JINNY ON HER ROUNDS
_Give me simple labouring folk,_
_Who love their work,_
_Whose virtue is a song_
_To cheer God along._
THOREAU.
I
THUS it was that the days passed without any literate and discreet
female descending on Frog Farm or any rejuvenation appearing in Martha’s
bonnet; and the unread letter lay—guarded by two china dogs—on the
parlour mantelpiece awaiting the carrier. For it had been decided, after
nightly discussions that were a change for Caleb from the
Christadelphian curtain-lectures, to fall back on Jinny after all. She
was to read it to Martha in Caleb’s careful absence, and was to be
stopped if the improper seemed looming.
Alas, the best-laid schemes of mice and Marthas gang agley, and by the
day that Jinny’s horn resounded along the raised road that led to the
farm, the world was changed for Caleb and Martha. There was, in
fact—for the first time in Jinny’s experience—neither of the twain to
meet her as Methusalem ambled under the drooping witch-elms towards the
twin doors.
It was a tilt-cart,—with two tall wheels, and although Jinny steered it
and packed it and unpacked it, and scoured it and hitched Methusalem to
it, its weather-beaten canvas blazoned in fading black letters the
legend:
DANIEL QUARLES
CARRIER
LITTLE BRADMARSH.
You gather that she operated under the shadow of a great name, greatest
as being masculine. Self-standing careers for women had not yet dawned
on the world. If the first faint cloud of feminism had appeared that
very year in New York, no bigger than a man’s pants, the Bloomerites had
but added to the gaiety of mankind, and in rural Essex, with the
exception of dressmaking, wherein man appeared unnatural, women were the
recognized practitioners only of witchcraft or fortune-telling or the
concoction of philters; professions that were the peculiar province of
crones scarcely to be considered sexed. Though women earned money by
plaiting straw, they had husbands on the premises. Widows, of course,
for whom there was no provision outside the Chipstone poorhouse, were
allowed to maintain themselves more manfully than spinsters: but then
they were “relicts” of the masculine, had served—so to speak—an
apprenticeship under it. But the business of plying between Chipstone
and Bradmarsh was a peculiarly male occupation, and even the venerable
name of Daniel Quarles would not have sufficed to shield or install
Jinny had she jumped into his place as abruptly as Nip was apt to jump
into the cart.
No, Rome was not built in a day, nor could Jinny have become the carrier
“all of an onplunge,” as Caleb would have put it. That would have
shocked the manners and morals of Bradmarsh, both Little and Long, and
upset the decorum of Chipstone. A gradual preparation had been
necessary, a transition by which Jinny changed into the carrier as
imperceptibly as she had ripened into the girl. At first the small
“furriner”—the carried and not the carrier—reposing in the cart
because, after smallpox had snatched away both her parents in the same
week, her grandfather, who had imported her, had nowhere else to put
her; playing in the great canvas-covered playground that held as many
heights, depths, and obstacles as a steeplechase course; petted by every
client for her helplessness before her helpfulness gave her a second
lease of favour; bearing a literally larger and larger hand in
“Gran’fer’s” transactions as he grew older and older; correcting with
cautious tact his memories, his accounts, his muddled bookings and
deliveries, in due course ousting the octogenarian even from his place
on the driving-board and carrying him first by her side and then inside
in his second childhood, just as he had carried her in her first—a
stage in which his cackle with the customers carried on the continuity
of the male tradition; leaving him at home on bad days—whether his own
or Nature’s—and then altogether in the winter, and then altogether in
the spring, and then altogether in the autumn, and finally—when he
reached his nineties—altogether in the summer; Jinny the Carrier
was—it will be seen—a shock so subtly prepared and so long discounted
as to have been practically imperceptible. She might crack Daniel’s
heavy whip, but nobody felt the flourish as other than vicarious, if not
indeed a sort of play-acting evoking the pleasure a more sophisticated
audience finds in Rosalind’s swashbucklings. Not that she made any
brazen pretences to equality in lifting boxes; she sat with due feminine
humility while male muscles swelled and contracted under her presiding
smile and the rippling music of her thanks.
Here was, in fact, the prosaic purpose of the little horn slung at her
side—her one apparent embellishment of the tradition: it summoned her
slavish superiors so that she might be spared alighting and re-climbing
with goods. In face of the accuracy of her operations, this display of
helplessness probably helped to remove the sting of an otherwise
intolerable feminine sufficiency: it was perhaps the secret of her
popularity. Even with the most Lilliputian packets nobody expected Jinny
to descend and knock at their doors—one blast and old and young tumbled
over one another to greet the coming or speed the parting parcel. It was
indeed as if a good fairy should condescend to do your marketing, a
fairy in a straw bonnet (piquantly tied under the chin in a bow with
drooping ends), a fairy whose brilliant smile and teeth and flowing
ringlets could convert even an order for jalap into poetry, nay, induce
in the eternal masculine a craving for more. In fine, so topsy-turvily
had this snail-paced transition worked, so slowly had Jinny’s freedom
broadened down from precedent to precedent, that when strangers
expressed disapproval at these mannish courses, Little Bradmarsh was
shocked, Long Bradmarsh surprised, and Chipstone scornful. Not that they
were at all prepared to argue the question in the abstract. Their
prejudice against carrying as a profession for women remained as rooted
and unshaken as the critic’s. Women? Who was speaking of women? Jinny
was Jinny—a being unique and irreplaceable, “bless her bonny fice.” It
contributed to her unquestionability that the Quarleses had been
carriers for a hundred years—and more.
II
Nor did Jinny, for her part, generalize on the other side or take any
conscious interest in the emancipation of her sex. Her horn blew no
challenge to the world. It did not even occur to her that she was doing
anything out of the common—the tilt-cart had been her nursery, it was
now her place of business. She had come into its foreground so
unconsciously that it was not as a good fairy that she saw herself, nor
even as an attractive asset of the Quarles concern, but as a busy
toiler—driven from morning to night rather than driving—and
handicapped not only by her household and garden work, her goats and
poultry, but by a nonagenarian grandfather, shaky in health and
immovable in opinion. Fortunately for her temper—and for the chastening
of a tongue only too a-tingle with rustic wit—Jinny regarded the
cantankerous patriarch as no more an object for back-talk than a
suckling. It had become second nature to soothe and humour him; and she
knew him as she knew the highways and byways in the dark or the snow:
where to turn and where to go round, where to skirt a swamp and where to
shave a ditch. By way of compensation there was his affection—as
primitive as Nip’s or Methusalem’s—and evoking as primitive a response.
For Jinny was none of your genteel heroines with ethereal emotions and
complex aspirations.
It was not that Nature had not cast her for a poetic part—she was small
and slender enough, and her light grey eyes behind dark lashes
sufficiently subtilized her expression, and when she was hesitating
between two words—not two opinions, for she always had one—her little
mouth would purse itself enchantingly. There was gentility too about her
toes. As her grandfather remarked with his archaic pronouns and plurals:
“That has the smallest fitten I ever saw to a wench!” She certainly did
not dress the part, for despite the witchery of the bonnet, her workaday
skirt and stout shoes proclaimed the village girl, as her hands
proclaimed the drudge who scoured and scrubbed and baked and dug and
manured: indeed what with her own goats and her farmyard commissions,
she was almost as familiar with the grosser aspects of animal life as
that strangely romanticized modern figure, the hospital nurse. The
delicate solicitude of Martha on her behalf was thus a pure morbidity,
for in going to and fro like a weaver’s shuttle, Jinny could scarcely
remain ignorant that women were as liable to offspring as any other
females, though it seemed a part of Nature’s order that had no more to
do with herself than the strange, hirsute growths on the masculine
face—or for the matter of that on Miss Gentry’s.
Mr. Fallow, the old pastor of Little Bradmarsh, who, though despised and
rejected of Dissent, required—being human—comestibles, candles, and
shoe-strings from Chipstone, as well as the disposal of his honey and
his smaller tithes, was among Jinny’s favourite clients, her original
horror of Bradmarsh Church having been early modified by an accidental
peep one weekday morning, which revealed its priest as its sole
occupant. Yet, standing in his place in his white surplice, he was going
through the service with such devout self-forgetfulness that the
confused child wondered whether the Satan of worldliness had him so
entirely gripped as she had been given to understand. She did not know
that this very praying all to himself would have shocked Miss Gentry as
savouring of the abhorred High Churchmanship. Indeed “little better than
a Papist” the Chipstone curate had pronounced the harmless old widower.
He for his part had long admired the little carrier, and perceiving the
fine shape of her calloused fingers, no less than the smallness of her
sturdy shoes, and enjoying the tang of her tongue—for the cottage
women, though nimbler than their lords, were not witty—he had indulged
his antiquarian vein (and the abundant leisure due to the ravages of
Dissent) by tracing for her a less plebeian and more Churchy pedigree.
Foiled in the hope of connecting her with Francis Quarles of “Emblems”
fame, he found in Norden’s list of the Ancient Halls of Essex a Spring
Elm Manor appertaining to one Jonathan Quarles. The flockless pastor had
even journeyed in quest of this Hall and found illogical confirmation in
the fact of its continued existence, in all the pride of mullioned
windows and lily-strewn if muddy moat, though with its private chapel
turned into a stable and its piscina bricked over. Henceforward he saw
in the exuberant vitality and imperious obstinacy of Daniel Quarles only
an impoverished reincarnation of hard-living but ecclesiastically
correct squiredom, while in Jinny, with her generous visits to the
ailing and bed-ridden on her route, he elected to behold a re-embodied
Lady Bountiful, pride of a feudal parish. What was prosaically certain,
however, was that Jinny had not even the education of Bundock’s bunch of
girls, the only school she had ever attended being the Peculiars’
Sunday-school held at a house adjoining the chapel in an interval
between the services. Thither, as to the services—her grandfather being
a Wesleyan—she had been convoyed regularly by Caleb, packed into a cart
with as many of the Flynt boys as had not yet flown off.
But the business itself forced reading and writing upon her, though when
its sole responsibility devolved on her, and it was no longer necessary
to confute the old man’s memory by the written word or figure, she found
herself agreeably able to dispense with the learned arts.
Welcomed at lonely farmyards where fierce dogs sometimes broke their
chains for the joy of licking her hand or of flying at Nip’s throat; not
less welcome in village High Streets, where every other house would ply
her fussily with orders that she took coolly and without a single note,
her bosom knowledge of everybody’s business and her dramatic
interpretation of any abnormal commission infusing life into her work
that saved her from slips of memory; adored by all the swains and yokels
who hauled her goods and chattels up and down, but radiating only a
frosty sunshine in return, for none had ever been able to pass the
ice-barrier that separated her private self from her professional
geniality; jumping down herself only to give Christian burial to hapless
moles, rats, shrews, leverets, and blood-stained feathers, or to glean
for lonely old women or the numerous and impoverished Pennymole family
the unconscious largesse of more careless drivers—turnips, lumps of
coal, wisps of hay; chaffering with beaming shopkeepers on behalf of her
clients, and hail-fellow-well-met with her fellow-carriers, encountered
at cross-roads or “The Black Sheep”; Jinny pursued her unmaidenly career
in fine weather or foul, sometimes wayworn, wind-whipped, rain-drenched,
and with aching forehead, but more often with a vital joy that was not
least keen when Methusalem—cloud-exhaling and clogged by snow that
sometimes raised the road as high as the hedges—had to plough his way
along a track hewn out by labourers, with here and there a siding cut in
the glittering mass for carts to pass each other by. Those were days not
devoid of danger: road, hedge, ditch, and field obliterated in one snowy
expanse. Once Jinny’s cart had to be dug out like a crusted fossil of
the Ice Age—and only the agonized howling of Nip had brought rescue.
III
It was the first time he had justified his air of managing the whole
concern round which he barked and bounded and scurried as though
Methusalem and Jinny were his minions. He had indeed commandeered
them—jumping originally out of nowhere on to the tail-board—and
however he strayed from the path of their duty in his numberless
tangential excursions and expeditions, they knew he would never abandon
them.
Like many other great characters Nip was a mongrel. His foundation was
fox-terrier, and he had preserved the cleverness of the strain without
its pluck. To strangers, indeed, he seemed a very David among dogs,
attacking, as he sometimes did, canine Goliaths. But no dog is a hero to
his mistress, and after he had adopted her, Jinny discovered that these
resounding assaults on the bulkier were but bravado passages, based on
his flair that the bigger dog was also the bigger coward. That was where
his brains came in, as well as his baser breed. A sniff at a real
fighter and Nip would evade combat, sauntering off with a nonchalant
air. A splash of brown on his brainpan and about his ears, and a dab of
black on his snout were—with his leathern collar—the sole touches of
relief in his sleek whiteness. His head—beautifully poised and
shaped—with its bright dark-brown eye, eloquently expressive and
passing easily from love to greediness, from shyness to shame, invited
many a pat from lovers of the soulful. Yet to hear him bolt a rabbit was
to imagine a demon on the war-path: in a flash the cart would be left a
furlong behind or athwart; his raucous staccato yells filled the meadows
with echoes of blood-lust and revenge. But long experience had dulled
Jinny’s solicitude for Bunny: never once was there a sign of a kill.
Sometimes, indeed, when Nip was hunting a rat, the creature would run
across the path under his very nose, but that nose, pushing eagerly for
far-off game, never seemed able to readjust itself to what was under it.
All the which maladroitness was probably artfulness, Nip scenting
shrewdly that a successful sports-dog would have been hounded out. He
knew well the foolish, treacherous heart of his mistress, who actually
misled the hunt those autumn mornings that brought the high-mettled
hares across their path with ears taut and every muscle tragically
astrain. Up would come the beagles, with a long processional flutter of
waving white tails, nosing forlornly and barking dismally, while
he—panting to put them right—was tied paw and paw. How they set him
quivering, those horn-tootlings of the gorgeous Master, though they did
not go to his bowels as much as those staccato chivies that suggested
that the green-and-white gentleman was one of themselves rather than a
biped, or as those more elaborately contorted cries and rousing
thong-cracks of the Whipper-in. A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.
And when all these hunters—four-footed or two-footed—including the
draggletail of fat, breathless farmers and wheezing females, were
remorselessly sent the wrong way by his brutal mistress, the poor dog
could not refrain from wailing.
Even when the hare did not cross her path, her horn, imitating the
professional toot, would allure and misguide the distant dogs. Nip’s own
relatives, the foxhounds, more rarely came his way, but though his
mistress’s sympathies with the quarry were less marked—her chickens
being precious—Nip was still held in. But amid all his disgust the
cunning dog remembered that his days of foraging for himself—before he
had picked up Jinny—had not been rosy and replete: caterers like Jinny,
he realized, did not grow on every cart, not to mention the cushioned
basket from which he could bark at everything on the road, or within
which, with a huge grunt of satisfaction, he could curl into an odorous
dream.
A contrast in all save colour was the stolid Methusalem, though he too
was of hybrid stock. While his hairy fetlocks proclaimed a kinship with
the draught-breed of the shire, he lacked that gross spirit, and while
his flying mane and tail flaunted an affinity with the fiery Arab, he
was equally deficient in that high mettle. By what romantic episode he
had come into being, whether through the wild oats of an Arabian
ancestor, or the indiscretion of a mere circus-horse, or whether his
tossing hair and tail were the heritage from a Shetland pony—as his
moderate stature suggested—is not recorded in any stud-book. But it was
impossible to see him without the word “steed” coming into the mind, and
equally impossible to sit behind him without thinking of a plough-horse.
“When Oi first see that rollin’ in the brook afore ’twas broke in,”
Gaffer Quarles would relate, “Oi was minded of the posters of Mazeppa at
the Fair, and christened that accordin’.” It was only when he discovered
that this blonde beast was a whited sepulchre, that “Mazeppa” was
exchanged for “Methusalem,” as though that antediluvian worthy had
always been a doddering millenarian, and not at one time in the prime of
his hundreds. The name had at least the effect of banishing expectation;
his mere amble was an agreeable surprise. As a matter of fact Methusalem
had still his Mazeppa moments. They came on Tuesday and Friday evenings
when he was loosed from the shafts; at which moments he would roll on
his back, kick up his heels and gallop madly round the goat-pasture to
the alarm of the tethered browsers. And even at his professional pace he
always kept his mane flying. One accomplishment, however, Methusalem had
which no “Mazeppa” steed could have bettered, nay, which made a circus
pedigree plausible. He could lift the latch of gates with his nose and
walk through. It was a trick which Jinny, with her habit of not
alighting, had fostered in him: if the gate did not swing to, she could
usually close it with the butt-end of her whip—through the cart-rear at
the worst—a procedure which, with her further habit of using short cuts
and even private tracks like that at Bellropes Park, saved not a little
time, and was some compensation for Methusalem’s general crawl.
If the local carrying business had grown indistinguishable from Jinny,
it seemed no less bound up with her four-footed companions, whose
ghostly figures, seen looming through the wintry dusk, sent a glow of
warmth through the bleak countryside.
IV
But to-day Jinny’s horn, Nip’s yap, and Methusalem’s pseudo-spirited
pawing, were alike powerless to evoke the familiar forth-bustling of
Caleb and Martha. Only cocks crowed and doves moaned, while from the
river-slope came the lowing of cattle. Alarmed for the lonely and aged
couple, Jinny jumped down and tapped at the door. Nobody replying, she
lifted the latch and came from the joyous spring sunshine on a chill,
silent piece of hall-way in which even the tall clock had stopped dead.
She peeped perfunctorily into the musty parlour on her way to the
kitchen—the lozenge-shaped motto: “When He giveth quietness, who then
can make trouble?” seemed to have taken on a strange and solemn
significance. But she knew that the kitchen was the likeliest lair, so
not pausing to examine, the ominously unopened letter addressed to Mrs.
Flynt which she espied on the mantelpiece, she pressed on to the rear.
The kitchen, however, was still more desolate, not only of the couple,
but of the habitual glow on the cavernous hearth. What wonder if Nip,
who had followed her, set up an uncanny whining! She halloaed up the
staircase, but that only aggravated the silence. She dashed next door to
the shepherd’s section—similar solitude! With a feeling of lead at her
heart she rushed back into the ironic sunshine and towards the
orchard—now unbearably beautiful in its blossoming—and as she was
approaching a remote corner that harboured the pigsty in which Martha’s
pet sow carried on a lucrative maternity, she was half relieved to
collide with Caleb who was moving houseward with haggard eyes and carpet
slippers.
“Is anything the matter?” she gasped.
“Sow glad you’ve come. The missus keeps arxing for you. We’ve been up
all night with her.”
“With your wife?”
He looked astonished. “Noa, Maria!”
Jinny’s full relief found vent in a peal of laughter.
“It’s no laughin’ matter—the missus wants ye to tell the wet to come at
once.”
“But what’s the matter with her?” inquired Jinny, still unable to rise
to his seriousness. “A snout-ache?”
“She’s a goner,” said Caleb solemnly. “We’ve reared up nine boys, but
Maria’s been more trouble than the lot. The missus would bring her up by
hand, and Oi always prophesied she wouldn’t live.”
Amusedly aware that Maria’s progeny had already exceeded sixty, Jinny
offered to visit the patient.
“Do—that’ll comfort the missus and ye’ll know better what to tell
Jorrow. Oi’ll hold your hoss. You know the way—behind the red
may-tree.”
Jinny smiled again. The idea of Methusalem needing restraint amused her,
but she did not dispel Caleb’s romantic illusion.
The sick sty was visible through a half-door that gave at once air and
view, and over which Nip at once bounded on to the startled Martha’s
back as she hung over the prostrate pig on its bed of dirty straw. Maria
belonged to the Society of Large Black Pigs, and snuffed the world
through a long, fine snout; but life had evidently lost its savour, for
the poor sow was turning restlessly.
“Oh, Jinny!” moaned Martha. “She had thirteen last time, and I knew it
was an unlucky number.”
“Nonsense!” quoth Jinny gaily. “Twelve would have been less lucky—at
the price I got you!”
“Yes, dearie, but I’m not thinking of prices. She was a birthday present
for my loneliness.”
“I know,” said Jinny gently.
“No, you don’t.” She wrung her hands. The self-possession Caleb had
admired when the letter broke on their lives was no longer hers. “You’ve
got lots of Brethren and Sisters, but I’ve got nobody to break bread
with, no fraternal gatherings to go to, and even Flynt won’t be
immersed, though he’s in his sixty-nine and we must all fall asleep some
day. So it was a comfort to have Maria following me about everywhere
like Nip does you, and I do believe she’s got more sense than the
so-called Christians here, and would be the first to pray for the peace
of Jerusalem with me if she could only speak. But now even Maria may be
taken from me. You’ll send Jorrow at once, won’t you, dearie?”
“But what’s the matter with her?”
“Can’t you see? All night she kept rooting up the ground. Oh, I hope it
isn’t fever.”
“Rubbish! Look at the skin of her ears. And she isn’t coughing at all.
What’s she been overeating?”
“Nothing—only the grass Flynt has been cutting.”
“Why don’t you give her a dose of castor-oil?”
“She won’t take it. She knows we’ve covered it up—I told you she’s got
as much brains as a Christian.”
“Let me try and get it down.”
“It _is_ down. The piglets ate the mess up.”
“Oh dear!” laughed Jinny. “That _will_ need Jorrow. Anything else, Mrs.
Flynt?”
“I can’t think this morning. Ask Flynt.”
Caleb, however, proved equally distraught.
“There was summat extra special, Oi know,” he said, his red-shirted arm
clinging heroically to Methusalem’s bridle, “for here’s the knot in my
hankercher. But what it singafies Lord onny knows.”
“It wasn’t a new shirt?” she suggested slyly.
He shook his head. “Noa, noa; this keeps her colour as good as new. But
the missus did make a talk about my Sunday neckercher.”
“I’ll get you a new one. Plain or speckled?”
“Oi leaves that to you, Jinny—you know more about stoylish things.”
V
On her winding and much-halting way to Chipstone, Jinny took advantage
of the absence of the noble family and the complaisance of her customer,
the lodge-keeper, to smuggle her plebeian vehicle through Bellropes
Park, which was not only a mile shorter, but dodged the turnpike with
its aproned harpy of a tollman; she loved the great avenues of oaks, and
the shining lake, the game of swans, and the sense of historic
splendour; and Nip, as if with a sense of stolen sweets, sniffed never
more happily, though when they got within view of the water, he had to
be summoned back to his headquarters-basket by a stern military note, a
combat between himself and the swans not commending itself to his
mistress. Some of these irascible Graces floated now on the margin,
meticulously picking their tail-feathers, contorting their necks. But
vastly more exciting were those of the flock far out on that spacious
sparkle of brown water. They seemed to be going spring-mad and threshing
the scintillating water with their wings, oaring themselves thus along,
each one infecting the other, till the water itself seemed to be leaping
in a shimmering frenzy of froth. Even the ducks reared up or stood on
their heads in a sort of intoxication. And this sense of the joy and
beauty of the spring communicated itself to the girl, not in jubilance,
but in some exquisite wistfulness: some craving of the blood for
mysterious adventure. Something seemed calling at once out of the past
and out of the future. And then her thoughts wandered back to Frog Farm
and the Flynts and the far-scattered youths with whom she had formerly
ridden to Sunday-school, and suddenly by a flash from her
subconsciousness she recognized the writing of the unopened letter on
Martha’s mantelpiece: of the letter she had scarcely looked at. Surely,
though the curves were bolder, it was the work of the very same male
hand that had written on the fly-leaf of a Peculiar hymn-book the
inspired quatrain—which she had admired from her childhood—beginning:
_Steal not this book for fear of shame:_
an admonition she thought peculiarly appropriate to the holy book it
guarded. And with the memory of the fly-leaf surged up also the
face—the long-forgotten, freckled face of the youngest and most
headstrong of the Flynt boys: the Will, flouted as “Carrots,” but in her
opinion the handsomest of the batch, who had always loomed over her with
such grown-up if genial grandeur, and had given her his bull-roarer and
threaded birds’ eggs for her before she had come to think their
collection wicked. What a hullabaloo when the boy disappeared—he must
have been hardly thirteen, she began computing—and she, the child of
nine or so who could have comforted the distracted Martha, had dared say
no word, because he had made her swear on that very hymn-book to keep
his flight silent. Just as she was permeated by the solemnity of the
book and the oath on it, he had thrown it away, she remembered, thrown
it into the bushes from the wagon in which he was driving her home from
chapel.
The details of that forgotten summer Sunday began to come back: most
vividly of all, the boy struggling and sobbing when his buttons were cut
off. He had been so proud of his new velvet jacket with its manifold
rows of blue buttons, and lo! after Sunday-school his father had
appeared with a somewhat crestfallen look and a pair of scissors,
saying, “You don’t want all this flummery,” while Elder
Mawhood—evidently the admonishing angel—had stood grimly by, intoning
“Pride is abominable. Wanity must be rooted out.”
The boy had choked back his sobs, and apparently found solace in the
evening hymns, and was further soothed by being allowed at his own
request to drive the party home. It was felt—especially by Martha—some
compensation for the buttons was due to him. Thus when the wagon had
reached Swash End and the bulk of the Flynt family got off according to
custom—mud and weather permitting—and walked up to Frog Farm, leaving
Jinny to be driven round the long detour to her home at Blackwater Hall,
she was left alone with Will.
It was then that, having asked her if she could keep a secret and being
assured she could, he informed her to her admiring horror that the
moment he had safely delivered her on the road by the Common, he would
turn his horse’s head for Harwich, where (stabling the horse and wagon
so that his parents might trace his intention) he would take ship as a
cabin-boy or a stowaway for America, where he was sure to come across
his brother Ben, and never would she see him again in Bradmarsh till he
had made his fortune.
She could see him now, under a late sunset that was like his hair, with
his flashing, freckled face, his blazing blue eyes, and his poor,
defaced jacket, the thready stubs of the big buttons showing like scars.
Their quaint dialogue came back vividly to her.
“Oh, Will, but can’t you make your fortune here?”
“No, thank you—no more chapel for me!”
“I know it’s hard—and you did look beautiful with the buttons—but
isn’t it more beautiful to please God?”
“Rubbish! What does God care about my buttons?”
“He’s pleased, just as I like your giving me birds’ eggs.”
“But I didn’t give my buttons—they were snatched from me—through that,
beastly old Mawhood.”
“But Elder Mawhood knows what God wants.”
“Let him cut off his own nose and not go smelling into everybody’s
business. The other day he made poor old Sister Tarbox get riddy of her
cat.”
“That was kindness, because it had to be shut up alone all Sunday while
she was at chapel.”
“I believe it was only to make more rats for him to kill.”
“That’s not true, Will. You know Sister Tarbox is too poor to have her
cottage cleared.”
“Well, let him look after his rats and cats—not me.”
“An elder must do his duty.”
“I hate elders and deacons and hymn-books. Yah! I’m done with religion,
thank God.”
“Oh, Will, you mustn’t speak like that!”
“Fancy stewing in chapel in weather like this!”
“Isn’t this just the weather to thank God for?”
“No—it’s all silliness.”
“Oh, Will!”
“Yes, it is! You ask Brother Bundock—I don’t mean old Mr. Bundock. I
asked him once who wrote our hymn-book and he said, ‘’Twixt you and I,
the village idiot!’”
“You are talking wickedly, Will”—there were tears in the voice now.
“You mustn’t run away, that’s more wicked.”
“Oh—I was an idiot myself to tell you. You are going to peach on me, I
suppose.”
“Peach?”
“Tell your grandfather about my running away.”
“Not if you don’t do it.”
“But I shall do it! And you promised to keep the secret. To tell would
be more wicked than me.”
“I won’t tell, but you mustn’t go.”
“I must. Swear not to betray me. Kiss my hymn-book.”
It was with some soothed sense of restored sanctities that she had
pressed her lips to the holy cover—she still remembered its smell and
taste, salted with a tear of her own—but what a fresh and mightier
shock, that throwing of the book into the bushes!
“Stop! Stop!” She heard the little girl’s horror-struck cry over the
years; remembered how, as he laughed and drove on furiously with her,
the phrase “drive like the devil” had come to her mind, charged for the
first time with meaning.
Wilful boy had had his way: he had escaped from England and
even—despite his diabolism—by the aid of the ninepence she had
insisted on bringing down from her money-box while he waited trustfully
outside her grandfather’s domain. But she had not responded in kind to
the lordly kiss he had blown her as he drove off to America.
“Good-bye, little Jinny!”
“Good-bye, Will. Say your prayers!”
“Not me!”
“Then I shall pray for you!”
When the hue and cry was out, and bellmen were busy with his carroty
head and velvet jacket with the buttons cut off, little Jinny had also
gone a-hunting—but for the outraged hymn-book. It lay now still hidden
in a drawer—the one secret of her life—unmentioned even when by the
bulky clue of the horse and cart the fugitive had been traced, as he
designed.
Yes, she must disinter this hymn-book of his from its hiding-place,
compare the inscription—she knew by now the rhyme was not
original—with her memory of Martha’s letter. What was its postmark, she
wondered. Well, she would find that out, indeed the whole contents, on
her return to Frog Farm. Perhaps he was coming back—his fortune already
made. And the revived sense of his wickedness was mixed with a sense of
her own soon-forgotten resolve—or threat—to pray for him, and was
blurred in some strange emotion, in which the glamorous freshness of
child-feeling mingled with a leaping of the heart that was like the
spring-joy of the swans.
VI
But Jorrow could not make the journey that day to that remote farm.
There were more important animals more expensively endangered and more
easily accessible. Old sows were so fussy, and to judge by the symptoms
it was a mere case for castor-oil. But precisely because Jinny had
herself recommended this drug-of-all-work she felt unconvinced: it
seemed a mere glib formula for being “riddy” of her. There was another
resource, Elijah Skindle, who, having settled in Chipstone only five
years ago, practised only among parvenus like himself. It was not
because he was a “furriner,” nor even because he had started as a
knacker and still had a nondescript status, that Jinny shrank from
calling him in now: she had more than once deposited damaged dogs with
him or deported them mended. But she objected to the appraising gaze he
fixed upon her on these occasions, though to be sure her objection to
these jaunts was not so strong as Nip’s, who, seeing in every canine
co-occupant of the cart a possible supplanter, bristled and whined and
barked till the rival was safely discharged. But, on her way home,
overcoming her repugnance—for Martha’s sake, if not Maria’s or
duty’s—she stopped her cart outside his pretentious black gauze blind
and blew a rousing blast. A tall, black-eyed, grey-haired woman, issuing
from the office door with a broom, who appeared to be Mr. Skindle’s
mother, informed her that ’Lijah was “full up”: however, he could be
found at the kennels if Jinny insisted on seeing him. She pointed
vaguely to a field behind the house, visible through an unpaved alley
yawning between the sober Skindle window and its flamboyant neighbour,
the chemist’s. But it was in vain that Jinny clucked to Methusalem to
thread the alley. The beast refused absolutely.
Alighting with some dim understanding of his instinct, she walked to the
field-gate over which a horse was gazing at her. Lifting the latch, she
wandered among other happily scampering horses in search of the kennels,
finding at first only a barn-like structure, a glance through whose
doors at the flagstoned paving that sloped to a centre turned her sick.
For a pyramid of horses’ feet was the least repulsive indication, though
even the homely skewers so agreeable to Squibs took on a sinister hue.
The spectacle, however, served to make the kennels, when at last
discovered, a lesser horror. But it was the first time she had seen dogs
so far gone in distemper, and these rheumy-eyed skeletons, each chained
in its niche, sullied the springtide and haunted her for days. She
caught up Nip, who had come to heel, as though he too might pine
suddenly into skin and bone. Nip himself, it must be confessed, regarded
these shadows of his species with indifference, if not with
satisfaction, as negligible competitors.
Elijah Skindle, discovered on his knees in the act of feeding a pathetic
poodle, was as unstrung by the sight of Jinny as Jinny by the sight of
the dogs. His black cutty pipe fell from his lips and he nearly stuck
the dog’s spoon into his own open mouth. But mastering himself, and
without raising his cap or his pipe or changing his attitude, he gasped
out: “Hullo! Nip ill?”
Jinny replied curtly—for there was a familiarity that repelled her in
his calling Nip by his right name—, “No, a sow at Frog Farm—Little
Bradmarsh, you know.”
His heart leapt. Frog Farm meant an old inhabitant, local prejudice was
then beginning to melt at last! But, “Rather out of my radius,” he said
with pretended indifference. “Besides,” as he reached for his pipe, “my
nag’s gone lame.”
“I could give you a lift,” said Jinny, outwitted for once, since it
never struck her that this was precisely what Elijah had fished for and
why he had lamed his beast. The spoon trembled in his hand, but he
replied grumblingly, “But then I should have to come at once.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Jinny.
Mr. Skindle rose and brushed his knees. “Anything to oblige a lady,” he
said.
“It isn’t me, it’s Maria,” said Jinny icily.
VII
But Jinny was not altogether outmanœuvred, for while Mr. Skindle was
getting his case of utensils, she filled up the rest of her seat—it was
a stuffed seat covered with sacking—by means of a peculiarly precious
parcel, needing a vigilant eye: no new device this, but her habitual
protection against bores or adorers, and Skindle, she feared, was both.
This swain-chaser or maid-protector was kept in a corner of the cart
ready for emergencies, being an elongated package of stones, marked
“Fragile.” The stones had to be jagged and uncouth or Nip would have
squatted on it and roused suspicion. This was the only parcel she lifted
herself, and it figured in her own mind as “The Scarecrow.”
And so, despite Mr. Skindle’s offer to nurse it on his knees, she put
him behind her—not as a Satan, for his seductiveness was small. He had,
it is true, a good styside manner, and his slim figure, outlined by a
trimly cut pepper-and-salt suit, effused a sense of vitality. But his
straw-coloured moustache, which was not without its female votaries, was
for Jinny more of a puzzle than a decoration, for she could not
reconcile its flowingness with the desolating baldness that any shifting
of his cap revealed. His cranium was, in fact, like the advertisement of
a hair-restorer in the picture preceding the application thereof. As
fixed a feature of his face as the grey cap which concealed his calvity
was the black cutty pipe stuck in his stained teeth, nor had Jinny ever
seen him without a large pearl horseshoe pin in his tie.
“Please don’t smoke,” she said, as he climbed in by the tail-board,
“Gran’fer would smell it.”
“And why shouldn’t he?”
“He’s a Wesleyan.”
“Oh!” He laughed without comprehension, a shade scoffingly.
“And the smell might get into people’s parcels,” she added.
Bestowing himself under the tilt as well as he could on a box, grazed at
his side by a ledge he considered too narrow to sit on, and threatened
with decapitation through a plank holding the smaller parcels that ran
athwart the cart just above his head, Mr. Skindle gazed up over this
shelf at the glorious view of the back of Jinny’s bonnet and feasted his
eyes on her graceful dorsal curves and the more variegated motions of
her driving arm, not to mention the succession of lovely rural
backgrounds made for her figure by the arch of the awning. And his
ill-humour melted, and though his pipe grew cold his heart began to
glow. But Jinny took no more notice of him than if he had been himself a
box. No wonder he began to feel closed and corded up, bursting though he
knew himself to be with soul-riches. For a full mile, his extinct pipe
in his teeth, he heard only the monotonous snap of Methusalem’s hoofs as
if everything along the road was snapping in a frost. The unjaded steed
had actually started off at almost a trot, and as the Gaffer explained
once, “a hoss what has long lopes knocks his fitten together.” Then—as
if to mark how completely her passenger was forgotten—one of her
grandfather’s songs began to steal from her lips. It was not “High
Barbary” nor “Admiral Benbow,” nor yet his favourite “Oi’m seventeen
come Sunday,” which the nonagenarian sang daily with growing conviction.
It was—and Nip would have been the first to be surprised, had he
understood it—the old English air:
_The hunt is up, the hunt is up, and it is wellnigh day,_
_And Harry our King has gone huntynge, to bring the deer to bay._
Perhaps it was the influence of her horn; perhaps she was an artist who
could enjoy in song what she could not suffer in life. Or perhaps she
loved the lilt of the old song and never thought of the meaning, or only
of the bravery of the spectacle and the gay coming of the dawn. For, all
untrained as she was, she vibrated peculiarly to music, and one of the
wonderful moments of her young life was when she first heard a hymn sung
in parts at the Sunday-school; to her ear, accustomed only to the solo
quavering of the Gaffer, was revealed harmony; a starry new universe and
a blood-tickling enchantment in one.
Almost at the first outbreak of the hunting song Nip appeared at a run,
and with two bounds he established himself in his mistress’s
lap—invidiously enough in Elijah’s eyes. For that silvery little voice,
rippling along the lonely road with the unconscious joyance of a
blackbird’s, completed the spell which the spring landscape—seen in
that series of pictures framed by the arch of the tilt—was weaving on
the doomed veterinary surgeon.
There were sheep, big and little, lying in the wide fields and great,
newly ploughed spaces of red, freshly turned earth—for the first time
Elijah felt the scarecrows as a degradation of all this primeval beauty.
Apple-trees flowered in the cottage gardens and in the hedges was early
May-blossom, and on the brinks primroses, anemones, and even a few
precocious bluebells rioted in an intoxicating fertility of beauty.
Larks rose palpitating with song, bumble-bees boomed, butterflies
flittered, and ever and anon came the haunting cry of the cuckoo. And
when Jinny’s voice soared up too, Elijah Skindle’s heart seemed melting
down his spine.
VIII
“That’s a lucky dog of yours,” he said desperately, when the music
ceased.
“That’s what I thought at your place,” she replied through the back of
her head.
“Not had distemper yet?”
He saw her shoulders shudder. There was an awkward silence.
“You know I’d gladly look after him gratis,” he blundered on, “and you
too.” Then, in a horrible consciousness of the pathological implication,
he awaited the lash of her tongue.
But she must have been abstracted. For she only said politely: “Thanks
very much. But I always go to Jorrow’s.”
Yes, he reflected bitterly, and always went there for other people
unless Skindle’s was expressly stipulated.
But they were now approaching the first village after Chipstone, and the
outside world intruded on the idyll. A dozen times he vaulted up and
down to prevent interloping young men—sometimes armed with
nosegays—receiving parcels too proximately; and he had a proud and
malicious pleasure in their disconcerted unspoken surmise as to his
privileged situation. The small coin of conversation appertaining to
these deliveries Jinny did not refuse him, and every cluck she gave to
Methusalem, every ripple of laughter on her busy way, deepened the
spell. The unexpected faces; the quaint cottage interiors; the
cheerful-smiling women in high green aprons who received stay-laces or
bobbins, sugar or tea-packets, in bare dough-powdered or soap-frothed
arms; the panting figures that tolled after the cart with forgotten
bundles; the dogs—the fiercer in their barrels and boxes, the milder
waving free and friendly tails; the quaint commissions and monitions,
the salutations and farewells—“I’ll remember the twopence,” “And tell
my brother, won’t you, about the christening,” “I don’t want any more of
her puddings, they put the miller’s eye out”—all this fascinating
bustle and chatter, spiced with friendly laughter, seemed to belong to
an enchanted earth of which gaiety was the ground-note, not animal
groaning. The windings of her horn completed his sense of fairyland.
In the remoter woodland regions he was possessed alternately with a
disapprobation of her recklessness in trusting herself thus alone with a
male, far from help, and a surprise at his own passivity in so provoking
and romantic a situation. Of course he was going to behave like the
gentleman he was, but why was she so irritatingly sure of it? Did she
think he wasn’t flesh and blood? She might at least show some
consciousness of his chivalry!
But his resentment at her professional nonchalance only served to
confirm his long-standing suspicion that here at last was the girl for
him: that he was choosing well if not wisely. Doubtless Chipstone and
his mother would say he was marrying too much beneath him. But look at
the farmers’ daughters—what lumps beside her! He admitted, of course,
that the Blanche of Foxearth Farm to whom his mother mainly aspired was
an exception, but then this Purley minx was hopelessly out of reach,
stuck up on her pedestal of beauty, conceit, and culture, and throwing
over even her affianced wooers. As for his neighbour, the chemist’s
girl—what _could_ his mother see in her except that annuity which would
not even survive her, and she not looking particularly strong! No, with
the present satisfactory amount of sheep-rot, glanders, and distemper he
could afford to please himself. And if Jinny couldn’t play the piano
like the land-surveyor’s widow, why one must content oneself with the
horn, pending initiation into the higher life. Together they would work
up the business. With Jinny’s connexion—though of course she must give
up carrying and become a lady—there would surely be a trail of sick
beasts in her wake: Jorrow would soon be out-distanced. They would live
away from his office; that could all be turned into dog-hospital.
Such were the kennels in the air built by the enamoured Elijah as he sat
on boxes or hampers or panted under their weight in his officious
deliveries: an officiousness which drove out of her head the keg of oil
destined for Uckford Manor.
“Oh, dear!” she murmured suddenly, a mile later.
Forcing the explanation from her, he cried joyfully, “Let’s go back.”
Jinny shook her head. “No time,” she said, and flicked at Methusalem.
“But I don’t mind being late.”
“I’m not thinking of you—but of the pig.”
“Bother the pig.”
“Is that the way you study your patients?”
“I’ve got better things to study.” He could only say it to her back, but
he threw enough intensity into it to come out on the other side of her.
“Indeed!” The back seemed impenetrable. “You going into another
business?”
“Why ever should I when I’m getting on so famously—ten pound a week, if
a penny.” It was an opportunity made to his hand. “I know,” he went on,
as the back remained rigid, “that folks pretend it’s not as high-class
as real doctoring, but believe me it needs more brains.”
“Does it?”
“Stands to reason. A human being can tell you what he feels and where
the pain lays, but with a dumb beast you’ve got only your own sense and
skill to go on: it’s us vets that should really be at the top of the
profession.”
“But sick babies are dumb too,” Jinny reminded him.
“Sick babies have talking mammas,” he replied genteelly.
Jinny did not imitate them, and silence fell again, tempered by
Methusalem’s snappings. Really, it was very awkward, Elijah felt, thus
proposing to a girl behind her back. But he struggled gallantly. “Take
stomach staggers now—if those horses you saw waiting to be killed this
evening had been treated in time——!”
“The horses in your field?” cried Jinny, shocked. “But they looked so
lively.”
“They’re all like that,” he explained. “Once out of harness they get a
bit jaunty again, but they’re worth more dead than alive.”
“It’s dreadful killing off a horse that has served one!” Jinny burst
out. “Just for a few shillings!”
“A few shillings? Why there’s horses over two-fifty pounds! Flesh, I
mean,” he explained, with a chuckle. “Not to mention the skin, hair and
bones. Why, there’s eighty pounds of intestines for sausage-skins!”
“Oh, do hold your tongue!” cried Jinny, feeling sick again.
“Yes, and what about _his_ tongue!” retorted Elijah triumphantly. “It
ain’t only Frenchies that get that. And his tail waving for funerals!
And his hoofs in your own shoe-buttons!”
Jinny felt indeed as though hoofs had descended on her feet, and she
could almost have sacrificed Methusalem’s high-waving tail to adorn her
passenger’s obsequies.
“My neighbour, the chemist—he buys the blood!” continued the ghoulish
Elijah. “He makes it into——”
But just here at a cross-road Jinny’s horn signalled to a smart young
man in a velvet waistcoat, who was driving a trap, and brought him to a
standstill. Would Barnaby deliver a keg of oil at Uckford Manor if he
was passing that way?
That Manor was, it transpired, the one goal and purpose of Barnaby’s
journey.
Jinny—well aware young Purley was homeward bound for Foxearth
Farm—gave him a radiant smile, and Elijah threw him the keg and a
furious look, a reliable fellow-feeling informing him that the velvety
liar was going at least two miles out of his way. Downright dishonest he
felt it, seeing that neither the young man’s time nor his trap was his
own, but belonged to his father, the hurdle-maker. But what could you
expect of Blanche’s brother? Let Jinny beware of the family fickleness,
let her lean on a less showy but manlier breast.
“I wonder you don’t arrange your things village by village instead of
letting ’em lay all over the vehicle,” he observed as she drove on.
“I shan’t forget where to drop you,” came the answer over her cold
shoulder.
Then silence fell more painfully than ever, and the monotonous tick-tack
of Methusalem maddened his conscious ear. The monstrous possibility
began to loom up that Jinny’s affections were pre-engaged to some one of
these numerous young men. His eye fell upon a coil of rope hung round a
loose hoop of the tilt, and morbid thoughts of using it—whether on the
young men or himself was not clear—floated vaguely in his usually
serene soul. Presently he noted other coils on other ribs, and their
plurality suggested it was for the young men, not himself, that rope was
appropriate. What else were they there for, he wondered dully? Yes, let
her fiancés go hang: engagements could always be broken off—nothing
venture, nothing have!
To nerve himself for the great question he took advantage of the pause
at Long Bradmarsh while Methusalem was drinking at the trough of “The
King of Prussia.” But this imitation of Methusalem on a stronger fluid
was fatal, for in Jinny’s persistent silence, the animal’s tick-tacks
now grew soothing: he settled himself more comfortably on the emptier
floor of the cart, with his head on a soft bundle, and watched the nape
of Jinny’s neck till it faded into a great white sea of floating ice. He
was struggling in it for hours, but at last the cold waves passed over
his head, and Jinny, turning to throw out a parcel, saw that his cap had
fallen off in his writhings, leaving his baldness almost indecently
glaring.
So deep was he in his daymare that he was quite unaware of Jinny’s
colloquy with another male whom her horn had hailed as they passed over
the bridge to Little Bradmarsh. Not that there was anything in Ephraim
Bidlake to excite apprehension, for he was a stalwart Peculiar, safely
married, and residing with his family and two twin-nieces of his
wife’s—Sophy and Sally—on board the billyboy whose great boomless
black sail Jinny had espied darkening the water with its shadow.
Bidlake’s barge was a cross between a Norfolk wherry and a ferry-boat,
and plied up and down the Brad, loading at the wharves with its
half-lowered mast for crane, or carrying man and cattle across the
bridgeless sections when it had nothing better to do. There was not much
money coming in at the best, and it was often Jinny’s privilege to eke
out the barge’s larder under pretence of presents for the motherless
Sophy and Sally, so tragically fathered. For Ephraim Bidlake, a shaggy
giant with doglike eyes, had brought the “little furriners” from
Hampshire when their mother died after their father—Mrs. Bidlake’s
brother—had been transported to Botany Bay for burning a rick in some
old agricultural riot against the introduction of machinery. The blot on
their scutcheon had been concealed from the new neighbourhood, but had
been gradually confided by Mrs. Bidlake to Jinny with protestations of
her brother’s innocence—had he not been made a constable in the very
convict ship? By degrees, too, she had conveyed to the girl a vivid
picture of the trial and deportation. For the devoted sister had walked
the bulk of the way to Winchester, in the hope of proving his innocence
by collecting testimonies to his character, and had joined the mob of
weeping women who hung round the gaol gates night and day, or crowded
the court, only to witness the sanctimonious cruelty of the bewigged
judges, and the tragic exodus of the damned in the prison coach, guarded
by a file of soldiers, to lie in the hulks at Southampton till they were
shipped to savage Australia, there to be assigned to brutal stockowners.
It was an experience which had cost Mrs. Bidlake dear; her next child
had been stillborn, and to this day she had never reared but one more
infant, and that a still delicate one. But for the comfort of the
Peculiar faith it would have been a cheerless household. She was now
again brought to bed: it was to inquire about her that Jinny had hailed
the barge, and very sad she was to learn from Brother Bidlake—when he
had punted within earshot—that the new baby had succumbed after a few
hours, though the “missus,” thank God, was recovering and the twins were
“wunnerful good and helpful.” She was not sorry, however, that the
undoctored infant had departed with a precipitation which rendered an
inquest unlikely, for inquests were the bane of the Brotherhood.
IX
It was twilight when Methusalem drew up again before the twin doors.
This time Caleb did not fail.
“Sow glad you ain’t brought the wet!”
“But I have—he’s snoring inside,” Jinny called down.
“Lord!” said Caleb, taking another look. “Oi did see his head, but by
this owl-light Oi thought ’twas a cheese.”
Jinny’s laugh rippled out and Elijah Skindle started up and sneezed. He
looked round dazedly for his cap.
“We’ve arrived?” he asked shamefacedly, clapping it on.
“Yes,” said Jinny, “but the pig’s all right. I fear you’ve had a wasted
journey.” She jumped down.
“Wasted?” He sat up ardently. “Don’t say wasted.”
“A good nap _is_ a comfort,” she agreed.
“I may have dozed off—your singing rocked me to sleep, I reckon. But
all the while I’ve been trying to tell you——” His voice broke.
“I know,” she said softly. “I heard you.”
“Did I talk in my sleep?” he asked innocently.
“Through your nose.”
He winced as at a blow on it. “That’s—that’s nature,” he stammered: “I
don’t suppose even females are free from snoring.”
“Maria isn’t,” observed Jinny, patting Methusalem.
Martha hurried out happily, with a piece of sugar for the same favoured
beast.
“Maria’s been walking with me!” she cried rapturously.
“And eating hearty,” added Caleb. “If you ask me, she was drunk.”
“Oh, Flynt!” cried Martha. “Aren’t you ashamed to speak like that about
your own pig; and before strangers?”
“But that rolled and kicked last night same as a sow Oi seen once that
swallowed a thick wine. Happen Maria got swillin’ at old Peartree’s
beer-barrel!”
“How could she do that?” Jinny protested.
“Turned on the tap like a Christian. Same as your Methusalem opens our
gate.”
Elijah picked up his pipe and his cap and scrambled down. “Appears to me
I’ve been brought here under false pretences.”
“We’ll pay you all the same,” said Caleb with dignity.
“But how am I to get back to Chipstone?” He had followed Maria in
reckless abandonment, and now came the prose of life with its questions.
“If we’re going to pay the gentleman,” put in Martha, “he may as well
have a look at Maria.”
Mr. Skindle agreed it was as well to make a possible future patient’s
acquaintance, but repeated his inquiry.
“There’s Shanks’s mare,” said Jinny blandly.
Caleb pointed towards the brook. “It’s onny seven miles by Swash End
through Plashy Walk.”
“Plashy Hall has a dog,” objected Elijah.
“Well, you’re used to dogs,” said Jinny.
“My instrument-case is too heavy. You’ll have to give me a lift to your
house.”
“With pleasure,” she said. “But Blackwater Hall is still farther from
Chipstone.”
“Anyhow I can get a trap from the village,” he said firmly.
“No, you can’t, and even if you walk to Long Bradmarsh it’s a toss-up if
you’ll get anything at ‘The King of Prussia.’”
“Well, take me as far as the bridge—I’ll pay extra.”
“I can’t guarantee Methusalem will go back.”
“That’s all right,” he said cheerfully. “Horses know I stand no
nonsense. And now, Uncle, as soon as I’ve lit my pipe, I’ll be ready for
the pig. Got a match?”
To his disgust, Caleb produced a lucifer and a phial of sulphuric acid
for dipping it in. The now well-established friction matches—that boon
to the idle and extravagant—had not yet reached Frog Farm, where even
flint and steel had been dispossessed but slowly. But the relit pipe was
comforting.
“Wait a moment, Mr. Flynt,” said Jinny, tendering a packet as he started
convoying the vet. “Your neckerchief!”
“Neckerchief!” cried Martha. “And what about my new bonnet?”
“’Twas only to be cleaned,” Caleb reminded her. “And by the same token,
mother, don’t forget we settled the wet was to read the letter.”
Elijah raised his eyebrows.
“Ah, yes—I’ll get it.” And Martha hurried within.
“You see, Jinny,” Caleb explained, “the missus got a letter from Cousin
Caroline, and we thought the gentleman here could make one job of it
with the pig.”
“But why can’t I read it?”
“You ain’t married.”
“No more is Mr. Skindle.” Elijah flushed furiously.
“Noa—but ef it’s too—too womanish, Oi’ll arx him kindly to break it to
me, sow Oi can break it to the missus when he’s gone.”
“Is this the letter?” asked Jinny, as Martha reappeared with it.
“That’s her—came all of an onplunge,” he repeated.
“But that’s not from your Cousin Caroline!” said Jinny, with a thrill of
excitement as she took it.
“Noa?” gasped Caleb, as if the world was tumbling about his ears. Then
he smiled. “You’re making game—you ain’t opened her yet.”
“But who else is it from?” cried Martha, catching her excitement.
“Can’t you see? It’s from Will.”
“Will!” Martha gave a great cry, and clutched at the letter. “My baby
Will!”
Caleb scratched his head. “Now which would be Will?”
“Will was the freckled, good-looking one,” said Jinny.
“Oh, Jinny,” said Martha. “They were all good-looking—took after Flynt.
Dear heart, you can’t ha’ forgotten our tot after all that flurry. ’Tis
only seven or eight years since he——”
“Ay, ay,” cried Caleb. “Him what mowed the cat’s whiskers.”
“No, dear heart, that was Ben.”
“To be sure. Ben’s the barber in New York—or some such place.”
“No, Caleb. That’s Isaac.”
“Isaac? Then Will ’ud be the one what married the coffee-coloured lady.”
“I told you the other day that was Christopher.”
“Ay, him in Australia.”
“Africa surely,” put in Elijah, puffing at his pipe with superior
amusement.
“They furrin places be much of a muchness,” said Caleb. “And my buoy-oys
were as like as a baker’s dozen.”
“There were girls in the batch,” corrected Martha. “But how you can
forget that dreadful Sunday night, you who snipped the darling’s
buttons——!”
“If I don’t see the pig soon,” interrupted Elijah, losing patience, “the
light’ll be gone altogether.”
“Oi’ll git a lantern,” said Caleb placidly. “Oi often used to set and
wonder how they lads knowed theirselves, the one from the ’tother. Well,
the Lord bless ’em all, says Oi, wherever they goo, and whichever they
be.”
“So you see,” said Jinny, with a faint blush hardly visible by
owl-light, “there’s no need to waste Mr. Skindle’s time over the
letter.”
“No more there ain’t!” said Caleb dazedly. “Come along, sir!”
X
But Martha still clung strangely to the letter she had snatched back.
“You mustn’t strain your eyes, Jinny,” she said. “I’ll light the lamp.
And you’ll take a cup of tea first. You must be tired out.”
“But I can see quite well,” said Jinny. Indeed the sky, despite the
risen moon, remained blue, and splashes of dying sunset burned magically
through the yet empty branches of the quiet trees. There was a great
sense of space and peace and beauty: a subtle waft from the stacks; the
note of the thrush was full of evening restfulness. Jinny took the
letter from the reluctant Martha.
“He must be back in England!” she cried. “Look at the stamp.”
Martha staggered against the cart. “It’s very good of God,” she said
simply.
Her emotion communicated itself to Jinny. Through misty eyes the girl
watched a solitary heron winging on high through the great spaces, its
legs sticking out like a tail.
“Ah, dearie,” said Martha, recovering herself, “never forget, to say
your prayers.”
“I don’t,” said Jinny with equal simplicity. But she remembered with
fresh remorse that she had forgotten those for the runaway.
“Ever since I was a little girl,” said Martha, “I’ve wanted to please
God. But of late, Jinny, I fear I’ve wanted Him to please me.”
“Well, now He has,” said Jinny. “You’ll have Will as well as Maria,” and
plucking out a hairpin she inserted it to rip open the loose
wafer-closed envelope.
“Stop!” cried Martha. “Suppose it’s bad news.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Flynt! Look how firm the writing is.”
“Firm—yes, he always was firm—even before he drove off with the cart.
Don’t you remember that night—no, ’twas before your grandfather fetched
you to these parts—he wasn’t seven, but that pig-headed he sulked in
the wood all night—roosted up a tree like a bird, and never a move or a
word when we came halloaing with torches!”
“Well, he’s not hiding now, for the postmark’s London and——”
“No, don’t open it yet, Jinny—suppose he should be married like
Christopher!”
Jinny laughed uneasily. “Two black daughters-in-law aren’t very likely.
Much more likely she’ll be blonde.”
“No, he can’t be married,” said Martha on reflection. “He never could
abide girls. I don’t mean you, dearie; you scarcely had your second
teeth, had you?”
Jinny began to rip the envelope. “We shall soon see.”
But Martha snatched away the letter again. “I’m sure you’ll spoil your
pretty eyes,” she persisted. “Day-stars, Will called ’em once.”
Jinny laughed still more uneasily. “Then I ought to be able to read by
’em. But I’ll light my night-star.” And she moved towards the cart-lamp.
“It isn’t your lighting-up time yet, is it? You don’t want to be
wasteful.”
“Well, come in and light me a candle a moment.”
“You seem in a great hurry to read it!” said Martha fretfully.
“Me?” Jinny flushed furiously. “I thought you’d want to hear what he
says.”
“Don’t I know what he says? That he is in England again and coming to
see his old mother? Isn’t that enough for one night?”
“It’s a great deal, certainly. But suppose—he wants something.”
“Ah, that’s true!” Martha was visibly perplexed. She did not herself
understand the suddenly awakened jealous instinct that resented Jinny’s
superior acquaintance with Will’s handwriting, that was subconsciously
urging her to hug this letter to her bosom and not share its sacred
contents with a girl she at last—especially after Bundock’s recent
innuendo—realized as grown-up, and who seemed, moreover, to be claiming
a co-proprietorship. And so it was difficult for her to frame an
objection satisfactory to her conscious intelligence. But the letter was
now in her possession, and that was a strong asset for her
subconsciousness.
“’Tis a pity to _tear_ open such a beautiful envelope,” she said. “You
have your cup o’ tea. I’ll steam it over the kettle.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t time for tea, especially having to take Mr.
Skindle a bit back,” said Jinny, almost as mystified as Martha herself.
“I’m late already, and Gran’fer will be roaring for his supper. I must
read it now or never.”
“If it was anything unpleasant,” wavered Martha, “Flynt would be very
upset. And after sitting up all night with Maria—no, he must have a
good sleep—better put it off till the morning.”
“To-morrow, I won’t be here. No, not till next Friday.”
“But I’ve got to go to-morrow to Miss Gentry and she can read it.”
“Oh!” said Jinny.
“Yes, Flynt wants to have my bonnet cleaned—vanity and waste, I call
it.”
“But won’t that tire you—such a long walk? Why can’t I take the bonnet
to-night? I’ll be passing her house.”
“We haven’t finished talking it over yet, Flynt and me,” parried Martha.
“I might be having a new bonnet, you see, dearie.”
“Well, of course, it’s just as you wish. But suppose it rains
to-morrow.”
“Rains?” repeated Martha, feeling—she knew not why—like an animal at
bay. Then she drew a great breath of relief. Footsteps and voices were
borne towards them. “Caleb!” she cried joyfully, “Will’s in London—he’s
coming to see his old mother.”
“Good buoy-oy!” cried Caleb jovially. It was only what he had expected
the letter would say, but at heart he shrank from the change—he had
finally equated himself to the dual solitude, and the home-coming
prodigal loomed as menacing as Cousin Caroline.
“Good boy?” echoed Martha. “I should think he _is_—never cared for
girls. And still unmarried.”
“There’s a chance for you, Jinny,” chaffed Caleb.
“Oh, how can you talk such nonsense!” Jinny was furiously angry.
“Basket, Nip,” she called sharply, and climbed up to her seat almost as
swiftly as he leapt into his.
“Are you coming, Mr. Skindle?” In her abstraction and to busy herself
about something, she automatically removed the parcel of stones from the
driving-seat.
“In a jiffy.” Elijah did not bound as obediently as Nip—he could not
lose the chance to pontificate before her. “Not at all so well as you
think, Mrs. Flynt. We experts can see what even the breeder can’t. Keep
her upon corn and peas—give her just soft stuff.” And he vaulted not
ungracefully to Jinny’s side.
“Thank you, sir,” said Martha, impressed. “Have you paid him?” she
inquired of Caleb in a formidable whisper.
“Dedn’t Oi say Oi’d pay him for nawthen?” he answered still more
audibly.
“Well, take off your hat for good-bye.”
“But Oi ain’t inside,” said the obstinate, if confused, Caleb.
Jinny cracked her whip fiercely, and Methusalem joyously turned his nose
for home.
“Good night, Jinny. Thank’ee for reading Cousin Caroline’s letter,”
Caleb called after the receding vehicle.
XI
It was symptomatic of Jinny’s new mood that she scarcely noticed that
Mr. Skindle now shared her sacking. Her mind was wandering again over
the ground covered by the Sunday-school wagon, and certain birds’ eggs,
losing their later cloud of guiltiness, lay suffused with childhood’s
holy light. Methusalem went unguided through quiet ways. The large, low
moon, a pink clown’s face, peered through leafless elms and gradually
grew golden. To the right of the winding road rooks cawed persistently,
and once a small flight flew towards the cart; to the left more
melodious birds whistled slow, high notes, or thrilled and gurgled
plaintively, or scurried off, startled, as the cart passed. One kept on
crying “Quick, quick, quick,” with a metallic sound as of shears
snipping the grass, but Methusalem was not to be hurried. There was time
to admire wherever a thatched cottage made a picturesque point or a pond
mirrored the dying sunset; time to savour the subtle balm, where
hayricks stood at the far margin of fields. Sometimes a little pig would
run round terrified and finally squeeze itself under the fence, or a big
gander would stand and hiss. Sometimes the road narrowed to a Gothic
nave, but for the most part there was nothing but a far-diffused sense
of keen air and great flat spaces, the dark blue circle of sky with
rolling white clouds, the large green fields with their distant border
of thin trees; a view unclosed and unbounded save by the horizon, though
impalpably veiling itself as they journeyed.
Elijah Skindle’s mood had changed no less than Jinny’s. Though he now
sat in the coveted proximity to her, and could propose to her profile
instead of her nape—and her bonnet was of the narrow-flanked pattern,
condemned by the more prudish of her sex, that left the profile
visible—he was subtly conscious that he was really farther from her
than before. Even when the delivery of the few remaining parcels
necessitated a slight thawing on Jinny’s part, the whole spirit seemed
to have gone out of the adventure. It was grown tasteless as a
thrice-warmed dish. The very horn had lost its thrill. Even if he found
a vehicle at “The King of Prussia,” he was thinking, it would be an
expensive trip: they might charge him all Caleb’s half-crown. He found
himself morbidly counting the coils of cord—there were five in all, he
made out. And when the rooks he called crows sailed towards him, they
gave a still more sable hue to his thoughts. He counted them, too,
remembering how his peasant mother—now installed as his
woman-of-all-work—used to curtsy to a solitary magpie, and the rhyme
she taught him about the crows: “One’s unlucky, two lucky, three is
health, four is wealth, five is sickness, and six is death.” Odd that
matrimony was not mentioned, unless it was included in “two.” There were
certainly five crows, he thought dismally—a sinister coincidence with
the coils of cord. Then, cheering up, he interpreted the omened sickness
as that of the local live-stock, a sickness greater than Jorrow could
cope with, and he reflected that after all Jinny’s was a hard and
toilsome life and her frigidity was perhaps due to its never occurring
to her that he was willing to raise her to his status. Perhaps she
thought he was just itching to take liberties. Well, he could understand
her coyness: other men might indeed exploit such a chance; but he, he
assured himself again, was a gentleman.
“That’s a slow couple,” he said, boldly breaking the long silence.
“Seems to me they fly as fast as the other rooks,” said Jinny.
“I mean the Flynts,” he said.
“Oh!” said Jinny.
There was resentment in her tone. She had not liked his calling Caleb
“Uncle,” understanding well the urban contempt that lurked in declaring
oneself a rustic’s nephew, and feeling, too, that however slow in the
uptake Caleb might be, his wealth of homely crafts, knacks, instincts,
life-wisdom, and nature-knowledge gave him a richer and deeper quality
than this pert townsman. But Elijah persisted in his urban appraisal.
“No go in them!”
“Dear old turtles!” sighed Jinny. “But so long as they go at the same
pace——!”
“Ah!” he said eagerly. “You believe in like to like?”
“Well, fancy a turtle married to a hare!”
“But a pair of hares now—?” He seized his opportunity. “You and me,
eh?”
“Speak for yourself, Mr.—Bunny!”
“I’m paying you a compliment, Jinny, classing you with me for smartness.
There isn’t a girl from Bradmarsh to Chipstone that can hold a candle to
you. So that’s why, seeing a man must marry somebody sometime, and
looking around as becomes a man who’s getting a bit—a bit——”
“Bald?” prompted Jinny blandly.
“And what does that matter?” he said, too intent now to be fobbed off by
raillery. “The point is that with the practice and position I’m getting
now, it would be a good lift for you.”
“I thought I was giving you a lift,” said Jinny icily.
“So you were—so you are—in that sense. But I didn’t need even that. My
nag wasn’t really lame. I only made an excuse to talk this over. See?”
“A very lame excuse,” flashed Jinny.
“There was never any way of talking to you—you always so busy with
parcels and me with patients. I’m not one of your flirting kind with
fancy waistcoats, I want to settle down, and I’ve taken a favour to
you.”
Even Jinny’s ready tongue had no repartee to this massive complacency.
She could only articulate: “Have you, now?”
“Yes, I have. And I’d like to see you driving of a Sunday in my smart
trap. Come, what do you say?”
“Thank you,” she said coldly. “I’d rather stay in my old cart.”
“But it’s such a shame—you so spruce and spry—tied to this ramshackle
cart, when you might be adorning a higher sphere and sitting in my
parlour instead of being at everybody’s beck and call.”’
He had chosen precisely the worst form of appeal. Confronted with this
picture of parlour-stodginess, her rôle of Jinny the Carrier—Jinny the
pet and friend-in-need of the countryside—seemed infinitely dear and
desirable. And what subtly added to her anger was some dim presentiment
in herself of other forces coming into her life, forces threatening to
emerge from their picture-past, and to trouble the placid current of her
career. Like Caleb she shrank from change. To shuttle for ever ’twixt
Bradmarsh and Chipstone; with her grandfather, Nip, Methusalem, all
immortal and unchanging as herself—this was all she asked of heaven:
this and not too much rain and wind.
“You want me to sit in your parlour?” she cried in white revolt.
He took off his cap and bowed gallantly: “In silks and satins.” Then
suddenly realizing his baldness, he clapped it on again.
“And give up my work!” There was an ominous light in Jinny’s eyes. But
love is blind! Even the bats now beginning to swoop in the dusk could
see more clearly than Elijah.
“I promise you you shan’t do a stroke!” said the fatuous young man. “As
the wife of a veterinary surgeon, you’d be a lady.”
“And what would become of Gran’fer?”
“He’d have warm corduroys and plenty of gruel in the Chipstone
poorhouse.”
“You heartless knacker! Get off my cart. Whoa! Methusalem, whoa!”
“How you fly at a man! I’ve already got my mother living with me, and
she and your grandfather wouldn’t get on, being of a different class.
But I’d be willing to pay his rent and get a woman to look after him.”
“Nobody shall look after him but me. And his business—who is to look
after that?”
“Don’t worry. Some other carrier’ll crop up.”
“There isn’t going to be any other carrier here but Daniel Quarles,
understand that.”
“Well, if you think you’ll find anybody to marry your grandfather——”
he said sullenly.
“Who wants to marry? I shall never give up the road.”
“If you’re so fond of driving, there’s always my trap.”
“No good setting traps for me. I’ll hang in a cage in no man’s parlour.
I must fly about in the woods like now—free!”
“Birds in the woods are sometimes hungry,” her wooer reminded her.
“Suppose your business falls off—or things go to famine prices like
five or six years ago. The gallon loaf ain’t always a shilling. Ten
years ago I remember flour was two and ten the stone, and that only
seconds, and tea was five shillings. With me you’d be sure of the fat of
the land always—there’s no difference with me ’twixt Sundays and
weekdays.”
“Oh, it’s a stuffed bird you want for your parlour.”
“Rubbish, I’ve got six stuffed birds in my parlour—in the loveliest
glass cases!”
“But they don’t sing!” And Jinny burst mockingly into a song that had
hitherto been a mere tune to her:
“_I’ll be no submissive wife,_
_No, not I——_”
He lost his temper. “Oh, you needn’t make such a fuss over yourself. I
dare say I can find plenty of wives—with my connexion.”
“Among pigs?” she said sweetly. She jumped down and began to light the
lamp. “This is your getting-out place.”
“It’s nothing of the sort—I go on to the bridge.”
“Impossible. My horse is lame.”
“I know all about that.” And snatching up the reins she had dropped,
“Gee-up!” he called suddenly.
But Methusalem knew better.
“You’ll never get home that way,” said Jinny, smiling.
“Then how the hell——?” he began furiously.
“Shanks’s mare,” she reminded him again. “That’s not lame.”
He gave her a long, nasty look as though meditating the law of the
stronger. But he tried pleading first.
“By the time I walk home, my mother’ll have locked up; thinking I’m
sitting up with a patient.”
“There’s the poorhouse!”
He winced. “You’ve got to carry me,” he said sullenly, “or I’ll have the
law on you.”
“There’s no law to make me carry aught save goods.” And she sang on
carelessly:
“_Should a humdrum husband say,_
_That at home I ought to stay——_”
The little voice, rippling through those demure lips, wellnigh stung him
to close her mouth with the masterful gag of kisses, but a remnant of
sanity warned him not to spoil a fine animal practice by a scandal.
Besides Jinny had her whip, and what was still more formidable, her
horn.
“I’ll be even with you for this!” And jumping down, he strode off
furiously.
“Hullo! Mr. Skindle! Hullo!”
“Keep away from me!” It was at once an appeal and a warning.
“Don’t you want your case of instruments? Not that you’ll be in time to
kill those poor horses to-night.”
With an unsmothered oath he turned back and clambered into the interior,
upsetting Nip’s basket in his fury; the result of which neglect to let
sleeping dogs lie was that the unsagacious animal mounted growling guard
over the instrument-case, as before a burglar.
“You’d best get it for me,” he said sullenly. “And by the way, how much
do I owe you?”
“Never mind,” she said blandly, handing him his burden. “You promised to
be even with me.”
“The little vixen!” he thought, as he trudged towards a farm where he
remembered doctoring a horse. “She ought to be put in the ducking-pond!
What a lucky escape!”