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Jinny the Carrier
By
Israel Zangwill
[Illustration: 1919 and company logo]
* * * * *
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
DEAR MISTRESS OF BASSETTS,
You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need—in our world of sorrow
and care—of a “bland” novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed
with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently
felt tempted to write one for you. But the spirit bloweth where it
listeth, and seemed perversely to have turned against novels altogether,
perhaps because I had been labelled “novelist,” as though one had set up
a factory. (Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here
is a novel at last—my first this century—and there is a further reason
for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the
vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during the past
twenty years, absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which
finally insisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and now
in this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed over High Field and
seen the opulent valley—tilth and pasture and ancient country
seats—stretching before me like a great poem, with its glint of winding
water, and the exquisite blue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me
below, snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true English
home of “plain living and high thinking,” and latterly of the rural
Muse! I can only hope that some breath of the inspiration which has
emanated from Bassetts in these latter days, and which has set its
picturesquely clad poetesses turning rhymes as enthusiastically as
clods, and weaving rondels as happily as they bound the sheaves, has
been wafted over these more prosaic pages—something of that
“wood-magic” which your granddaughter—soul of the idyllic band—has got
into her song of your surroundings.
_The glint of blue where the estuary flows,_
_Or a shimmering mist o’er the vale’s green and gold:_
_A little grey church which ’mid willow-trees shows;_
_A house on the hillside so good to behold_
_With its yellow plaster and red tiles old,_
_The clematis climbing in purple and green,_
_And down in the garden ’mid hollyhocks bold_
_Sit Kathleen, Ursula, Helen, and Jean._
And yet it must not be thought that either “Bassetts” or “Little Baddow”
figures in the “Little Bradmarsh” of my story. The artist cannot be tied
down: he creates a composite landscape to his needs. Moreover, in these
last four or five years a zealous constabulary can testify out of what
odds and ends the strange inquiring figure, who walked, cycled, or rode
in carriers’ carts to forgotten hamlets or sea-marshes, has composed his
background. Nor have I followed photographic realism even in my dialect,
deeming the Cockneyish forms, except when unconsciously amusing, too
ugly to the eye in a long sustained narrative, though enjoyable enough
in those humorous sketches which my friend Bensusan, the true
conquistador of Essex, pours forth so amazingly from his inexhaustible
cornucopia. I differ—in all diffidence—from his transcription on the
sole point that the Essex rustic changes “i” into “oi” in words like
“while,” though why on the other hand “boil” should go back to “bile”
can be explained only by the perversity which insists on taking
aspirates off the right words and clapping them on the wrong, much as
Cockney youths and girls exchange hats on Bank Holiday. I have limited
my own employment of this local vowelling mainly to the first person
singular as sufficiently indicative of the rest. In the old vexed
question of the use of dialect, my feeling is that its value is simply
as colour, and that the rich old words, obsolete or unknown elsewhere,
contribute this more effectively and far more beautifully than vagaries
of pronunciation, itself a very shifting factor of language even in the
best circles. It is not even necessary for the artistic effect that the
reader should understand the provincial words, though the context should
be so contrived as to make them fairly intelligible. In short, art is
never nature, though it should conceal the fact. Even the slowness and
minuteness of my method—imposed as it is by the attempt to seize the
essence of Essex—are immeasurable velocity and breadth compared with
the scale of reality.
In bringing this rustic complex under the category of comedy I clash, I
am aware, with literary fashion, which demands that country folk should
appear like toiling insects caught in the landscape as in a giant web of
Fate, though why the inhabitants of Belgravia or Clapham escape this
tragic convention I cannot understand. But I do not think that you, dear
Aunt by adoption, see the life around you like that. Even, however, had
you and I seen more gloomily, the fashionable fatalistic framework would
have been clearly inconsistent with the “blandness” of your novel. Such
a novel must, I conceive, begin with “once upon a time” and end with
“they all lived happy ever after,” so that my task was simply to fill in
the lacuna between these two points, and supply the early-Victorian
mottoes, while even the material was marked out for me by Dr. Johnson’s
definition of a novel as “a story mainly about love.” I am hopeful that
when you come to read it (not, I trust, with a sore throat), you will
admit that I have at least tried to make my dear “Jinny” really “live
happy ever after,” even though—in the fierce struggle for literary
survival—she is far from likely to do so. But at any rate, if only for
the moment, I should be glad if I had succeeded in expressing through
her my grateful appreciation of the beautiful country in which my lot,
like Jinny’s, has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple,
kindly people.
Your affectionate Nephew,
THE AUTHOR
SUSSEX
_New Year 1919_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREAMBLE 1
I. BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT 4
II. JINNY ON HER ROUNDS 34
III. JINNY AT HER HOMES 70
IV. WILL ON HIS WAY 100
V. WILL AT HOME 154
VI. SUNDAY AT CHIPSTONE 195
VII. COMEDY OF CORYDON AND 234
AMARYLLIS
VIII. CUPID AND CATTLE 264
IX. TWO OF A TRADE 320
X. HORSE, GROOM, AND BRIDE 357
XI. WINTER’S TALE 432
XII. WRITTEN IN WATER 472
XIII. THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE 503
JINNY THE CARRIER
PREAMBLE
_I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal._
“As You Like It.”
ONCE upon a time—but then it was more than once, it was, in fact, every
Tuesday and Friday—Jinny the Carrier, of Blackwater Hall, Little
Bradmarsh, went the round with her tilt-cart from that torpid Essex
village on the Brad, through Long Bradmarsh (over the brick bridge) to
worldly, bustling Chipstone, and thence home again through the series of
droughty hamlets with public pumps that curved back—if one did not take
the wrong turning at the Four Wantz Way—to her too aqueous birthplace:
baiting her horse, Methusalem, at “The Black Sheep” in Chipstone like
the other carters and wagoners, sporting a dog with a wicked eye and a
smart collar, and even blowing a horn as if she had been the red-coated
guard of the Chelmsford coach sweeping grandly to his goal down the High
Street of Chipstone.
Do you question more precisely when this brazen female flourished? The
answer may be given with the empty exactitude of science and
scholarship. Her climacteric was to the globe at large the _annus
mirabilis_ of the Great Exhibition, when the lion and the lamb lay down
together in Hyde Park in a crystal cage. But though the advent of the
world-trumpeted Millennium could not wholly fail to percolate even to
Little Bradmarsh, a more veracious chronology, a history truer to local
tradition, would date the climax of Jinny’s unmaidenly career as “before
the Flood.”
Not, of course—as the mention of Methusalem might mislead you into
thinking—the Flood which is still commemorated in toyshops and
Babylonian tablets, and anent which German scholars miraculously
contrive to be dry; but the more momentous local Deluge when the Brad,
perversely swollen, washed away cattle, mangold clamps, and the Holy
Sabbath in one fell surge, leaving the odd wooden gable of Frog Farm
looming above the waste of waters as nautically as Noah’s Ark.
In those antediluvian days, and in that sequestered hundred, farm-horses
were the ruling fauna and set the pace; the average of which Methusalem,
with his “jub” or cross between a lazy trot and a funeral procession,
did little to elevate. It was not till the pride of life brought a
giddier motion that the Flood—but we anticipate both moral and story.
Let us go rather at the Arcadian amble of the days before the Deluge,
when the bicycle—even of the early giant order—had not yet arisen to
terrorize the countryside with its rotiferous mobility, still less the
motor-mammoth swirling through the leafy lanes in a dust-fog and
smelling like a super-skunk, or the air-monster out-soaring and
out-Sataning the broomsticked witch. It is true that Bundock, Her
Majesty’s postman, had once brought word of a big-bellied creature, like
a bloated Easter-egg, hovering over the old maypole as if meditating to
impale itself thereon, like a bladder on a stick. But normally not even
the mail or a post-chaise divided the road with Master Bundock; while,
as for the snorting steam-horse that bore off the young Bradmarshians,
once they had ventured as far as roaring railhead, it touched the
postman’s imagination no more than the thousand-ton sea-monsters with
flapping membranes or cloud-spitting gullets that rapt them to the lands
of barbarism and gold.
Blessèd Bundock, genial Mercury of those days before the Flood, if the
rubbered wheel of the postdiluvian age might have better winged thy
feet, yet thy susceptible eye—that rested all-embracingly on female
gleaners—was never darkened by the sight of the soulless steel reaper,
cropping close like a giant goose, and thou wast equally spared that
mechanic flail-of-all-work that drones through the dog-days like a
Brobdingnagian bumble-bee. For thine happier ear the cottages yet hummed
with the last faint strains of the folk-song: unknown in thy sylvan
perambulations that queer metallic parrot, hoarser even than the raucous
reality, which now wakens and disenchants every sleepy hollow with
echoes of the London music-hall.
Rural Essex was long the unchanging East, and there are still ploughmen
who watch the airmen thunder by, then plunge into their prog again. The
shepherds who pour their fleecy streams between its hedgerows are still
as primitive as the herdsmen of Chaldea, and there are yokels who dangle
sideways from their slow beasts as broodingly as the Bedouins of
Palestine. Even to-day the spacious elm-bordered landscapes through
which Jinny’s cart rolled and her dog circumambiently darted, lie
ignored of the picture postcard, and on the red spinal chimney-shaft of
Frog Farm the doves settle with no air of perching for their
photographs. Little Bradmarsh is still Little, still the most reclusive
village of all that delectable champaign; the Brad still glides between
its willows unruffled by picnic parties and soothed rather than
disturbed by rusty, ancient barges. But when Gran’fer Quarles first
brought little Jinny to these plashy bottoms, the region it watered—not
always with discretion—was unknown even to the gipsy caravans and
strolling showmen, and quite outside the circuit of the patterers and
chaunters who stumped the country singing or declaiming lampoons on the
early Victoria; not a day’s hard tramp from Seven Dials where they
bought their ribald broadsheets, yet as remote as Arabia Felix.
CHAPTER I
BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT
_He comes, the herald of a noisy world,_
_With spattered boots._
COWPER, “The Task.”
I
IT had rained that April more continuously than capriciously, but this
morning April showed at last her fairer face. The sunshine held as yet
no sense of heat, only the bracingness of a glad salt wave. Across the
spacious blue of the Essex sky clouds floated and met and parted in a
restful restlessness. The great valley swam in a blue sea of vapour. Men
trod as on buoyant sunshine that bore them along. The buds were peeping
out from every hedge and tree, the blackthorn was bursting into white,
the whole world seemed like a child tiptoeing towards some delightful
future. Primroses nestled in every hollow: the gorse lay golden on the
commons. The little leaves of the trees seemed shy, scarcely grown
familiar with the fluttering of the birds. All the misery, pain, and
sadness had faded from creation like a bad dream: the stains and
pollutions were washed out, leaving only the young clean beauty of the
first day. It was a virgin planet, fresh from the hands of its Maker,
trembling with morning dew—an earth that had never seen its own
blossoming. And the pæan of all this peace and innocence throbbed
exultingly in bird-music through all the great landscape. Over the
orchard of Frog Farm there were only two larks, but you would have
thought a whole orchestra.
A blot against this background seemed the blood-red shirt of Caleb Flynt
in that same orchard; a wild undulating piece of primeval woodland where
plum-trees and pear-trees indeed flourished, but not more so than oaks
and chestnuts, briars and brambles, or fairy mists of bluebells. The
task of regenerating it had been annually postponed, but now that Caleb
was no longer the Frog Farm “looker,” it formed, like his vegetable
garden, his wheat patch, or his wife’s piggery, a pleasant
pottering-ground. He worked without coat or smock, chastening the ranker
grass while the dew was still on it—or in his own idiom, “while the dag
was on the herb.” White-bearded and scythe-bearing, he
suggested—although the beard was short and round and he wore a
shapeless grey hat—a figure of Father Time, incarnadined from all his
wars. But in sooth no creature breathed more at one with the earth’s
mood that morning than this ancient “Peculiar,” whose parlour bore as
its text of honour—in white letters on a lozenge of brown paper: “When
He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?”
Quietness was, indeed, all around him in this morning freshness: the
swish of the scythe, the murmurous lapse of shorn grass, the drone of
insects, the cooing of pigeons from the cote, the elusive cry of the
new-come cuckoo, seemed forms of silence rather than of sound. And his
inner peace matched his outer, for, as his arms automatically wielded
the scythe, his soul was actually in heaven—or at least in the New
Jerusalem which, according to his wife’s novel Christadelphian creed,
was to be let down from heaven for the virtuous remnant of earth—and at
no distant date! Not that he definitely believed in her descending city,
though he felt a certain proprietary interest in it. “Oi don’t belong to
Martha’s Church,” he reassured his brethren of the Peculiar faith, “but
Oi belongs to she and she belongs to me.”
In this mutual belonging he felt himself the brake and Martha the
spirited mare who could never stand still. No doubt her argument that we
were here to learn and to move forward was plausible enough—how could
he traverse it, he who had himself changed from Churchman to Peculiar?
But her rider: “We don’t leave the doctrine, we carry it with us,”
struck him as somewhat shifty. And her move from “Sprinkling” to “Total
Immersion”—even if the submergence did in a sense include the
sprinkling—was surely enough progression for one lifetime. He did not
like “this gospel of gooin’ forrard”: an obstinate instinct warned him
to hold back, though with an uneasy recognition that her ceaseless
explorations of her capacious Bible—to him a sealed book—must
naturally yield discoveries denied to his less saintly and altogether
illiterate self. Discoveries indeed had not been spared him. Ever since
she had joined those new-fangled Christadelphians—“Christy Dolphins” as
he called them—she had abounded in texts as crushing as they were
unfamiliar; and even the glib Biblical patter he had picked up from the
Peculiars was shown to imply at bottom the new teaching. Curtain
lectures are none the less tedious when they are theological, and after
a course of many months—each with its twenty-eight to thirty-one
nights—Caleb Flynt was grown wearisomely learned in the bold doctrine
launched by the great John Thomas that “the Kingdom of God on earth”
actually meant on earth and must be brought about there and nowhere
else, and that Immortality enjoyed except in one’s terrestrial
body—however spiritualized—was as absurd a notion as that it was
lavished indiscriminately upon Tom, Giles, and Jerry.
The worst of it was he could never be sure Martha was not in the
right—she had certainly modified his belief in “Sprinkling”—and he
fluttered around her “New Jerusalem” like a moth around a lighthouse.
Had anybody given a penny for his thoughts as he stooped now over his
scythe, the fortunate investor would have come into possession of “the
street of pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” not to mention the
sapphires and emeralds, the beryls and chrysolites and all the other
shining swarms of precious stones catalogued in Revelation. If he had
kept from her the rumour that had reached his own ears of such a
treasure-city of glass actually arising in London at this very moment,
it was not because he believed this was veritably her celestial city,
but because it might possibly excite her credulity to the pitch of
wishing to see it. And the thought of a journey was torture. Already
Martha had dropped hints about the difficulties of “upbuilding” in the
lack of local Christadelphians to institute a “Lightstand”: the wild
dream of some day breaking bread in an “Ecclesia” in London had been
adumbrated: it was possible the restless female mind even contemplated
London itself as a place to be seen before one died.
But surely the New Jerusalem, if it descended at all, would—he
felt—descend here, at Little Bradmarsh. A heaven that meant girding up
one’s loins and wrenching out one’s roots was a very problematic
paradise, for all the splendour with which his inward eye was now,
despite himself, dazzled.
II
From this jewelled Jerusalem Caleb was suddenly brought back to the
breathing beauty of our imperfect earth, to pear-blossom and
plum-blossom, to the sun-glinted shadows under his trees and the mellow
tiles of his roof. The sound of his own name fell from on high—like the
city of his daydream—accompanied by a great skirring of wings, and
looking up dazedly, the pearly gates still shimmering, his eye followed
the tarred side-wall of the farmhouse till, near the roof, it lit upon
his wife’s night-capped head protruded from the tiny diamond-paned
casement that alone broke the sheer black surface of the wood.
A sense of the unusual quickened his pulses. It stole upon him, not
mainly from Martha’s face, which, despite its excited distension,
wore—over wrinkles he never saw—the same russet complexion and was
crowned by the same glory of unblanched brown hair that had gladdened
his faithful eyes since the beginning of the century; but, more subtly
and subconsciously, through the open lattice which framed this
ever-enchanting vision. In the Flynt tradition, windows—restricted at
best by the window tax still in force—were for light, not air. Had
folks wanted air, they would have poked a hole in the wall; not built a
section of it “of transparent glass.” People so much under the sky as
Caleb and Martha Flynt had no need to invite colds by artificial
draughts. They were getting a change of air all day long. But their
rooms—their small, low-ceiled rooms—were not thus vivified, even in
their absence; the ground-floor windows were indeed immovable, and an
immemorial mustiness made a sort of slum atmosphere in this spacious,
sun-washed solitude. Hence Caleb’s sense of a jar in his universe at the
familiar, flat pattern of the wall dislocated into a third dimension by
the out-flung casement: a prodigy which he was not surprised to find
fluttering the dovecot, and which presaged, he felt, still vaster
cataclysms. And to add to the auspices of change, he observed another
piebald pigeon among his snowy flock.
“Yes, dear heart,” he called up, disguising his uneasiness and shearing
on.
Martha pointed a fateful finger towards the high-hedged, oozy path
meandering beyond the orchard gate, and dividing the sown land from the
pastures sloping to the Brad. “There’s Bundock coming up the Green
Lane!”
“Bundock?” gasped Caleb, the scythe stopping short. “You’re a-dreamin’.”
That Brother Bundock, who had been prayed over for a decade by himself
and every Peculiar in the vicinity, should at last have taken up his bed
and walked, was too sudden a proof of their tenets, and the natural man
blurted out his disbelief.
“But I see his red jacket,” Martha protested, “his bag on his shoulder.”
“Ow!” His tone was divided between relief and disappointment. “You mean
Bundock’s buoy-oy!” He drew out the word even longer than usual, and it
rose even beyond the high pitch his Essex twang habitually gave to his
culminating phrases. “Whatever can Posty be doin’ in these pa-arts?” he
went on, with a new wonder.
“And the chace that squashy,” said Martha, who from her coign of vantage
could see the elderly figure labouring in the remoter windings, “he’s
sinking into it at every step.”
“Ay, the mud’s only hazeled over. Whatever brings the silly youth when
the roads be in that state?”
“It’ll be the Census again!” groaned Martha.
Caleb’s brow gloomed. He feared Martha was right, and anything official
must have to do with that terrible paper-filling which had at last by
the aid of Jinny been, they had hoped, finally accomplished some weeks
before. Ever since the first English census had been taken in the first
year of the century, Martha had been expecting a plague to fall upon the
people as it had upon the Israelites when King David numbered them. But
although she had been disappointed, there was no doubt of the plague of
the Census itself.
“Haps it’s a letter for the shepherd,” hazarded Caleb to comfort her.
“Who’d be writing Master Peartree a letter? He can’t read.”
“Noa!” he answered complacently, for his wife’s learning seemed part of
their mutual “belonging.” The drawbacks of this vicarious erudition
were, however, revealed by his next remark; for on Martha crying out
that poor Bundock had sunk up to his knees, Caleb bade her be easy. “He
won’t be swallowed up like that minx Cora!”
But Martha’s motherly heart was too agitated to recognize the Korah of
her Biblical allusions—she vaguely assumed it was some scarlet woman
englutted in the slimy saltings of Caleb’s birthplace. “Run and lead him
into the right path,” she exhorted.
But Caleb’s brain was not one for quick reactions. Inured for nigh
seventy years to a world in which nothing happened too suddenly, even
thunderbolts giving reasonable notice and bogs getting boggier by due
degrees, he stood dazedly, his hands paralysed on the nibs of his
arrested scythe. “Happen the logs Oi put have sunk down!” he
soliloquized slowly.
“If I wasn’t in my nightgown I’d go myself,” said Martha impatiently.
“’Tis a lesson from the Lord not to lay abed.”
“The Lord allows for rheumaties, dear heart,” said Caleb soothingly.
“He’ll be up to his neck, if you don’t stir your stumps.”
“Not he, Martha. Unless he stands on his head.” Caleb meant this as a
literal contribution to the discussion. There was no wilful
topsy-turveydom. He was as unconscious of his own humour as of other
people’s.
“But he’ll spoil his breeches anyways,” retorted Martha with equal
gravity. “And the Lord just sending his wife a new baby.”
“Bundock’s breeches be the Queen’s,” said Caleb reassuringly. But laying
down his scythe, he began to move mazedly adown the orchard, and before
the postman’s mud-cased leggings had floundered many more rods, the
veteran was sitting astride his stile, dangling his top-boots over a
rotten-planked brook, and waving in his hairy, mahogany hand his vast
red handkerchief like a danger signal.
“Ahoy, Posty!”
Bundock responded with a cheerful blast on his bugle. “Ahoy, Uncle
Flynt!”
“Turn back. Don’t, ye’ll strike a bog-hole.”
“I never go back!” cried the dauntless Bundock. And even as he spoke,
his stature shrank till his bag rested on the ooze.
“The missus was afeared you’d spoil the Queen’s breeches,” said Caleb
sympathetically. “Catch hold of yon crab-apple branch.”
“Better spoil her breeches than be unfaithful to her uniform,” said the
slimy hero, struggling up as directed. “I’ve got a letter for you.”
Caleb’s flag fell into the brook and startled a water-rat. “A letter for
us!”
He splashed into the water, still dazedly, to rescue his handkerchief,
avoiding the plank as a superfluous preliminary to the wetting; and,
standing statuesque in mid-stream, more like Father Neptune now than
Father Time, he continued incredulously: “Who’d be sendin’ us a letter?”
“That’s not my business,” cried Bundock sternly. He came on heroically,
disregarding a posterior consciousness of damp clay, and picking his way
along the grassy, squashy strip that was starred treacherously with
peaceful daisies and buttercups, over-hung by wild apple-trees, and
hedged from the fields on either hand by a tall, prickly tangle and
congestion—as of a vegetable slum—in which gorse, holly, speedwell,
mustard, and lily of the valley (still in green sheaths), strove for
breathing space. At the edge of a palpable mudhole he paused perforce.
Caleb, who, when he recovered from his daze at the news of the letter,
had advanced with dripping boots to meet him, was equally arrested at
the opposite frontier, and the two men now faced each other across some
fifteen feet of flowery ooze, two studies in red; Caleb, big-limbed and
stolid, in his crimson shirt, and Bundock, dapper and peart, in his
scarlet jacket.
The postman’s face was lightly pockmarked, but found by females
fascinating, especially under the quasi-military cap. Hairlessness was
part of its open charm: his sun-tanned cheek kept him juvenile despite
his half-century, and preserved from rust his consciousness of a
worshipping womanhood. Caleb, on the contrary, was all hair, little
bushes growing even out of his ears, and whiskers and beard and the
silver-grey mop at his crown running into one another without
frontiers—the “Nonconformist fringe” in a ragged edition.
“Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience,” he called
apologetically. “Oi count,” he added, having had time for reflection,
“one of our buoy-oys has written from furrin parts. And he wouldn’t be
knowing the weather here.”
“’Tain’t any of your boys,” said Bundock crossly, “because it comes from
London.”
“That’s a pity. The missus’ll get ’sterical when she hears it’s for us,
and it’s cruel hard to disappoint her. There ain’t nobody else as we
want letters from. Can’t you send it back?”
“Not if I can deliver it,” said Bundock stiffly.
“But ye can’t—unless you chuck it over.”
The slave of duty shook his head. “I daren’t risk the Queen’s mail like
that.”
“But it’s _my_ letter.”
“Not yet, Uncle Flynt. When it reaches your hand it may be considered
safely, legally, and constitutionally delivered. But, till then, ’tis
the Queen’s letter, and don’t you forget it.”
Caleb scratched his head.
“If ’twas the Queen’s letter, she could read it,” he urged obstinately.
“And so she can,” rejoined Bundock. “She has the right to open any
letter smelling of high treason, so to speak, and nobody can say her
nay.”
“But my letter ain’t high treasony,” said Caleb indignantly. “And if
Wictoria wants to read it, why God bless her, says Oi.”
Bundock sighed before the bovinity of the illiterate mind.
“The Queen has got better things to do than read every scribble her
head’s stuck on to.”
“Happen Oi could ha’ retched it with a rake,” Caleb mused. “What a pity
you ain’t got spladges, like when Oi was a buoy-oy, and gatherin’
pin-patches on the sands. And fine and fat they was too when ye got ’em
on the pin!” His tongue clucked.
Bundock looked his contempt. “A pretty sight, Her Majesty’s uniform
lumbering along like a winkle-picker!”
“Bide a bit then,” said Caleb, “and Oi’ll thrash through the hedge and
work through agen in your rear.”
It was a chivalrous offer, for a deep ditch barred the way to the
freshly ploughed land, and a tough and prickly chaos to the pasture
land; but Bundock declined churlishly, if not unheroically, declaring
there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. And when Caleb, recovering from
this vindication of his wife’s prophesyings, offered to transmit it to
the shepherd, “What guarantee have I,” asked Bundock, “that it reaches
him safely, legally, and constitutionally? Nay, nay, uncle, a man must
do his own jobs.”
“Then work through the bushes yourself. Don’t, ye’ll be fit to grow
crops on.”
“Lord, how I hate going round—circumbendibus!” groaned Bundock. “I
might as well be driving a post-cart.”
“There’s a mort of worser things than gooin’ round,” said Caleb. “And Oi
do be marvelling a young chap like you should mind a bit of extra
leg-work, bein’ as how ye’ve got naught else to do but to put one leg
afore the ’tother.”
“Indeed?” snapped Bundock, this ignorant summary of his duties
aggravating the moist clayey consciousness that resided at the seat of
Her Majesty’s trousers.
“Ef ye won’t keep to the high roads, you ought to git a hoss what can
clear everything,” Caleb went on to advise.
“And break my neck?”
“Posty always had a hoss when I was a cad.”
“Or lay in the road with a broken back and Her Majesty’s mail at the
mercy of every tramp?” pursued Bundock. “No, no, one cripple in a family
is enough.”
Caleb looked pained. “You dedn’t ought to talk o’ your feyther like
that. And him pinchin’ hisself and maybe injurin’ his spinal collar to
keep you at school till you was a large buoy-oy!”
III
Bundock’s irritation at his Bœotian critic was suddenly diverted by the
spectacle of a female figure bearing down upon him literally by leaps
and bounds—it seemed as if the steeplechase method recommended by Caleb
was already in action. The postman felt for his spectacles, discarded
normally in the interests of manly fascination. “Lord!” he cried. “Has
your missus joined the Jumpers?” Caleb turned his head, not unalarmed.
With so skittish a theologian anything was possible. But his agitation
subsided into a smile of admiration.
“She thinks of everything,” he said.
The practical Martha was in fact advancing with an improvised
leaping-pole that had already carried her neatly over the brook and
would obviously bring Bundock over the boglet. But why—Caleb
wondered—was she risking her “bettermost” skirt? His own mother, he
remembered, had not hesitated to tuck up her petticoats when winkles had
to be gathered. And why was Martha’s hair massed in its black net cap
with a Sunday stylishness?
“Morning, Mrs. Flynt,” cried Bundock, becoming as genial as the weather.
Females, even sexagenarian, so long as not utterly uncomely, turned him
from an official into a man.
“Morning, Mr. Bundock!” Martha called back across the mudhole. “I hope
your father’s no worse!”
Bundock’s brow clouded. Still harping on his father.
“He’s not so active as you,” he replied a bit testily.
“Thank the Lord!” said Caleb fervently. Then, colouring under Bundock’s
stare, “For the missus’s legs,” he explained.
And to cover his confusion he snatched the pole from her and hurled it
towards Bundock, who had barely time to jump aside into a still
squidgier patch. But in another instant the dauntless postman secured
it, and with one brave bound—like Sir Walter Scott’s stag—had cleared
the slimiest section, and his staggering, sliding form was safely locked
in Caleb’s sanguineous shirt-sleeves. Safely but not contentedly, for at
heart he was deeply piqued at this inglorious position of Her Majesty’s
envoy; the dignified newsbearer, the beguiler of loneliness, the gossip
welcomed alike in the kitchens of the great and the parlours of the
humble. Morbidly conscious of his unpresentable rear, he kept carefully
behind the couple, while Caleb explained the situation to Martha,
breaking and blunting the news at one hammer-blow.
“There’s a letter for _us_! From Lunnon!”
Martha was wonderful. “What a piece! What a master!” he thought. One
might live with a woman for half a century, yet never fathom her depths.
Not a gasp, not a cry, not a sigh of vain yearning. Merely: “Then it’ll
be from Cousin Caroline. When she went back to London at Michaelmas she
promised to let us know if she reached home safe, and if your brother
George was better.”
“Ay, ay!” he assented happily. “Oi’d disremembered Cousin Caroline.”
It was a merciful oblivion, for his Cockney cousin had come from
Limehouse in August and stayed two months, protesting that it was
impossible to bide a day in a place where there wasn’t a neighbour to
speak to except a silly shepherd who was never at home; where water was
scooped filthily from a green-scummy pond instead of flowing naturally
from a tap; where on moonless nights you could break your leg at your
own doorstep; where frogs croaked and cocks crowed and pigeons moaned
and foxes barked at the unholiest hours; where disgusting vermin were
nailed on the trees and where you broke out in itching blotches, which
folks might ascribe to “harvesters,” but which were susceptible of a
more domestic explanation. Moreover, Cousin Caroline had brought a
profuse and uninvited progeny, whose unexpected appearance in Jinny’s
cart, though vaguely comforting as recalling the days when the house
resounded with child-life, was in truth at disturbing discord with the
Quakerish calm into which Frog Farm had subsided after the flight of its
teeming chicks. As Caleb came along now, convoying Bundock through the
lush orchard grass, the echo of Cousin Caroline’s querulous voice rasped
his brain and made him wish she had pretermitted her promise to write.
As for his ailing brother George, information about whom she was
probably sending, it was obvious that he was no worse, else one would
assuredly have heard of his funeral. Had not George carefully let him
know when he got married? Caroline was a Churchwoman—he remembered
suddenly—she had compromised Frog Farm by eking out Parson Fallow’s
miserable congregation. And now she had sent her letter just at a season
to plague and muddy a worthy Dissenter.
“Sow sorry to give ye sow much ill-convenience, Mr. Bundock,” he
repeated, as they reached the farmhouse.
IV
Frog Farm, before which Bundock stood fumbling in his bag, was—as its
name implies—situated in a batrachian region, croakily cheerless under
a sullen sky, a region revealed under the plough as ancient sedge-land,
black with rotted flags and rushes. But the scene was redeemed at its
worst by the misty magnificence of great spaces, whose gentle
undulations could not counteract a sublime flatness; not to mention the
beauty of the Brad gliding like the snake in the grass it sometimes
proved. The pasture land behind the farmhouse and sloping softly down to
the river—across which, protected by a dyke and drained by little black
mills working turbine wheels, lay the still lower Long Bradmarsh—was
the salvage of a swamp roughly provided with a few, far-parted drains by
some pioneer squatter, content—on the higher ground where a farmhouse
was possible—to fell and slice his own timber and bake his own tiles.
At the topmost rim, on a road artificially raised to take its wagons to
the higher ground or “Ridge” of the village, rose this farmhouse with
its buildings, all dyked off from the converted marsh by a three-foot
wall of trunk-fragments and uncouth stones, bordered by bushes. The
house turned its back on the Brad, and had not even hind eyes to see
it—another effect of the window tax—and had the rear of the house not
been relieved by the quaint red chimney bisecting it, the blankness
would have been unbearable. But if little of good could have been said
of its architecture behind its back, and if even in front it ended
abruptly at one extremity like a sheer cliff or a halved haystack, with
one gable crying for another to make both ends meet, it was as a whole
picturesque enough with all that charm of rough wood, which still seems
to keep its life-sap, and beside which your marble hall is a mere
petrifaction. Weather-boarded and tarred, it faced you with a black
beauty of its own, amid which its diamond-paned little lattices gleamed
like an Ethiopian’s eyes. In the foreground, haystacks, cornricks, and
strawstacks gave grace and colour, fusing with the spacious landscape as
naturally as the barns and byres and storehouses, the troughs and
stables and cart-sheds and the mellow, immemorial dung.
But what surprised the stranger more than its lop-sidedness was the
duplication of its front door, for there were two little doors, with
twin sills and latches. It had, in fact, been partitioned to allow a
couple of rooms to the shepherd-cowman, when that lone widower’s cottage
was needed for an extra horseman. Master Peartree’s new home became
known as Frog Cottage. The property was what was here called an
“off-hand farm,” the owner being “in parts,” or engaged in other
enterprises, and for more than a generation Caleb Flynt had lived there
as “looker” to old Farmer Gale, the cute Cornish invader who had
discovered the fatness of the oozy soil, and who had been glad to
install a son of it as a reconciling link between Little Bradmarsh and
“the furriner.” Caleb belonged to that almost extinct species of
managers who can dispense with reading and writing, and his
semi-absentee employer found his honesty as meticulous as his memory.
While the Flynt nestlings were growing up, the parent birds had found
the nest a tight fit, but with the gradual flight of the brood to every
quarter of the compass, the old pair had receded into its snugger
recesses—living mainly by the kitchen fire under the hanging hams. Thus
when last year Farmer Gale’s son, succeeding to the property and
foolishly desiring a more scientific and literate bailiff, delicately
intimated that having bought all the adjoining land, he had been
compelled to acquire therewith the rival looker, the old Flynts were
glad enough to be allowed for a small rent the life-use of the farmhouse
and the bits of waste land around it, subject to their providing living
room for old Master Peartree, who was to pasture his flock of sheep and
a few kine in the near meadows. Martha, indeed, always maintained that
Caleb had made a bad bargain with the new master—did not the whole
neighbourhood pronounce the young widower a skinflint?—but Caleb, who
had magisterially negotiated with the new bailiff the swapping of his
wood-ashes for straw for her pet pig, Maria, limited his discussions
with her to theology. “When one talks law and high business,” he
maintained, “we must goo back to the days afore Eve was dug out of
Adam.”
V
Bundock, restored to his superiority by the deprecatory expectancy of
the old couple, observed graciously that there was no need to apologize:
anybody was liable to have a letter. Indeed, he added generously, with
nine boys dotted about the world, Frog Farm might have been far more
troublesome.
“Eleven, Mr. Bundock,” corrected Martha with a quiver in her voice.
“I don’t reckon the dead and buried, Mrs. Flynt. They don’t write—not
even to the dead-letter office.” He cut short a chuckle, remembering
this was no laughing matter.
“And the other nine might as well be dead for all the letters you bring
me,” Martha retorted bitterly.
“No news is good news, dear heart,” Caleb put in, as though to shield
the postman. He was not so sure now that this unfortunate letter had not
disturbed her slowly won resignation. “We’ve always yeared of anything
unpleasant—like when Daniel married the Kaffir lady.”
“That was Christopher,” said Martha.
“Ow, ay, Christopher. ’Tis a wonder he could take to a thick-lipped
lady. Oi couldn’t fancy a black-skinned woman, even if she was the Queen
of Sheba. Oi shook hands with one once, though, and it felt soft. They
rub theirselves with oil to keep theirselves lithe.”
Martha replied only with a sigh. The Kaffir lady, for all her coloured
and heathen horror, at least supplied a nucleus for visualization,
whereas all her other stalwart sons, together with one married daughter,
had vanished into the four corners of the Empire—building it up with an
unconsciousness mightier than the sword—and only the children who had
died young—two girls and a boy—remained securely hers, fixed against
the flux of life and adventure. Occasionally indeed an indirect rumour
of her live sons’ doings came to her, but correspondence was not the
habit of those days when even amid the wealthier classes a boy might go
out to India and his safe arrival remain unknown for a semestrium or
more. The foreign postage, too, was no inconsiderable check to the
literary impulse or encouragement to the lazy. Indeed postage stamps
were still confined to half a dozen countries. It was but a decade since
they had come in at all and letters with envelopes or an extra sheet had
ceased to be “double”; postcards were still unknown, and in many parts
postmen came as infrequently as carriers, people often hastening to
scrawl replies which the same men might convey to the mail-bags.
“Kaffirs ain’t black,” corrected Bundock. “They’re coffee-coloured.
That’s what the name means.”
Martha sighed again. So far had her brooding fantasy gone that she
sometimes pictured baby grandchildren as innocently dusky as the hybrid
young fantails which no solicitude could keep out of her dovecot, and
which were a reminder that heaven knew no colour-boundaries.
“Don’t be nervous,” Bundock reassured her. “I’ll find it.”
“Oh, no hurry, no hurry!” said Caleb, beginning to perspire
distressingly under the postman’s exertions and to mop his hairy brow
with his brook-sopped handkerchief. How these youngsters grew up! he was
thinking. Brats one had seen spanked waxed into mighty officers of
State. “Shall I brush your breeches, Posty?” he inquired tactlessly.
“What’s the use till they’re dry?” snapped Bundock.
“Come in and dry them before the kitchen fire,” said Martha.
“This sun’ll dry them,” he said coldly.
“Not so slick as the fire,” Caleb blundered on. “’Tain’t like you was a
serpent walking on your belly.”
Bundock flushed angrily and right-wheeled to hide the seat of his
trousers. “Why you should go and catch your letter when the roads are in
that state——!” he muttered.
“You could ha’ waited till they dried!” Caleb said deprecatingly.
“I did wait a post-day or so,” said Bundock with undiminished
resentment. “But there’s such a thing, uncle, as duty to my Queen.
Things might have got damper instead of drier, like the time the floods
were out beyond Long Bradmarsh, and I might have had to swim out to
you.”
Caleb was impressed. “But _can_ you swim?” he inquired.
“That’s not the point,” growled Bundock. “I don’t say I’d ha’ faced the
elements for _you_, but if somebody with real traffic and entanglement
were living here, e.g. the Duke of Wellington, I should have come
through fire and water.”
“The Dook at a farm!” Caleb smiled incredulously.
“In the Battle of Waterloo,” said Bundock icily, “the whole fight was
whether he or Boney should hold a farm.”
“You don’t say!” cried Caleb excitedly. “And who got it?”
“Well, it wasn’t Froggy’s Farm.” And Bundock roared with glee and
renewed self-respect. Caleb guffawed too, but merely for elation at the
Frenchy’s defeat.
The calm and piping voice of Martha broke in upon this robustious duet,
pointing out that there was no Duke in residence and no need for
natation, but that since Jinny called for orders every Friday he might
have given _her_ the letter.
“Give the Queen’s mail to a girl!” Bundock looked apoplectic.
“Jinny never loses anything,” said Martha, unimpressed.
“She’ll lose her character if she ain’t careful,” he said viciously;
“driving of a Sunday with Farmer Gale.”
“That’s onny to chapel,” said Caleb.
“A man that rich’ll never take her there!” sneered Bundock.
“Why, Jinny’s only a child,” said Martha, roused at last. “And the best
girl breathing. Look how she slaves for her grandfather!”
“Jinny! Jinny!” Bundock muttered. “Nothing but Jinny all the day and all
the way.” How often indeed had she snatched the gossip from his mouth,
staled his earth-shaking tidings, even as the Bellman anticipated his
jokes! “Let me catch her carrying letters, that’s all. I’ll have the law
on her, child or no child. I expect she blows that horn to make the old
folks think she’s got postal rights!” He did not mention that in his
vendetta against the girl it was he who never hesitated to poach on the
rival preserves, and that he was even now carrying a certain packet of
tracts which he had found at “The Black Sheep” awaiting Jinny’s day, and
which he had bagged on the ground that he had a letter for the same
address.
“Jinny would have saved your legs,” said Martha dryly.
Caleb turned on her. “Ay, and his leggings too!” he burst forth with
savage sarcasm. But at great moments deep calls to deep. “Women don’t
understand a man’s duty. And Posty’s every inch a man.”
Bundock tried to look his full manhood: fortunately the discovery of the
letter at this instant enabled him to gain an inch or two by throwing
back his shoulders, so long bent under the royal yoke.
“_Mrs._ Flynt,” he announced majestically.
“For _me_?” gasped Martha.
“For you,” said Bundock implacably. “Mrs. Flynt, Frog Farm, Swash End,
Little Bradmarsh, near Chipstone, Essex. Not that I hold it’s proper to
write to a man’s wife while he’s alive—but _my_ feelings don’t count.”
And he tendered her the letter.
“It does seem more becoming for Flynt to have his Cousin Caroline’s
letter,” admitted Martha, shrinking back meekly.
Bundock relaxed in beams. “I’m wonderfully pleased with you, Mrs.
Flynt,” he said, handing Caleb the letter. “You’re a shining example,
for all you stand up for that chit. When I think of Deacon Mawhood’s
wife and how she defies him with that bonnet of hers——!”
“What sort of bonnet?” said Martha, pricking up her ears.
“You haven’t heard?” Bundock’s satisfaction increased. “It’s like the
Queen’s—drat her! I mean, drat Mrs. Mawhood—made with that new
plait—‘Brilliant’s’ the name. They turn the border of one edge of the
straw inwards and that makes it all splendiferous.”
“Pomps and wanities,” groaned Caleb. “And she a deacon’s wife!”
Bundock sniggered. _His_ sympathy with the husband was deeper and older
than theology.
“I told you,” Martha reminded Caleb, “what would come of electing a
ratcatcher a deacon.”
“A righteous ratcatcher,” maintained Caleb sturdily, “be higher than a
hungodly emperor.”
“You haven’t got any emperors,” said the practical Martha.
“And how many kings have joined your Ecclesia?” put in Bundock.
“All the kings of righteousness!” answered Martha in trumpet-tones.
Bundock was quelled. “Well, I can’t stop gammicking,” he said,
shouldering his bag.
“Won’t you have a glass of pagles wine?” said Martha, relapsing to
earth.
“No, thank you. I’ve got a letter for Frog Cottage too!”
“For Master Peartree!” cried Martha. “And all in one morning. Well, if
that’s not a miracle!”
“You and your miracles!” he said with a Tom Paine brutality. “Why I
saved up yours till another came for Swash End. And so I’ve managed to
kill——” His face suddenly changed. The brutal look turned beatific.
But his sentence was frozen. The good couple regarded him dubiously.
“What’s amiss?” cried Martha.
Bundock gasped for expression like a salmon on a slab. “To kill” burst
from his lips again, but the rest was choked in a spasm of cachinnation.
“You’ll kill yourself laughin’,” said Caleb.
Bundock mastered himself with a mighty effort. “So as to kill—ha, ha,
ha!—to kill—ha, ha, ha!—two frogs—ha, ha, ha!—with one stone!”
Martha corrected him coldly: “Two birds, you mean.”
“Ay,” corroborated Caleb, “the proverb be two birds.”
“But here,” Bundock explained between two convulsions, “it’s two
_frogs_.”
Caleb shook his head. “Oi’ve lived here or by the saltings afore you was
born, and brought up a mort o’ childer here. Two birds, sonny, two
birds.”
Bundock’s closing chuckles died into ineffable contempt.
“Good morning,” he said firmly.
“You’re sure you won’t have a sip o’ pagles wine?” repeated Martha.
He shook his head sternly. “If I had time for drinking I’d have time to
tell you all the news.” He turned on his heel, presenting the post-bag
at them like a symbol of duty.
“Anything fresh?” murmured Martha.
Bundock veered round viciously. “D’you suppose all Bradmarsh is as
sleepy as the Froggeries? Fresh? Why, there’s things as fresh as the
thatch on Farmer Gale’s barn or the paint on Elijah Skindle’s new
dog-hospital or the black band on the chimney-sweep’s Sunday hat.”
“Is Mrs. Whitefoot dead?” inquired Martha anxiously.
“No, ’twas only his mother-in-law in London, and when he went up to the
funeral he had his pocket picked. Quite spoilt his day, I reckon—ha,
ha, ha!”
“Buryin’ ain’t a laughin’ matter,” rebuked Caleb stolidly.
“It depends who’s buried,” said Bundock. “I shouldn’t cry over Mrs.
Mawhood. Which reminds me that the Deacon sent out the Bellman to say he
couldn’t be responsible for her debts.”
“Good!” cried Caleb. Martha paled, but was silent.
“Only the Bellman spoilt it as usual with his silly old jokes.
Proclaimed that the Deacon had put his foot down on his wife’s bonnet.”
“He, he, he!” laughed the old couple.
Bundock turned a hopeless hump. “_Good_ morning!”
“And thank you kindly for the letter,” called Martha.
“Don’t mention it,” said Bundock. “And besides I killed—ho, ho,
ho!—two frogs!”
They heard his explosions on the quiet air long after he and his royal
hump had vanished along the Bradmarsh road.
VI
Caleb’s eyes followed the heaving mail-bag.
“Bundock’s buoy-oy fares to be jolly this mornin’.”
“He does be lively sometimes,” agreed Martha.
Suddenly Caleb became aware of the letter in his hand.
“Dash my buttons, Martha! We disremembered to ask him to read it.”
It can no longer be concealed that despite her erudition Martha could
not read writing nor write save by imitating print. The cursive alphabet
was Phœnician to her.
“I didn’t forget,” she answered with her masterly calm. “Bundock’s too
leaky. You heard him tell all the gossip and scandal. And it ain’t true
about Jinny, for Master Peartree saw them riding in the other Sunday and
Farmer Gale’s little boy sat between them. Besides, Bundock’s a man, and
I don’t want a man to read my letter from Caroline.”
The point seemed arguable, but Caleb meekly suggested the little boy she
had just mentioned—only a mile and a half away. He would be at school,
Martha pointed out.
Caleb looked at the letter as a knifeless cook at an oyster.
“What’s the clock-time?” he asked.
“Not quite certain. I set the clock by Jinny last Friday, but it stopped
suddenly yesterday, when I was reading you St. Paul’s Epistle to the
Corinthians. Haven’t you heard it not striking?”
Caleb shook his head.
“Afeared Oi’m gooin’ deafish, dear heart. But we’ll know the clock-time
on Friday,” he added philosophically. “And when Jinny comes she can read
the letter likewise.”
But Martha was blushing. “No, no, not Jinny! She’s a young girl.”
“Thank the Lord for her lively face!” agreed Caleb.
“Maybe she oughtn’t to read a letter to a married woman,” explained
Martha shyly, “being a girl without mother or sisters, brought up by her
grandfather.”
“But Cousin Caroline wouldn’t write naught improper.”
“Of course not—but it mightn’t be proper for an orphan girl to read.
Maybe it’s not even proper for you, and that’s why she addressed it to
me.”
Caleb felt as bemused as before a Bundock witticism.
“Joulterhead!” said Martha, with a loving smile. “And you’ve had
fourteen!”
The letter fell from his nerveless fingers. “Cousin Caroline confined
again!” And the clacking of all those innumerable infants filled the
air—like the barking of the black geese on the wintry mud-flats. But he
recovered himself. “Why, she’s a widow, not a pair.”
“Widows can be re-paired,” said Martha.
“Must have been a middlin’ bold man to goo courtin’ a family that size,”
Caleb reflected.
He picked up the letter and poised it in his hand.
“Don’t feel as weighty as St. Paul’s letters,” he said.
“The text doesn’t mean his letters were heavy,” explained Martha. “‘His
letters, say they, are weighty and powerful’—that’s what I was reading
you when the clock stopped. Any fool can write a heavy letter—he’s only
got to write on a slate.”
“That’s a true word,” said Caleb, admiring her.
“Whereas,” pursued Martha, “the whole Bible has been got inside a
nutshell.”
“Lord!” said Caleb. “I suppose it was a cokernut!”
“Not at all. Only a walnut.”
“Fancy! But was there walnuts in the Holy Land?”
“I didn’t say ’twas done in Palestine.”
“Then there wasn’t walnuts there?” His face fell.
“I don’t remember—oh, yes—Solomon asked his love to come into the
garden of nuts.”
“But it don’t say walnuts?” he inquired wistfully.
“I can’t say it does.”
“Then maybe there won’t be pickled walnuts in the New Jerusalem?”
“Not all the righteous have your carnal appetite,” said Martha severely.
“You just said Solomon’s sweetheart liked nuts,” said Caleb stoutly.
“And dedn’t the Holy Land flow with milk and honey?” He had a vision of
it, seamed and riddled like his native mud-flat, but with lacteal creeks
and mellifluous pools.
“You put me out so,” snapped Bundock, suddenly reappearing before the
engrossed couple, “that I forgot to kill my two frogs after all!” And
going to the Frog Cottage doorway, he knocked officially before opening
it and committing the letter to the empty interior.
“You’ll be witness that I delivered it constitutionally,” he said, “for
I can’t be expected to come a third time.”
“’Tis a windfall your coming a second,” cried Caleb eagerly, “bein’ as
we can’t read the letter.”
Martha made facial contortions to remind him that Bundock was barred.
“’Tain’t you we want to read it,” he hurriedly added, “but when a letter
comes all of an onplunge, time a man’s peacefully trimmin’ the werges,
he ain’t prepared like. You haven’t got a moment—did, Oi’d be glad o’
your counsel on the matter.”
“Well, since I’ve wasted so much of the Queen’s time——!” said Bundock,
flattered.
They adjourned to the parlour to give him a rest, and denuding himself
of both cap and bag of office, he occupied oracularly the long-unused
arm-chair, while Caleb, uncomfortably perched on a seat of slippery
horsehair, started to unfold the situation.
“Take off your hat,” broke in Martha. “Mr. Bundock will be thinking
you’ve no manners.”
“Oi’ll be soon gooin’ outside again,” said Caleb obstinately, and
re-started his story.
“Do let me explain,” interrupted Martha at last.
“Do let me get a word in,” cried Caleb.
“Well, take off your hat.”
“Oi’ll be gooin’ outside soon, Oi tell ye.”
“Then you can put it on again.”
“Oi shall never make Bundock sensible, ef you keep interruptin’ me.”
“You see, Mr. Bundock, it’s this way——” began Martha.
“Oi’ve told him all that,” said Caleb. “Let _me_ speak.”
“Well, take off your hat,” said Martha.
“Oi’ll be gooin’ outside agen, won’t Oi?”
Bundock was examining the letter which had been laid on the table as for
an operation.
“But it don’t look like a woman’s writing,” he interrupted. “That would
be spidery.”
“’Tain’t likely she could write herself in that condition,” began Caleb,
but Martha’s face again hushed him down.
“There’s neither seal nor sticking envelope,” pursued the expert.
“Nothing but a wafer. Comes from a poor man.”
“Her new husband,” said Caleb, and set Martha grimacing again.
“Oi’ll be soon gooin’ outside,” he protested, misunderstanding.
“What you want,” summed up Bundock judicially, “is a mixture of
discretion with matrimony, seasoned with a sprinkle of learning.”
“He talks like the Book!” said Caleb admiringly.
“But where _is_ this mixture?” inquired Martha eagerly.
“She don’t exist,” said Bundock. “But Miss Gentry is the nearest lady
that can read, and Fate is just sending me with a letter and a packet to
her.”
The couple looked doubtful.
“She ain’t matrimony,” said Caleb.
“No,” admitted Bundock, “but I guess she’s old enough to be, though I
haven’t seen her census paper—he, he! And besides she’s a dressmaker!”
“What’s that to do with it?” asked Caleb.
“I see your missus understands,” said Bundock mysteriously.
“But she won’t walk five miles to read my letter,” urged the blushing
Martha.
Caleb had one of the great inspirations of his life.
“And ain’t it time you got a new gownd?”
Martha flushed up. “Oh, Caleb! Don’t let us run to vanity!”
“Wanity, mother! It ain’t tinkling ornaments nor cauls nor nose-jewels,”
protested Caleb, with a vague reminiscence of her Biblical readings.
“And ye’ve had naught since the sucking-pig Oi bought ye for your
sixtieth birthday.”
But Martha shook her head, quoting firmly:
“_Let me be dressed fine as I will,_
_Birds, flowers, and worms exceed me still._”
“Then why not a bonnet?” suggested Bundock. “That would be cheaper than
a gown.”
“Ay, a bonnet!” agreed Caleb, though he sounded it a “boarnt.”
Martha flashed a resentful glance which, however, Bundock took for but
another thrust at Caleb’s obstinate hat.
“I don’t want a new bonnet,” she cried indignantly.
“It needn’t be new,” said Bundock helpfully. “Just have your old bonnet
whitened. That’s on her bill-paper:
‘Bonnets Bleached As Good As New.’”
“That’s a good notion,” said Caleb. “You don’t want it bran-span-new.
Posty’ll tell her to come over here to get your old boarnt and then
we’ll spring Cousin Caroline’s letter on her for her to read!” He
chuckled. Bundock chuckled too, swelling at the adoption of his advice.
“And now that I’ve stopped gammicking so long, I may as well sample that
cowslip wine, Mrs. Flynt,” he observed graciously.
But Martha had vanished.
VII
Miss Gentry had apartments in one of the most elegant cottages to be
found in Little Bradmarsh. Protected by palings, it stood all alone on
the high road, painted a vivid green, with three pollarded lime-trees in
front like sentinel mops. At the base of the trim little garden the
front door rose above two wooden steps with a little porch and
ostentated a brass plate with the inscription:
MISS GENTRY
LATE OF COLCHESTER
PRACTICAL DRESSMAKER AND MILLINER.
In proof of which, from the cottage window, whose green shutters lay
folded back, a _visite_ or jacket of black silk, and a polka jacket, and
a trio of straw bonnets, Tuscan or Leghorn, appealed to the passing eye:
one of them a bonnet cap with a quilting of net and broad blue strings,
another resplendent with purple ribbons and the new-treated straw plait
that the Queen and Mrs. Mawhood favoured, and the third of drawn silk on
little wires. The pictures of the period with a wonderful unanimity and
monotony display a single style of bonnet, but artists in those days
were men, and Miss Gentry could have told you better. “I’ve looked down
from a pew in the gallery of my Colchester Church on Easter Sunday,” she
told Jinny once, “and tried in vain to find two fellow-bonnets.”
But her professional door with its immaculate paint and shining brass
was so forbiddingly respectable that clients mostly preferred to seek
access through her landlady’s back door, where the flutter of washing
from the clothes-line on its green square poles in the little orchard
was reassuring; not to mention her chickens.
“Practical” was the unfailing adjective in those parts. Miss Gentry was
not undeserving of it, for her dresses were cheap without being vulgar,
while her knack of whitening the straw enabled the poorest, in the
succession of new bonnets, to keep pace with Victoria on the throne. A
stranger might have thought another species of dressmaker existed, whose
confections, though exquisite, would never fit, or who designed, but
could not execute; whereas the only other person for miles round at all
in the sartorial line was an equally “Practical Breeches-Maker,”
placarding from a flower-potted cottage window his “Strong, Stylish
Pantaloons.” But the thought of _un_practical pantaloons—say, without
buttons or belts—or of theoretical trousers, was simple compared with
the image evoked by Mr. Henry Whitefoot’s door-plate, proclaiming that
victim of the London pick-pocket a “Practical Chimney-Sweep”: as by
contrast with some exquisite dream Ethiopian, only platonically black,
darkly revolving flues and fireplaces, sweeping shadow-chimneys with
fleckless brushes, and carrying off ideal bags of the soot that never
was on sea or land.
But perhaps in Miss Gentry’s case the word “Practical” was necessary to
offset the business-damage of the tradition that had followed her from
her native Colchester. For Miss Gentry had had a “revelation.” It had
occurred in her girlhood, but the halo of it still circled round her
chignon. Seated in church, full of worldly thoughts—possibly studying
the infinite variety of bonnets—she had seen the stained-glass angel
move. What this flutter of wing and lifting of leg “revealed” had never
been clear: unless—as a wag maintained—it portended the flight of Miss
Gentry herself. That hegira of hers from Colchester to Bradmarsh had
not, alas, increased her prophetic prestige: what right has a “furriner”
to come with “revelations”? Even her fellow-Churchfolk—she was one of
the few Bradmarshians that clung to the Establishment—looked askance on
the miracle, feeling it indeed as reprehensibly Papish, and as lending
colour to the suspicion that she was a “French” dressmaker: a suspicion
strengthened at once by her elegant handiwork, and by her full-bosomed
plenitude, swarthy complexion, and more than embryonic moustache. It was
forgotten that if these did imply Gallic blood, it would have been, not
the Papish, but that Huguenot strain whose inpour into the county had at
one time carried the French liturgy into Essex churches. As a matter of
fact Miss Gentry was so fanatical a Church woman that she supplemented
all her bills and receipts by tracts in defence of the Establishment,
purchased at her own expense from a mysterious reservoir in Colchester.
Nevertheless, such is the contrariety of mankind, the large accession
she represented to the parish church—where on wet Sundays only the
Apostle’s two or three were gathered together—was discounted by her
felt queerness.
And it was, still more oddly, from the Peculiars that she received the
bulk of her custom, and this despite her top-lofty airs towards them,
and the tracts suggesting that souls, no less than bonnets, could be
bleached as good as new. Possibly their more elastic spirituality
vibrated more readily to the moving angel: perhaps the real bond of
sympathy was that they knew her unpopular with the Church: like
themselves a butt of legend, and lacking even their advantage of
Bradmarsh birth.
But even the Churchwomen did not utterly deny patronage to this talented
needlewoman, nor refuse her the deference due to weekday gloves, a
parasol, and bills with printed headlines; they did not even
discountenance her crusade against Dissent, though her copious allusions
to Providence “moving in a mysterious way” were felt to be too broadly
autobiographic. Moreover, in view of the caustic remarks upon cardinals,
Puseyites, black-robed priests, and winking pictures, by which her
tracts began to diversify the attack upon Dissent—for John Bull was
getting alarmed at the new Roman invasion—it was a source of surprise
that she failed to see the beam in her own eye. For if Virgins could not
wink in Rimini, why should Angels wobble in Colchester? To add to her
oddity, her brain was full of ancient maggots of astrology and medicine,
crept in from “Culpeper’s Herbal,” her one bedside book.
That Bundock should be bringing a bonnet commission to this excellent
and industrious, if freakish female, was the more laudable, inasmuch as
he nourished a prejudice against her and her tracts. Not that he held
with Catholic or evangelical Dissenters any more than with the Church
proper. As a follower of Tom Paine, whose “Age of Reason” he read
piously in bed every Sunday morning—the passage asserting that to make
a true miracle Jonah should have swallowed the whale was a regular
Lesson—he regarded himself as a great free spirit in an illiterate and
priest-ridden world, one whose God was everywhere except in Church. Not
that he could follow the Master’s excursions into trigonometry or
astronomy or knew anything of his idol’s “Rights of Man,” being indeed
singularly free from the contemporary unrest of the industrial townsman,
and combining, like greater men, a crusty conservatism for the old order
with a radical rejection of its spinal creed. Possibly his devotion to
the still youthful Queen was part of his softness for the sex, for the
only part of “The Age of Reason” that left him unconvinced was its
impugnment of the wisdom of Solomon, its contention that “seven hundred
wives and three hundred concubines are worse than none.” But it was not
Tom Paine, nor even Bob Taylor’s “The Devil’s Chaplain,” it was the long
years of his father’s paralysis that had first sapped his faith in the
pharmacopœian aspects of prayer, though he considerately concealed his
defection from his bed-ridden parent, and even the visiting elders
withheld the racking information. The old Bundock was not, however, to
be deceived, on this point at least.
“My son is moral, only moral,” he would say, with a sigh.
To such a temperament Miss Gentry must needs be antipathetic, and to
mark his distaste, Bundock was wont to leave the Colchester packets of
tracts as well as the “practical” correspondence at the side door,
shedding the light of his countenance only on the landlady. But on this
occasion, having a message to deliver as well as a missive and a packet,
he performed resoundingly on the green knocker, and Miss Gentry herself,
attended by Squibs, her ebony cat, appeared in the narrow, little
passage, frenziedly stitching at a feminine fabric. Behind her, through
the open back door, was a gleam of blossoming orchard and dangling
chemises.
“Good morning, Bundock,” she said graciously; “lovely weather.”
“It’s all right overhead,” he grumbled, “but underfoot, especially at
Frog Farm—whew!”
“You had to go to Frog Farm?” she inquired sympathetically.
“Yes, but there was a letter for Frog Cottage too. So I—he, he!—I
killed two frogs with one stone.”
“Two birds, you mean,” said Miss Gentry, embosoming her letter with a
romantic air and laying her packet on a chair. She added in alarm:
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“I don’t need drink,” said Bundock, mastering the apoplectic assault,
“it’s other folks that need brains.”
“My, were the old Flynts unusually trying?” she asked sympathetically.
“They want you to clean the gammer’s bonnet,” he answered brusquely.
“That’s not so foolish.” Her needle was moving busily again. “Have you
brought it?”
“No.”
“That does seem foolish.”
“I’m not a bonnet-bearer! They want _you_ to fetch it.”
“Me! Five miles to clean a bonnet! When I’m so busy! And in all that
mud!”
“It ain’t so muddy this side o’ Swash End, and it’s not two miles each
way by the fields.”
“Yes, with horrid cows!”
Bundock felt protective. “Cows ain’t bulls.”
“Well, I won’t go. You tell Mrs. Flynt she must come to me.”
“How can I tell her? I shan’t likely be going that way for months, thank
my stars.” Miss Gentry quivered a little at the expression, wondering
under what planet he was born.
“Well, I’ll write to her,” she said conclusively.
“What! And me take the letter!” In his indignation he almost blurted out
that the same difficulty of reading it would arise.
“Then I’ll tell Jinny to bring the bonnet!”
Bundock felt baffled. Instead of cunningly helping the Flynts to get
their letter read, he had only secured that minx of a carrier a
commission. He scowled at the dressmaker, seeing her moustache as big as
a guardsman’s and believing the worst of the legends about it: even that
the real reason she left Colchester was that the bristly-bearded
oysterman to whom she was engaged had refused to shave unless _she_ did.
“I’ll be wishing you a good morning,” he said icily, hitching up his
bag.
“Good morning,” said Miss Gentry. But she omitted to slam the door in
his face as he expected, indeed she had gradually advanced into the
porch, stitching unrelaxingly. And Bundock now became acutely aware that
he could not turn his back on her without revealing the stain on Her
Majesty’s uniform, that even by lowering the mail-bag he had just
hitched up, he could not cover up what certain rude ploughboys had
already commented on. He understood it was green. In this dreadful
situation he began backing slowly as from the presence of royalty,
making desperate conversation to cover his retreat.
“I did give you your tracts, didn’t I?” he babbled.
“If you mean the packet,” said Miss Gentry in stern rebuke, “there it
lies. _I_ haven’t opened it!”
“Do you mean that _I_ have?” he asked indignantly, gaining another yard
in this rear-guard action. “We don’t have to open an oyster to know
what’s inside.”
Miss Gentry’s brow grew as swarthy as her moustache—at the reminder of
her lost oysterman, Bundock supposed in dismay.
“Don’t you always send out tracts after I bring you packets?” he
explained hastily, still retreating with his face to the foe.
“Not when they’re patterns,” said Miss Gentry crushingly. “And how do
you know it’s not _The Englishwomen’s Magazine_?”
She turned back into the passage, and he hoped she would slam the door
on her triumph, but she took up the packet instead. “We shall soon see,”
and snipping the string with mysteriously produced scissors, she read
out unctuously: “Ishmael and the Wilderness.”
Bundock did not know which way to turn. Why in the name of propriety did
she not go back to her workroom and close her door? Miss Gentry, without
the clue to his lingering attitude, observed invitingly, tapping the
packet: “If this won’t make you see the beauties of the Establishment,
nothing will.”
He grinned uncomfortably. “Always willing to see the beauties of any
establishment.”
It was very strange. Give him a female, even with a moustache, even
tepefied by tracts, and something from the deeps rose up to philander.
Not that there wanted a lurid fascination in this exotic and literate
lady: his very loathing was a tribute to a vivid personality.
Miss Gentry, however, was shocked. She put down the tracts. She knew
herself “born under Venus,” but romance and respectability were never
disjoined in her day-dreams, and as the channel of a revelation she felt
profaned. “Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply. “You’re a married
man.”
“’Tis a married man knows how to appreciate beauty,” he replied,
receding farther nevertheless as in ironic commentary.
“For shame!” Her needle stabbed on. “And you setting up to be holy!”
“Me?” Surprise brought his strategic retreat to a standstill. “I never
set up to be a stained-glass saint.”
Again he had blundered. The black eyes flashed fire. “You who move
mountains!” she cried angrily.
“Me move mountains?” Bundock was bewildered.
“A little grain of mustard-seed,” he heard her saying more tremulously.
“And if a sycamine-tree could move—! Surely you don’t hold with the
unbelievers!”
It was precisely whom Bundock did hold with, but the big black eyes
seemed suddenly tearful and appealing, her needle seemed entering his
breast, and she swam before him as a fine, voluptuous female. Through
the passage he saw the apple-trees in bridal bloom and the white
feminine washing, and the Master’s remark on the apparent miracle of the
extraction of electric flashes from the human body thrilled in his
memory.
“Of course not,” he heard himself saying soothingly, while his legs felt
going forward, losing all the ground so laboriously won.
“Then you do believe the angel moved?” she asked eagerly.
“Don’t I see her moving?” he replied.
Miss Gentry looked down from her doorstep more in sorrow than in anger.
“You’re a married man!” she reminded him again.
“And does marriage pick out a man’s eyes—like a goat-sucker?” He felt
too near her now to back out, and he put forth his hand for hers, not
without nervousness at the needle. Could his father have seen him now,
he might have thought his son not even “moral.” But Miss Gentry
dexterously met the amorous palm with a tract. “That’ll open your eyes,”
she said.
To feel a flabby piece of paper instead of a warm hand is not conducive
to theological persuasion: all Bundock’s dissenting blood rushed to his
head.
“There’s two opinions about that,” he snorted.
“There _are_ two opinions,” Miss Gentry assented placidly; “one wrong
and the other mine.”
“Oh, of course!” he sneered. “The Church is always infallible.”
“We’re eighteen and a half centuries old,” said Miss Gentry freezingly.
“Did you put that in your census paper?” retorted the humorist.
Miss Gentry winced. She was weary of the jokes that had desolated
Bradmarsh, yet she was conscious of having let her landlady’s estimate
of her age go by default.
“I had no paper to fill up,” she reminded him frigidly. “But if there
was a census of religions, you’d certainly be among the mushrooms.”
“Better than being among the mummies.” Bundock’s father might have
clapped his palsied hands, to hear this defender of the faith. But Miss
Gentry mistook this fair retort in kind for another allusion to the
personal census.
“I thought you could discuss like a gentleman!” It was a cunning shaft,
and Squibs, seizing this moment to rub herself against the postman’s
leggings, he replied more mildly: “What’s the use of going by
age—except the Age of Reason?”
“Then be guided by Reason.” Miss Gentry stitched implacably. “If the
Almighty meant prayer to be medicine, why did He create castor-oil?”
Bundock was dumbfounded.
“Or Epsom salts?” she added triumphantly.
“They’re for cattle which can’t pray,” he answered with an inspiration.
Miss Gentry’s needle stabbed the air. But she recovered herself. “Then
why do you eat rhubarb pie?”
“Because it’s nice.” He grinned.
“But rhubarb’s a medicine!”
He countered cleverly. “We don’t mind taking medicine—so long as we’re
well!” We! He was identifying himself with his despised Brethren: such
is human nature under attack. But Miss Gentry was not at the end of her
resources.
“Well, what do you do when you break your legs? Pray the bones
straight?”
“But we don’t break our legs. I never heard of a Peculiar breaking his
leg.”
“But why shouldn’t a Peculiar break his leg?”
“That’s not my affair. He don’t. I’ve got Peculiars all over my beat,
and never have I known one to break a leg. A broken heart, now——!”
“But if he _did_ break a leg?” persisted Miss Gentry.
“If any one could break a leg, it would be me!” he said crossly.
“Well, then what would _you_ do—if you broke your leg?”
Bundock was worn out. “What’s the good of meeting troubles half-way?” he
snapped, turning on his heel.
“Yours seem to have come more than half-way,” scoffed Miss Gentry.
Bundock clapped his hand to the mud-patch, stung in his tenderest part.
He wheeled round prestissimo, raging with repartee. But the door had
closed—too late! Solitary, the sable Squibs dominated the
doorstep—like a sardonic spirit.
Bundock was turning away angrily, though now fearlessly, when with a
sudden thought he caught up the cat and plucked out one of her hairs. It
was not revenge—it was merely that his youngest daughter had a sty, for
which he believed the black hair an infallible remedy.