
“And I knew it was silly to keep on thinking with every step, ‘This
brings you nearer the grammar-school--Portsannet--Portsannet and the
grammar-school.’ Rousseau did it, you know. But once in a while, when
you’ve laboured till your spirit seems freed from your body, it does
seem all one--all part of something you’re trying to do, you don’t know
what--something you’re trying to make of your life.... It was only seven
miles; but seven miles or seven hundred isn’t the point. The point is
just the limit of your endurance: if it’s only seven yards, seven
hundred, or seven million, it comes to just that.... Wait a minute....
The moon was very little higher, so we couldn’t have been very long. I
remember noticing this and shouting it out, but I don’t know whether it
steadied them or not. My mind was somewhere in advance, over the
Heights. I was thinking that, once over the top, the men who were
pulling would fall back to check her; that without a pole the team would
be useless; that a pole might be made of a long spar; that we might
zigzag down; put props through the valve-holes; elementary mechanics,
parallelogram of forces, grammar-school again, and a lot more
light-witted stuff. Then somebody sighted the alum-works, a quarter of a
mile to the left.... One minute....
“We were at the top. It’s forty-five years ago, and you can persuade
yourself of a lot in less than that time. We persuaded ourselves
afterwards that it was a moment of triumph--there was no harm in that;
but we knew better really. We knew in our hearts that the Portsannet men
would have to man the boat for themselves, for we reeled like drunkards,
went forward like drunkards, with the drunkard’s instinct for his bed.
But we boasted foolishly: we would put out ourselves--take her back that
night--show what men could do,--I don’t know what. Nobody said it was
nonsense. Joe Barker alone seemed to realise that it didn’t follow that
because we’d got through, the _Lizzie Martin_ had. We could hear the sea
now, a dull roar, and far on our right the Abbey light flashed white and
red. There was a babel of talking. Men with horses seemed to join us
every few minutes. A man called Lockwood came from Lizzie’s old home
with two Galloways and a mare in foal, and they hitched them on behind.
As they did so we stood for a moment looking down on Portsannet, the
river, the scattered lights far up the valley, the grey beyond the
harbour-wall....
“They came up, the fish-wives of the quay--the women who swear so--they
turned out with the men; men and women, there were enough to carry the
boat and us with it. Three boats had managed to keep head-up the whole
of the day--you know that--and the _Lizzie_ was one of them. The shouts
and lanterns were bewildering, and I heard a fellow give a shout of
recognition to Osa Couper. We turned into the street that leads to the
movable bridge over the river. The river’s tidal, of course, and there
was a beach of mud and pebbles; and the Portsannet men fought for places
as we put her in. She danced on the water again, and they pulled down
the river. We trooped across the bridge to the boat-house. They were
jacketed, and had fresh oars by the time we caught them up, and the sea
was bursting on the sea-wall with tremendous shocks. They got out the
very first time....
“You know how many they saved? Frank and another man and a lad from the
_Lizzie_, and seven from a barque, and six from a Lowestoft boat. We saw
them all in, and then they wanted us to go to bed. ‘Why should we go to
bed?’ we said. We didn’t want to go to bed. I went to bed sometime the
next day, but it wasn’t till the following night that I slept--not to
call sleeping.... Nunan, they said, was worse than I; the horses,
perhaps, though they got them the next day but one, all but two....”
His eyes were half closed, and we prepared to leave him: he opened them
again, hearing us move.
“I want to know if you can tell me something before you go,” he
said; “it’s often puzzled me. I can tell you in half a minute. It’s
this: If you were to ask me whether I thought my own life worth
such and such a vast deal of labour,--the risk of other lives too,
maybe,--I think I should have to say, No. At any rate, it would be
a question of balance, value for value, and so on, you see. And I
know other men think the same. But as soon as it’s a question of
anybody else’s life, the case seems to be different. John Broadwood
would have jumped up just the same if Frank Martin had been the
biggest rapscallion who ever handled a net. Now where’s the sense
in it? I’m not saying there isn’t any; I’m asking. I went too. I’d
have gone in the boat, but it would have kept a better man out of a
place; and I ask myself the reason of it all. It isn’t
reason--can’t be; and yet reasonable men will do it. ‘Thank God for
that,’ you say. Well, that’s unanswerable too.... I see you can’t
help me. I’ve been asking such questions all my life, and shall go
on, I suppose, till the end now.... I’m very tired....
Good-night....”
_Printed by The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey._