COMEDY OF CORYDON AND AMARYLLIS
_Among the rest a shepherd, though but young,_
_Yet harten’d to his pipe, with all the skill_
_His few years could, began to fit his quill,_
_Willie he hight. . . ._
_Fair was the day, but fairer was the maid_
_Who that day’s morn into the green-woods stray’d._
_Sweet was the air, but sweeter was her breathing,_
_Such rare perfumes the roses are bequeathing._
BROWNE, “Britannia’s Pastorals.”
I
It was the shepherd-cowman, and not Jinny, who delivered the horn to
Will. She had “happened of him,” Master Peartree explained tediously, in
the remote field to which he had taken the sheep to feed off the winter
barley. “Powerfully trumpeting” for him with it just when he was looking
for fly, when indeed in the very act of discovering a maggoty rump, she
had besought him to convey that “liddle ole horn,” she being so late and
Gran’fer likely to be “in a taking.”
Now this “liddle ole horn”—when Will saw Master Peartree and his
sheep-dog coming along in the evening light—he took to be the
shepherd’s crook or his great umbrella folded, so lengthy did it loom,
and when he perceived that it was what he was expected to perform on, he
was taken aback. It was not that he had not seen coach-horns in plenty,
but he had seen them in their proper environment and at their proper
altitude, their elemental straightforwardness making an exhilarating
right-angle with the guard’s mouth, a sort of streaming pennon. But a
coach-horn in its bare quiddity, quite as tall as the shrunken old
shepherd, and hardly a foot shorter than Will himself, dissociated from
jovial visions of scarlet, rum-soused visages and spanking steeds, was
as ungainly to behold and as awkward to handle as it was difficult to
explain away. Evidently the jade had bought him the largest size on the
market; he knew not whether to be flattered or vexed at her idea of the
appropriately virile. But to send it by this alien hand—to make a
village wonder and scandal of it! How, indeed, was he to explain to the
bucolic mind his sudden passion for the instrument? Flutes and
concertinas folks could understand, even tin whistles; but what could a
man looking round for a farm want with a colossal coach-horn? He was
glad at least he had met Master Peartree out of sight of his parents.
There was a note attached to the case, and he opened it the more eagerly
that it delayed the explanation which Master Peartree seemed to his
morbid vision to be grimly awaiting.
“SIR,—Mr. Daniel Quarles has pleasure in forwarding per favour
of bearer Mr. William Flynt’s esteemed order. Bill enclosed. I
hope you will find the stature agreeable to you—it was only by
casualty I got such a protracted one, and as the compass
protracts with the stature you could easily educe three octaves
from it. Half-tones of course I shall not expect as without
holes only a musical Arabian spirit like my granddaughter can
evoke them, but when you can play the ‘Buy a Broom’ Polka with
concinnity, I shall consider the gloves fairly conquered.
“I remain
“Yours obediently,
“DANIEL QUARLES.
“P.S.—The mouthpiece unscrews being mutable, so I can exchange
it for another, if this does not suit Mr. William Flynt’s lips.”
How the deuce was he to play a polka he had never heard, especially
“with concinnity” (whatever that might be), was the dominant thought in
his perturbed brain. But as Master Peartree seemed still expectant—was
it even of a tune?—Will stooped down to pat the dog, whose black-tipped
tail was hoisted like a friendly signal. It was a ragged animal just
between two coats—a canine counterpart of its shabby, straggly-haired
master—but Will caressed it like a velvety lapdog while he inquired
carelessly—his horn tucked like a telescope under his arm—how the
Carrier had carried herself, what exactly she had said. But he only
provoked—after the briefest glimpse of the girl—a rambling narrative
about a sheep that had broken its arm in a “roosh,” in the panicky
restlessness of the thundery Sunday: it had fallen down a steep and
another had rolled on top of it. And even with this “meldoo” the sheep
were so pernickety you could do naught with ’em. Doubtless in this
cloudy heat they felt the weight of their wool—he should be shearing
some for the early market as soon as they could get the labour, which
was not easy in these migrating days. Even young men who came back lazed
about, he added pointedly, when they might be earning good money. Will
hastened to inquire whether the shearers were as merry at their work as
he remembered them. He could never forget the beautiful bass voice of
Master Peartree, but he supposed time had now abated its resonancy, or
was he mistaken? He _was_ mistaken, he admiringly admitted, for the
ancient was soon quavering out in a piping voice:
“_There was a sheep went out to reap_”
and Will, beating time with the great horn, was solemnly singing the
chorus:
“_Chrissimus Day, Chrissimus Day_”
And now would the famous singer oblige with the “Buy a Broom Polka”?
Alas, he did not know it, with or without “concinnity”! But young Ravens
might know it, he who was as full of tunes as a dog of fleas, and with
his perpetual flow of melody made bread and tea like harvest suppers,
and shearing days as jolly as Chrissimus. But where was this musical
box? Alas! he had “gone furrin,” being somewhere beyond Southend. But
master expected him back for the shearing; he was a rolling stone, was
Ravens, but he usually rolled back this time o’ year. No, not rolled
with liquor, nor yet like the sheep that broke its arm. Had it been a
fat sheep, he would have butchered it, but as it was only store he had
set the arm himself. No, he had no need of a vet. for that, like the
degenerate young shepherds nowadays; he wouldn’t be beholden to
cattle-doctors, not he, keeping for ever o’ salts and gentians and
bottles of lotion in his hut, although “suspicioning shab”—it might
even be rot from the river-marsh—in one of the sheep which he had just
been examining for fly, he had taken the opportunity to ask Jinny to
send round Elijah Skindle. ’Tis a long talk that has no turning, and
Will, when the narrative thus came, by a wide detour, back to Jinny,
ceased fidgeting with the horn, and demanded what she had said to that.
It transpired that she had refused to order Elijah, despite that Mrs.
Flynt had recommended him as cheaper, alleging, drat her, that Jorrow
was the better man. Will, curiously forgetting Mr. Flippance and his
horse, concurred in the view that carriers cannot be choosers. He also
started another current of indignation against carriers getting other
folks to fetch and carry for them. Would the hard-working shepherd, who
was too easily put upon, kindly not encourage the girl in future to
shirk her job?
Touched by the sense of his own magnanimity and the sixpence slipped
into his palm, the good shepherd promised to repress his obligingness in
the interests of the higher ethics, and Will, bidding him farewell,
slipped behind the row of stag-headed poplars opposite the gate of Frog
Farm, and strove—before entering the house—to adjust his horn down his
trousers and up his back. It was no easy process with such a
“protracted” object: fortunately it was thin, save at the swelling end,
but by keeping this bulge below, he could avoid humping his back. To
walk with such a ramrod up it and adown one leg would, however, have
taxed the talents of the most graceful damsel training for deportment.
He hobbled painfully to the rear of the farmhouse, designing to hide the
horn before entering, but lo! there was his mother filling the food-pot
of his neglected ferrets.
“Oh, my poor Will!” she exclaimed. “I told your father you’d have
rheumatics—sitting in chapel in your damp clothes.” She tried to take
him pitifully in her arms but he limped away, fearing she would imagine
his backbone had come outside.
“It’s only one leg a bit stiff,” he said ungraciously. But she hooked
her arm in his and drew her halt offspring towards the back door; a
brief but parlous journey, for he felt the horn slipping towards his
boot.
“Why, your ankle’s swollen,” said Martha tragically.
“It’ll soon go down,” he assured her.
A terrible struggle agitated the maternal heart. Even Will, preoccupied
with his grotesque position, could see her face working.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to have the doctor?”
“Oh no, mother. What nonsense!”
Her clouds lifted a little. “But this may be Jinny’s evening for
coming—I could tell her to go for him to-morrow.”
“To-morrow it’ll be better—I feel certain, mother.”
She beamed. “I’m so glad you’ve found faith, dearie. I knew when once
you began studying the texts you couldn’t miss it. King Asa, too,
suffered from his feet. But he sought to the physicians and displeased
the Lord. Have no confidence in man, dearie. There’s days I get pains in
my side as if my ribs grated together. But I’d be afraid to put myself
out of the Lord’s hands, after I’ve trusted to Him all these years.”
Will winced. He seemed to himself vaguely blasphemous. As soon as he was
alone in his bedroom, the swelling was transferred to the capacious box
so miraculously carried from Chipstone. He dared not descend to supper:
so speedy a miracle might have seemed _too_ “Peculiar.” But next morning
(after a family breakfast which was for his elders a veritable feast of
faith) he stole out with the horn and his fishing-rod and creel to the
river, which in the watches of the night he had decided upon as the
loneliest spot for practising, while the open ramshackle boat-house,
where the rusty punt usually nested, was to afford a hiding-place for
the instrument.
It was worth while going down that pastoral slope these days, even were
one not bent on music, solitude, and the winning of gloves. In weather
so prematurely sultry, the river was so sweet and still and green, with
its shadowy reflections, its blobs of duckweed, the sedges and flags
along its banks, and the willows—grey-white or silvery—along its
borders: gliding so tranquilly in its reaches and lapping so lazily
round its islands that only at bends did the water seem to flow at all.
In the undulating meadows that sloped to it, silted with cow-droppings,
Master Peartree’s kine lay around chewing, and the sense of brooding
heat gave to the landscape a dreamy magic, suffused with a sense of
water.
It was to this idyllic retreat that our Tityrus or Corydon repaired to
essay his metallic pipe. And, standing on the bank like a watchman, his
horn to his lips, “Tucker, tucker,” he breathed industriously into the
unresponsive instrument. In vain did he lip and tongue the notes as
instructed, nothing broke the sultry silence. Surely the mouthpiece
could _not_ suit Mr. William Flynt’s lips. Suddenly, in his shamed
impotence, he had a sense of a breathing presence. In his agitation the
horn slipped from his nervous fingers and went souse into the water,
while the startled beast—for the observer proved to be only one of
Master Peartree’s cows—lumbered bouncingly back along the pasture.
Fortunately the instrument had lodged in the shallow mud of the bank.
Fishing it up—it was his sole catch that week—he found to his joy that
it emitted a faint toot, and he rightly divined that a little water was
just what it had needed. Encouraged by this intervention of Providence
in his favour, his performance bore henceforwards some proportion to his
pains.
It was embarrassing though to return from these painful puffings without
a single bite. Every dinner-time he had to sneak in as best he could
with empty basket after a morning of pertinacious tooting, successful
enough to frighten off the deafest fish. Once, indeed, going home by a
somewhat roundabout route that skirted Blackwater Hall, he chanced on a
Chipstone fishmonger serving Long Bradmarsh, and was able to take home
some fruits of his rod. But the only time our piscatorial swain ever
tried for an honest bite was when he saw or heard somebody or something
coming along. Then, drawing in his horn like a snail, he presented the
picture of the complete angler. Usually it was only Bidlake’s barge that
disturbed his strenuous solitude, and the transient mockery of the twins
was for the futile fisher, not for the unsuspected musician. Not even
Master Peartree’s cows ever munched their way again to the bank while
the horn was at its fell exercises, for, like the horn which the fairy
Logistilla presented to Astolpho in “Orlando Furioso,” its blast seemed
to put all creation to flight. His sole auditors were a pair of swans
who refused to quit their normal haunt, though they hissed him fiercely.
Possibly they were accustomed “to hear old Triton blow his wreathèd
horn,” and so had a standard of musical taste. Is not the swan’s own
song, too, celebrated, though it appears only to perform before it dies,
as if to evade criticism?
But however soundly the swans might hiss, Will, after three days of
red-faced rehearsal on the pleasant bank of the Brad, felt ready to
challenge his female critic in all save the polka she had set for
examination, and this he determined—after failing to hunt it out—was
no fair part of the wager. A whole evening he had spent reknitting the
thread of old acquaintanceship with carolling cottagers, gleaning much
gratitude for his kindly attentions, but not the melody he was after,
and being forced politely to abide while gaffers piped “Heave away, my
Johnny,” or gammers ruthlessly completed “Midsummer Fair” or “Dashing
away with the Smoothing Iron.” However, he could now turn out such
complicated military flourishes that he excited his own military ardour,
and felt like marching in his thousands, and doing such deeds of
derring-do that the lips of all the damsels of Essex would vie to change
places with that mouthpiece. It was high time then that this particular
damsel should understand how vain was her hope that he could be baffled
by a tube. Though he might not know that polka, he was sure that
whatever “concinnity” might be, he could perform with it, and impatience
began to steal over him at the delay in the test performance. For if
Jinny had fobbed him off with the shepherd on Tuesday, she evaded
service altogether on Friday. Even Nip might conceivably crop up with
some small groceries tied on to him, and he could not try it on the dog.
Also, unless he saw her soon, the cattle fair would be upon them, and
she still unsaved. He must, with the relics of his copybook paper,
compose a new note, formally citing her to stand and hear, and deliver
the gloves.
But it was not easy to fix the place for deciding the wager. The
riverside meadows she could not well get at in her cart, and for her to
come specially on foot was hardly to be expected, in view of her
household labours. To cut her off and perform to her on a high road was
to run risks of being publicly ridiculous: even by-ways have ears.
Suppose his nerve or his breath failed, suppose some impish accident
muffled up the horn: there would he be with swollen cheeks, a mountain
in labour, producing not even, a mouse-squeak; the mock of man and
beast. But there was Steeples Wood—not too far back off the high road,
but approached by a tangly brake that few ever penetrated: there—if he
could persuade her to it—was the ideal place for the great horn solo.
In a postscript he would express his willingness to take off her hands
the purchase of the Showman’s horse. To convey all this by
correspondence involved almost as much effort as the practising, though
his renewed call upon the Bible came to Caleb and Martha as the natural
sequel of his faith-cure. It was no small feat of composition, this
particular letter, in face of a people, which, however abundant its
horses, appeared to have had neither “wagers” upon them, nor “gloves,”
riding or other.
II
That gloves were unknown to the ancient Hebrews, Will could hardly bring
himself to believe, even by hours of searching, especially after coming
upon a Fashion Catalogue for Ladies, which showed a surprising wardrobe.
Bonnets they had, it would appear, and headbands and tablets and
changeable suits of apparel, and mantles and wimples and crisping pins
and fine linen and hoods and vails, and mufflers and girdles and
stomachers: as for their jewel-cases, they seemed stuffed not only with
rings and ear-rings and charms and bracelets and moony tires, but
likewise with jewels that dangled at the nose or tinkled at the feet.
How then should so elegant a world have dispensed with gloves? But
so—after scouring the sacred Book from Genesis to Revelation—he must
finally fain believe. Not a single patriarch, priest, satrap, shepherd,
physician, apostle, publican, or sinner had ever sported gloves, and the
Queen of Sheba fared no better in this respect than the Witch of Endor.
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed with even one of these. The
Pharisees, it would appear, covered their foreheads with
phylacteries—whatever these might be—but left their hands bare. And
yet, Will thought wistfully, reading so early in the sacred Book how
Rebekah “put the skins of the kids of the goats upon Jacob’s hands,”
they might surely in all those centuries have gone on to the idea of
gloves, especially for winter wear. But no, thousands of years after
Rebekah, the knuckles of Dives were apparently as raw as those of
Lazarus. Oh, why had he not betted something Biblical—a muffler now
would have suited either sex: even handkerchiefs were available. Not
that he could not risk spelling “gloves” to accord with “loves,” which
he found with no great difficulty in the holy text: he felt it romantic
to throw himself thus trustfully upon “love,” even should it prove
misleading.
Yet the search was not altogether vain, for though he could find no
gloves, the prophets, he found, were full of exhortations to Jinny,
which he carefully dog-eared and committed to memory and kept up his
sleeve for contingencies. “How canst thou contend with horses?” Jeremiah
asked her. Ezekiel warned her against the cattle-dealer. “By reason of
the abundance of his horses their dust shall cover thee.” As for Isaiah,
he remarked plumply: “Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of
vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope.”
To himself, on the other hand, the prophets were kind; abounding in
promises for the prosperity of his horn. And it was Amos who supplied
his letter with its opening sentence, abrupt but dramatic:
“Can two walk together except they be agreed?”
But the letter written, there was the problem of sending it. The
intervention of either Bundock or Daniel was intolerable. He must find
an individual way. One verse that he came upon—it was in the Book of
Esther—enchanted him with its images, telling how Mordecai wrote an
order in the King’s name “and sealed it with the King’s ring and sent
letters by post on horseback, riders on mules, camels, and young
dromedaries.” How he would have liked to seal his letter too with a
royal ring, and send it “by post on horseback.” He had a vision of the
long procession of mules, camels, and dromedaries filing along the
grass-grown lane to Blackwater Hall. How old Daniel would rub his eyes
at the strange humped beasts—yes, and Jinny too. She would perhaps
think that Mr. Flippance had acquired a new show and was paying her a
processional visit. Possibly these animal images did lead him to the
invention of his postal method, or possibly it was his prior
apprehension of Jinny’s utilizing Nip as a package-bearer. At any rate,
after having wondered whether Martha’s pigeons could be trained up in
the way they should go, he hit on the device of tying his note to Nip’s
collar. The creature was friendly, and that Saturday afternoon it would
be at home. He would only have to hover long enough around Blackwater
Hall for his post-dog to fawn upon him. Of course there was no certainty
the dangling missive would escape Daniel’s spectacles, but Nip being
providentially of the colour of paper, it was possible heaven had not
blanched him in vain. Besides, this time the note was carefully
addressed to Miss Jinny Quarles, with the “Quarles” scratched out by an
afterthought when he remembered that it was not her name.
But, alas! Nip did not play up; that longed-for quadruped did not appear
in the purlieus of the Hall. Will, tired of carrying about the note,
thought again of sticking it up in the stable and ventured near, but his
fear of encountering Daniel Quarles was too lively, and finally he
essayed—with some obscure remembrance of Bowery melodrama—to fix it
gleamingly in the fork of a tree by which Methusalem stood when
harnessing and unharnessing. To his amaze a chaffinch flew out of the
fork in violent protest, while her gaily coloured consort dashed up from
another quarter, crying “U-whit” at him like an avine Flippance. Peeping
into the hollow of the fork he saw a couple of rather belated
youngsters, ugly, bald-headed, and featherless, apparently new-hatched
and almost savouring of the egg: yet when he touched them with the note,
opening great eyes and yawning with yellow beaks and kicking each other
with skeleton legs. But before he could bethink himself of a new
posting-place, lo! as sudden as the chaffinches but far more welcome,
with a yelp of joy and a perpendicular tail wagging like a mad pendulum,
Nip was upon him; and having succeeded with a desperate bound in licking
the tip of his stooping chin, rolled himself on mother-earth with
voluptuous grunts. Will profited by this supineness to attach the note
by the thread he had passed through it.
The new postal system was a success. For when Will after high tea
sneaked out to the Common and sounded his horn—with a happy combination
of challenge, salute, and signal—Nip actually appeared with a reply.
It was, however, unsatisfactory. Miss Boldero—the very name, though he
divined it denoted the same Jinny, came like a glacial blast—presented
her compliments to Mr. William Flynt, but she had no time to be romantic
in woods (she said) nor, even at their homes, could she ever pay more
than volant visits to anybody, and that strictly in the way of Daniel
Quarles’s business. He could almost always find her at Blackwater Hall
except Tuesdays and Fridays, but she trusted he would not be too turgid
and thrasonical about his playing, even if his contumacious serenade
should be puissant enough to extort the pair of gloves.
All these strange words came, of course, from “The Universal
Spelling-Book.” Will, though he would still have refused to toot before
her grandfather, might have felt less crushed had he known that in that
ancient authority, “romantic” was defined as “idle.”
III
It is possible that persons of strict ethics—like Miss Gentry,
say—would have lost sympathy with Jinny in these epistolary efforts of
hers to stand on tiptoe, so to speak, and write beyond her education.
But in thus titivating her style with gems of speech she knew not to be
false, she was moved by the necessity of countering an overweening,
overbearing, interfering young man, who was subtly assuming a sort of
critical wardenship over her and her life: he needed a good vibration
(“_shaking_ or _beating_”), she must teach him by her gelidity
(“_coldness_”) to be less conversant (“_familiar_”), and that she was
quite his parallel (“_equal_”). He must be made to feel that her company
was not to be had for the rogation (“_asking_”), in short that she was
no housekeeping ignoramus to be ridden over by world-travelled wisdom,
however genuine. No, she was not going to incurvate (“_bow or bend_”) to
Mr. William Flynt.
This rigidity was the more necessary as, ever since in that thunderstorm
his hand had tightened on hers—or was it the reverse?—the lightnings
seemed to pass through her, the reverberations to shake her, whenever
she thought of him, and even when she did not. What there was in him to
rend her thus elementally she could not understand; doubtless it was the
memory of the storm now for ever associated with him. He seemed—it was
perhaps his life of adventure—to be in mystic unison with tempests and
floods and that sea-creek of her childhood, now remembered exclusively
as tossing and white-flecked. Even when she was turning over her
Spelling-Book to find words to “vibrate” him with, it was the pages that
vibrated: when she copied its gelid trisyllables, she felt her hand
again in his, and her quill quivered as if the lightning were going
through it.
And even Miss Gentry, though she would have derided Jinny’s new
vocabulary, might have admitted that there was a laudable side to her
pursuit of learning: the Spelling-Book itself overflowed with
commendation of such scholastic zeal. Jinny no longer knitted or sewed
in her evening hour of leisure. It was occupied—even after the
concoction of the grandiose letter—in a feverish study of the volume
neglected since her first scholastic period. She must make herself a
greater intellectual power, she felt: she must master all human
knowledge. And that all human knowledge lay in the hundred and fifty
pages of this little book, our simple village girl, who was not romantic
in any sense of that word, who, except for Bible and hymn-book, had
never read a book—not even a novel—and who approached life with senses
fresh and virginal, sincerely and crudely believed.
Nor was the pose of “The Universal Spelling-Book” calculated to
dissipate her delusion. This wonderful work, which was now destined to
become Jinny’s guide, philosopher, and friend, had nothing in common
with those shallow productions of a later period, concerned mainly with
correct combinations of letters. Dating from the age of folios and
exhibiting, despite its diminutive size, the same solid solemnity, it
did really take all knowledge for its province. (You learnt, for
example, how to make the very ink you spelled with—and although you may
rarely have possessed those best blue galls of Aleppo which formed the
base of black, still you might hope to get the three pints of stale beer
that were the substratum of red.) And not only all knowledge, but all
morals formed the farrago of this book. Well might it ostentate among
its “Patronizers” clergymen, private gentlemen, philomaths, writing
masters, and heads of academies.
Originally published—as already related—in the year of the Lisbon
Earthquake, and creating apparently as great a sensation (in England at
least), it constituted an _omnium gatherum_ so peculiar and extensive
that there was no earthly (or heavenly) subject you could be certain of
not meeting there, though there was one subject you could be certain of
never escaping, for it cropped up in the quaintest connexions—and that
was Virtue.
As the author—who hailed oddly from the Royal Exchange Assurance
Office—justly claimed in his dedication to the Right Honourable
Slingsby Bethell, Esq., Lord Mayor of the City of London, and One of its
Representatives in Parliament (an encourager of everything tending to
“the Practice of Piety” and “the Good of Mankind”), it was designed to
do more than barely teach the young idea how to spell. “To inculcate
into the Minds of Youth early Notices of Religion and Virtue, and to
point out to them their several Duties in the various Stages of Life”
was no less its aim. “And I should be very thankful,” explained His
Lordship’s obliged, obedient, and most humble servant, “should I prove
an instrument in the Hand of Providence in preventing but one of the
rising Generation from falling a sacrifice to the pernicious Doctrines,
secret Whispers, and perpetual Insinuations of _Popish_ Emissaries.”
It was a passage that had always swelled Jinny’s bosom with emotion and
the vow to ensure the gratification of this saintly aspiration by
supplying in herself the minimum one member of the rising Generation to
baffle these minions of the Scarlet Woman. It had been at first a little
bemusing to reflect that for her Peculiar friends, the Established
Church was little less pernicious: still, fended by the double buffer of
her sect and Protestantism, she had thus far resisted the Emissaries she
had never encountered (for certainly the Rev. Mr. Fallow, whatever the
Chipstone curate might say of his Puseyite practices, had never tried to
pervert her even to the Establishment).
With three generations brought up on this pious pabulum—the copy from
which Sidrach the Owler had educated himself for smuggling was already
beyond the fiftieth edition—-it seemed strange that the century should
have had any declensions from virtue to note; that papistry should have
progressed was incredible.
If in her dim, childish way, Jinny had ever felt a jarring note in this
treasure-house of virtue and information, it was the assumption that
both these existed primarily for little boys. True, among the
fascinating woodcuts was one depicting little girls at school, but even
there the mistress occupied the stiff chair, while the Dominie of the
boys’ school, majestic in a full-bottomed wig, sat throned on a chair
with arms. “A good child will love God,” she read with humid eyes, only
to be pulled up short by “he will put his whole trust in Him.”
Everything seemed to be masculine, from God downwards: there was no
place for women even in punishment: to be “well whipt at School and at
Home, Day and Night”—a recommendation she found it difficult to
reconcile with the definition of “Ferula,” as “_a foolish Instrument,
used in some Schools_”—was a Nemesis held out only to the boy who
minded not _his_ Church, _his_ School, and _his_ Book. Such a one would
live and die a Slave, a Fool, and a Dunce. But as to the fate of bad
little girls there was a mysterious silence. Even for their goodness
there was no sure reward: for though presumably they were included in
the well-behaved who would be clothed in Garments of Gold and have a
Crown of Gold set on their Head, while Angels rejoiced to see them,
these joys were never definitely attached to an exclusively feminine
pronoun. A virtuous “woman” appeared once to her relief, but it was only
to be a crown to her husband. Even in the foot-notes Jinny could not
find a female. “If the young learner has learnt to read these lessons
pretty perfectly,” said one note, “let him go over them once more.” As
for the Useful Fables, it was the boy that stole Apples or went into the
Water instead of going to School; and when it came to the longest story
of all, “Life truly painted in the Natural History of Tommy and
Harry”—the story that professed to show “Youth the ways of life in
General,” and did indeed show how wickedness wrecks you on the Coast of
Barbary, where you are torn to pieces by wild beasts as per woodcut,
while the pattern of Virtue and Goodness still lives happy—it appeared
that even a realistic picture of life may be complete without girls.
IV
Behold, however, Jinny—despite her sex—embarked on a learned career,
and burning the midnight oil in her fat little lamp instead of curling
up in her chest of drawers. Puckering her brow she sat on a squat wooden
arm-chair in that dun papered living-room, imbibing virtue and
information, till the Dutch clock in the outer box-room startled her
with its emphatic declaration of the hour, and the cracked mirror
revealed eyes heavy-lidded. Far out over the Common streamed the
curtained light of that midnight oil, for the shutter could not be
closed, owing to a pair of blackbirds that had set up house in the
eaves. Jinny had found one of the young fallen on the grass: she had fed
it with morsels of meat which it swallowed with great yellow gulps,
following up the meal with a fluted grace. She had restored it to its
nest—touched to mark the domestic virtue of its co-incubating parents.
It had grown quite big now and flown hoppingly away with short sharp
cries, but Jinny still cherished the nest and felt no need of the
barring shutter. In the silence the creakings of the cottage often
sounded like footsteps outside, but Jinny was not nervous, and a real
footstep would rouse Nip, she knew. Sometimes, these warm May nights,
she heard the cuckoo keeping hours as late as hers, sometimes the
nightingales would sing passionately in the lane. There was one, she
knew, that niched in a mutilated, ivy-swathed trunk bordering on the
Common, and she would hear it answering the faint melancholy calls from
afar with throbs and gushes of melody as well as with a series of quick,
piercing notes. And sometimes when the air was clear she could hear the
distant church clocks. But all these sounds, like Nip’s and the Gaffer’s
snoring, were but a restful accompaniment to the acquisition of
omniscience: even the nightingale, in her ignorance of literature,
failed to romanticize her thoughts, painfully bent on mastering all
there was to know.
Meanings, we have seen, played a great part in these studies:
“Dollar—_a Dutch coin_”; “Engineer—_an Artist_”; “Gambadoes—_a Sort
of Boots_”; “History—_an Account of Things_”; “Interview—_Mutual
Sight_”; “Logarithms—_Artificial Numbers_”; “Mahomet—_the Turkish
Impostor_”; “Replevin—_a Writ so called_”; “Stolidity—_Foolishness_”;
“Tarantula—_a Baneful Insect_”; “Valentine—_a Romish Festival_”;
“Upholsterer—_an Undertaker_”; “Zodiac—_a Circle in the Heavens_”:
such were the strange vocables she kept muttering and misunderstanding:
believing indeed that “Paramour” was merely a grander word for “_Lover_”
and connecting divorce with “Schismatic—_one guilty of unlawful
separation_.” It pained her to meet the “Sadducees—_a People that
Denies the Being of Angels_,” slurring, as did these unimaginable
heretics, the status of her own mother. Surely it was for such that
“Damnation—_the punishment of Hell Torments_” had been designed.
Punctuation too she studied, growing learned in Apostrophes, Asterisks,
Carets, Crotchets, and Obelisks; other hours were devoted to Grammar,
Tenses, Degrees of Comparison (always between good and better _Boys_),
Genitives, and even Scraps of Latin. Pronunciation, however, was her
great stumbling-block. How was it possible to keep one’s feet in the
chaos, say, of four-syllabled words, each accented on a different
syllable? Antiquary, Ambassador, Affidavit, Animadvert—it was
heart-breaking and head-splitting. Her memory, so marvellous when
vivified by realities, broke down before this procession of shadows.
With what relief she turned to the rich riot of “Moral and Satyric
Poems”—though her sex was still distressingly ignored, and through
every loophole the eternal male popped up.
_He most improves who studies with Delight_
_And learns Sound Morals while he learns to write._
Still, where “Swearing, Gaming, and Pride” were rebuked in lashing
lines, she was not sorry to find the petticoat conspicuous by its
absence. It was a rare joy to come on Queen Anne in a “List of
Abbreviations” under the unexpected guise of A.R.; in the list of kings,
too, she appeared again, together with Mary and Elizabeth; not a large
proportion, Jinny thought, rejoicing at the Victoria unforeseen by the
learned author, whose “Chronological Account of Remarkable Things”
stopped, like her friend Commander Dap’s, at the Battle of Trafalgar.
This table was indeed one of her favourite pages—it gave her, she felt,
a bird’s-eye view of all history—and with her head for figures she
never forgot that the Ten Commandments and the Ten Plagues were given in
1494 B.C., and that the sun stood still at Joshua’s word in 1454, while
Daniel was in the Den of Lions in 536. She was puzzled, though, at the
destruction of Troy which intervened between Joshua’s interference with
the sun and Saul’s anointment. Of the twenty-two great events that
preceded the Christian era, this was the only one that the Bible forbore
to mention. Subsequently to Christianity things seemed to her to have
moved fast, for up till the year 1600 alone, fourteen “remarkable
Things” occurred—two-thirds as many as had happened in the whole
previous 4007 years since the world was created—while after 1600,
extraordinary events sprouted like blackberries, no less than fifty
crowding to their grand climacteric in Trafalgar.
In these fifty she was glad to see included the Confutation of Popery by
Martin Luther—a personage with whom Miss Gentry had made her
familiar—and she thrilled almost with local pride to find “Arts and
Sciences first taught at Cambridge, 1119,” for the Cambridge carriers
sometimes penetrated eastwards as far as Chipstone itself. As a carrier,
indeed, she was immensely excited by the “Eleven Days successive Snow”
of 1674, the “Frost for thirteen Weeks” of 1684, “The Terrible high Wind
of November 26, 1703,” “the great and total Eclipse of the Sun, April
22, 1713,” and the “severe Frost for nine Weeks” beginning on Christmas
Eve, 1739. She could vividly sympathize with the unfortunate carriers of
those days, and she did not wonder that these brumal phenomena should
form so great a proportion of the few score happenings of Universal
History, for frosts and winds must be terrible indeed to be recounted as
on a level with the shooting of Admiral Byng, the American Declaration
of Independence, the Birth of the Prince of Wales, and the “Attempted
Assassination of George III at Drury Lane by Hadfield, a lunatic.”
These studious vigils were invariably wound up with a prayer from this
same limitless thesaurus: on her knees by the transmogrified chest of
drawers, and with her hair hanging down her back, and the lamplight
falling on the coarse grey-typed page of the Spelling-Book, Jinny
repeated one or other of its masculine supplications, prose or verse,
and only a cynic (“Cynic—_a Sour, Crabbed Fellow_”) would have laughed
at the solemnity with which she swallowed all those motley lucubrations,
whether lay or clerical. An impromptu prayer for her grandfather was
invariably slipped in, for this holy book of hers finished as terribly
as the Old Testament, and what made it worse was that this awful
culmination of the Spelling-Book was printed in black-letter. It was a
gruesome recital of the miseries and follies of “the Seven Stages of
Life”—none of which seemed worth living even with the correctest of
spelling, while death seemed worth dying to escape the depravity and
decrepitude of the final stadium. But although her grandfather, with all
his peevish humours, could hardly be counted so steeped in sin as the
old man of the text, while his infirmities were still rudimentary, yet
the physical prognostication was terrifying—“_for when we come to those
years, that our Eyes grow dim, Ears deaf, Visage pale, Hands shaking,
Knees trembling, and Feet faltering, then it is evident the Dissolution
of our mortal Tabernacle is near at Hand_.”
Jinny could never read those dreadful words but she would creep
anxiously to the foot of the dark, twisting staircase and listen for the
reassuring sound of the Tabernacle snoring. And if she bore so patiently
with his whims and crotchets, not none of the credit must be given to
this sanctimonious Spelling-Book.
V
While Jinny was thus pursuing omniscience and equipping herself to meet
the masterful young man, and while the young man in question was adding
the mastery of the horn to his conquests, their roads failed to cross.
Jinny went to chapel the Sunday following the thunderstorm, but Will was
too alarmed by the communal expectation of public autobiography to
venture there again, and his parents were only too glad to ignore his
home-staying and to resume their private Christa-peculiar-delphian
service, being sufficiently fortified by his preoccupation with the
Bible. What had driven Will to the Book again was the outrageous
appearance on Saturday night of Uncle Lilliwhyte as parcel-bearer.
Recovering from his relief that the parcel did not contain snakes, but
the conventional household stores, Will found himself angry on his
mother’s behalf. What right had Jinny to foist such a fusty ragamuffin
upon them, the gay strings of whose rotting beaver only accentuated his
griminess? Jinny must know that his mother ranked uncleanliness next to
ungodliness. And Uncle Lilliwhyte would be a fixture too, unless
violently shaken off—he was Jinny’s neighbour; as natural a go-between
as Will’s own neighbour, Master Peartree. He had already bribed off the
shepherd: must he be blackmailed by both?
And so, while Essex was at prayer, Will was concocting a furious
Oriental epistle, demanding a clean envoy, if Jinny was too lazy to come
herself. This was not so difficult to demand, though laziness seemed as
unknown to the Hebrews as gloves. He had dallied, indeed, with his
original idea of fetching the household parcels from Chipstone himself,
but somehow he could not bring himself to so complete a severance of
relations with Jinny, especially as after the appearance of Uncle
Lilliwhyte in the new rôle of goods-deliverer, his mother had
surprisingly suggested that to spare Methusalem’s legs, the old
nondescript might always in future bring the weekly parcel for a penny
or two. Will had put this suggestion emphatically aside—it would mean
exposing his mother to a contact she detested—but he wound up his
letter to Jinny by threatening to become his own carrier unless the
service was conducted with propriety. Nip duly returned that same Sunday
afternoon with the answer that if he would send his esteemed order in
writing, Mr. Daniel Quarles would have pleasure in executing his
commission through a scrupulously scoured ambassador. Will started
replying instantly that it was not _his_ order: let her mark that he was
not the householder, merely the “scribe.” To write out the order,
however, gave him unexpected pause. Who could have realized that
“parrafin,” “sope” and “shuggar” were alike unenjoyed by the heathen
Jews? A pity that Frog Farm was itself so “flowing with milk and honey”:
with what confidence he could have drawn on the resources of Palestine!
True, one might dodge—lamps and oil were abundant enough in Judæa, and
purification and sweetness could be suggested with airy allusiveness.
But in the end he only wrote grandly, “Household order the same as
uzual.”
Before this order had been executed, however, chance brought about a
meeting. Not that Miss Gentry, near whose wayside cottage it occurred,
would have called it chance. For that deft needlewoman, besides
believing in her own stained-glass miracle, cherished, as we know, a
naïve faith in “Culpeper’s Complete Herbal”—a faith doubtless sustained
by the attacks on the Pope or on infidel physicians that might lurk
snakelike in its most innocent-seeming herb. Under the stimulus of this
elementally indelicate work—never permitted to stray from her bedside,
though imparted in filtered form to Jinny—she would tie woody
nightshade round her neck for her dizziness, and buy watercress from
Uncle Lilliwhyte to wash away pimples with the juice. And if these herbs
were, as Culpeper testified, under the respective governance of Mercury
and the Moon, how much more so human life! Miss Gentry had indeed
remarked to Will that very afternoon (when he at last brought his
mother’s bonnet to be “bleached as good as new”) that her own horoscope,
cast in infancy by her aunt, had shown that the first time she went upon
a voyage she would be drowned: a reading whose infallibility her happy
survival demonstrated, since she had never been foolish enough to set
foot upon a vessel. “But for the deciphering of this horoscope,” she had
pointed out, “I should surely now have been drowned, for I am naturally
as fond of voyages as you.”
It must be admitted that if Miss Gentry had thus pathetically perished,
Will would not have taken his mother’s bonnet to her, nor met Jinny that
afternoon. But then would he have met Jinny but for the foolish sheep?
Even the ovine fates, it would appear, are interblent with the human.
This sheep suddenly dawned upon Jinny’s vision as Methusalem with his
cunning nose was trying to open a gate that led over a private road, on
either side of which its fellows grazed. Preoccupied with the task of
clasping Nip so that he should not frighten the flock in his passage,
she did not at first observe that in the gap between the hinge of the
gate and the post, a sheep’s head was jammed, and that Methusalem’s
success in lifting the latch bade fair to asphyxiate it. The silly
creature, having escaped from the flock, had evidently tried to jump
back again through this gap, at a point just large enough to admit its
head, and with the failure of the leap, the head had descended into the
narrowest portion and there remained in pillory. In the creature’s
terror at the approach of the cart and Nip’s excited barking, its
efforts to free itself became more convulsive than ever. Checking
Methusalem in the middle of his pet trick, and fastening up Nip, Jinny
jumped down and with soothing words seized the head of the frantic
sheep, which was still thrusting itself backward and forward, though
without the sense to jump upwards towards the broader space. But alas,
its spasmodic struggles prevented her from getting a sufficient grip on
it to lift the wedged and weighty head. She saw its ear was torn and
bleeding, and to her imagination it was going black in the face. She
looked round desperately. On the other side of the gate lay the flock,
scattered apathetically over the pasture they had reaped and manured,
chewing a tranquil cud, like self-righteous citizens before the
writhings of one of their own black sheep: of a good Samaritan or
shepherd there was no sign. She climbed over the gate and strove to lift
the agonizing head from the other side, but she only increased the
sufferer’s frenzy as well as Nip’s.
“Be quiet, Nip!” she shouted, almost hysteric herself. And as she raised
her eyes to admonish the yapping terrier, she espied to her joy a
puffing pipe and a stick advancing towards her cart; whether a young man
or old she was not aware. He was simply man as saviour, and he was at
the gate and working at the rear of the struggling head before she had
quite realized it was Will, and a certain added pleasure at the sight of
this man in particular had scarcely time to well up before it was
swamped by the far greater pleasure of seeing the sheep deftly released.
It staggered, however, as Will let it go, and lay sideways on the road,
gasping, and Jinny observed with horror a raw ring round its throat
where the wool was cut through as by a cord. But before she could get
through the gate to its assistance, it had risen feebly, and as she came
towards it, it trotted off timidly. Vastly relieved, she tried to coax
or chevy the truant back to its companions. But it refused to go: on the
contrary, it retreated, and in solitary self-sufficiency began to crop
the wayside grass.
“Hasn’t spoiled her appetite!” said Will, with a laugh.
“They don’t seem to feel things as much as us,” agreed Jinny.
“No, indeed.” He knocked the ashes out of his pipe and pocketed it.
“Fancy, if you’d got your head nipped like that!”
There seemed something aggressive in the suggestion. “_I_ should have
known to lift it up without waiting for a man,” she said.
“All very well, but when one’s head’s caught, one is apt to lose it: one
struggles blindly.”
“We’re not all like sheep to go astray,” she said uneasily. “But thank
you for your kind help.” She jumped up and drove slowly through the
gate. He closed it behind her and ran to open the gate at the opposite
end of the private road.
“Thank you again,” she said, passing through.
“But surely you’ll come into the wood now you’re so near,” he cried
through the arch of the vanishing tilt.
The cart unexpectedly slackened, Jinny’s head was turned backwards. “If
you won’t be long,” she said.
He shut the gate briskly and kept pace with her slow progress along the
leafy lane towards the wood-path they both knew. Nip, untied, sprang to
fawn at his feet, and then bounded into the hedge after something smelt,
and barking raucously, wormed his way along like a weasel.
“Why didn’t you come, Will?” said Jinny softly.
“Why didn’t you?” he evaded. “Why did you send Uncle Lilliwhyte?”
“I didn’t come because you didn’t,” she answered simply.
“I—I—your grandfather,” he stammered. “I couldn’t well play before
him.”
“You mean you couldn’t play well,” she flashed.
“That’s all you know about it. I can blow better than Dick Burrage.”
“Then why be nervous of poor old Gran’fer? He might have been umpire.”
He was shocked again. “Good gracious, Jinny! Where did you get those
betting words from?”
“That’s my affair.” She pursed her pretty lips. “But never mind—however
you blow—you’ve deserved a pair of gloves to-day—in sheepskin.”
He smiled. “I’m not above taking two pairs.”
“If you win!”
“Of course I’ll win.”
“Don’t brag. Save your breath for your blowing. We shall soon be there.”
“Oh, but I’m not going to blow now,” he pointed out.
“Not now? Then why have you lured me here?”
“But how could I guess I should meet you? How could I lure you? You
could see I hadn’t got my horn.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Jinny murmured.
“It’s big enough,” he said grimly.
“Then I certainly shan’t go into the wood. I’m much too busy. Good-bye,
Will.” She flicked her whip, but ere Methusalem could quicken a leg, a
terrible yelping came from the bushy hedgerow—it was the voice of Nip,
but not of Nip the hunter, rather of a hunted, trapped Nip.
“Oh, poor Nip!” And in a moment Jinny had leapt down and was peering and
pushing into the hedge. But she could penetrate scarcely at all: the
wood behind was firmly guarded by a broad chaotic belt of thistle and
nightshade, burr and bramble, furze and stinging-nettle, a veritable
riot of prickliness; and this thorny tangle had closed upon
Nip—trespassers prosecuted indeed!—though it was a relief to his
mistress to find the trap was natural, not wickedly human. Stuck full of
burrs, and looking like a spotted pard, her pet was shrieking for first
aid. But even while she was hesitating to pierce farther, despite her
gloved hands, Will brushed by her, thrilling her with the sense that
this was his second feat of animal salvation; while the woodland savours
and the rich prodigality and ruin of nature—for dead wood lay around as
profusely as rank vegetation sprouted—seemed to stir in her the same
sense of elemental forces as the thunderstorm. She scarcely noticed that
Will had the aid of his stick in parting the jungle, and when he
restored the whining animal to her arms, gratitude and hero-worship
mingled in her emotion, though for a moment she was too occupied in
picking Nip clean to say much, while Will, for his part, was engaged
with equal industry in removing thorns from his sleeves and burrs from
his trousers.
“Oh, you’ve hurt yourself!” she said at last, catching sight of blood
and scratches on his hands and wrists.
“It’s nothing.” He tried to pluck out something from a finger.
“Shall I help you?” She pulled off her driving-gloves, took his finger
and squeezed at the flesh, perceiving the microscopic protrusion of the
thorn, but her own fingers were shaking and she could not extract it. He
said it did not matter, it would work out; then he started sucking it.
She somehow would have liked as with a child to kiss the place and make
it well—the whole back of his left hand seemed reticulated in red—but
instead she carried Nip back to his basket in the cart. He, too, was
scored in red, though he did not seem to mind any more than the sheep.
As she bent over her scratched pet, Will came up to the tail-board,
still sucking at his finger.
“I shall need gloves now,” he said, glancing with comic ruefulness at
his scratches.
“You poor hero!” she said, with eyes softly flashing. “I _will_ come
into the wood and you shall win them.”
His face lit up; then fell. “But how?” he asked.
“Isn’t there _my_ horn, silly?”
He laughed gleefully. “You’re right to call me that.” She leaped down,
the horn dangling at her girdle, and fastened Methusalem to a tree. “Not
that he’s likely to move: still his head _is_ homewards.” Methusalem’s
head, however, was already grasswards: he was munching with gusto, while
his great tail swished at the flies.
“But suppose somebody steals the parcels!” said Will with sudden
compunction.
“This isn’t Babylon—or America,” said Jinny witheringly. “Besides,
there’s Nip.”
Only a few yards farther was the opening they had been making for, but
they now found it almost as overgrown as the entry chosen by Nip, and
had it not been for the rare fern-leaf elders in the hedge, that marked
their memory of the spot, they might have passed it by. “Might be in
Canada,” said Will. However, he pioneered with his stick, and, following
him closely, she had a sense of safety and protection unknown since the
days she was escorted from chapel. It was quite strange—yet not
unsweet—to be thus guarded from the venomous vegetation thrusting at
her from all sides, and she was not sure she was relieved when the
menace and novelty were over, and they were in the wood. The struggle,
moreover, had made the humanized part of the wood, on which they
emerged, somewhat tame. The grove of young ash, beautiful as the slim
silver-grey trunks were with their new green livery—too light to cast a
shadow—suggested commerce to both of them, and the suggestion was
emphasized by the charred remains of a bonfire of elm-loppings, and by a
deserted charcoal-burner’s hut in a clearing. But poetry had gathered on
the mossy stumps of other trees, long since felled, and they came down a
wonderful azure river of bluebells running as between wooded green
banks. As they waded through the tall thin stalks, they chanced here on
a patch of late-lingering primroses and there on green advance waves of
foxgloves, with their long leaves. Primrose, bluebell, foxglove—what a
beautiful succession, thought Jinny. How marvellous was earth in its
changing loveliness, and Heaven in its unchanging bounty! On another
slope, crowned by Spanish chestnuts, glittered a stream purling down to
lose itself in scrub. Here rosemary was in bloom, humming with bees, and
yonder was broom, its yellow blossoms showing against a lighter green
than the earlier gorse, which flowered in great golden clumps.
“The gorse looks fine,” said Jinny.
“And smells finer,” said Will. “Let’s sit down.”
“Not here,” said Jinny, coyly shrinking. “There’s nettles.”
“They’re dead!” he said, grasping their yellow brittleness. But they
walked on.
They came over baby bracken and crisp beechnuts to a sort of ring
surrounded by blushing young oaks, and little silver birches with their
flat green leaves, and tall aspen-trees, and one lonely mountain-ash
with white flowers. Overhead, early as it was, the moon had long been
hanging at three-quarters, white and magically diaphanous: a
dream-planet. Unseen wood-pigeons purred, and a tomtit was singing.
“Here!” said Will, beginning to sit down.
“No, no!” She clutched his arm to keep him up. “An ant-heap!” This time
her shyness had found sounder cover.
He gave a comical “Oh!” and stood watching the squirm of seething life,
absolutely black at the central congestion, where ants walked
indifferently under or over one another: they were like the moving
grains in an hour-glass, Jinny thought. Will poked his stick into the
great piazza.
“Don’t,” said Jinny.
“I’m not hurting them.” The ants were, in fact, already using the rod as
a causeway. “Why, they’re like you, Jinny!”
“Like me?”
“All carriers and all busy.”
She laughed, and followed their movements with a new sympathy, though
she was rather disgusted by those that carried dead flies or dead ants.
“Those are not carriers—those are undertakers,” she insisted.
They sat down at last on a mound of spongy moss, free from formic
activity, and there was a silence. The little purling stream was too far
off to break it, but they heard a chaffinch and the peep-bo-playing
cuckoo, with that golden human note that floats through the warm,
brooding May. And then the irrepressible and unbasketable Nip came
rushing and tearing, not making straight for them, but appearing and
disappearing like a giant fungus in the rich masses of blues or greens
or yellows.
He made an opening for conversation, and presently when he came
snuggling into Jinny’s arms—poor scotched creature!—an opportunity for
joint patting and petting: a process in which hands do not always
succeed in partitioning out the pattable and pettable surface rigidly,
but graze and brush each other, and even lie passively in abstracted
contact.
“Why shouldn’t I buy this wood?” said Will, after one of these sustained
manual juxtapositions.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” said Jinny.
“Yes—I must settle something soon. Those aspens, though, I’d cut ’em
down. They’re only a weed. And yonder ashlings weren’t planted quite
close enough—you’ve got to make ’em fight for air if you want ’em
straight enough to sell.”
Jinny was vaguely disappointed at the turn of this conversation; not
following the romantic dream vaguely underlying it.
“But could you afford to buy such a big wood?” she murmured.
“Big wood? Why, in Canada you get forever of land for nothing!”
“Then why didn’t you stay there?” she asked.
“This is better than America,” and his hand touched Jinny’s too
consciously.
“Why, what was the matter with America?” she murmured, withdrawing the
hand from Nip’s flank with a little blush.
Everything was the matter with America, it appeared. He was, indeed,
more anxious to explain how nothing was the matter with Essex, but under
Jinny’s physical bashfulness and intellectual curiosity he found himself
headed off his native county and kept closely to Transatlantic
territory. And under the spell of her eager attention he was soon
discoursing fluently enough, sketching a discreetly selected picture of
his adventures, beginning with the emigrant sailing packet in which he
had gone out as a stowaway, but wherein he fared little worse than the
emigrants proper, who in the first six of the thirty-seven days’ voyage
had had none of the stipulated provisions served out to them, despite
their contract tickets, and no meat during the whole voyage. They had
had to be satisfied with their daily water and the right of cooking, and
complaints were met with oaths from the officers and doctors, and
sometimes even with fists or rope-ends from the sailors. Once or twice
the hose had been turned on them, but there were over nine hundred of
them, he said, so she might imagine the Babel and confusion, though
there were two great passenger decks on which the tallest man could
stand, and on whose shelved sides they could all find sleeping-space,
with never more than six to a berth. And then from the moment America
had burst upon the vessel in the guise of touts, runners, and employers,
all anxious to mislead or enslave, he had borne through the continent
the banner of a steady disapprobation.
In the States, where his first clutches at Fortune had been made,
peculiar perils awaited the British immigrant. If he gravitated, as was
natural, to the cliques and boarding-houses of his countrymen, he was
likely to be soon “used up” by the gambling and drinking sets that
feigned to make him welcome. And if he escaped this pitfall by his
resourcefulness, he would strike the native American prejudice against
English immigrants, popularly supposed to consist of the paupers and
wastrels whom the parish overseers of Old England, anxious to be quit of
the burden of supporting them, bribed with free Atlantic passages and
dumped on the struggling New World: a prejudice, Will admitted
laughingly, which his own purse had done nothing to diminish.
At first he had got a job as car-driver and fed at the market-houses,
but though the food was good and cheap, the company was rough of manner
and language. And even when he was earning good money—at a boot-store
with the sign of a gigantic boot made of real leather reaching to the
first-floor windows—he had disliked the “go-along-steamboat” pressure
of existence, and the Mechanics’ Boarding House where gabbling Yankees
gobbled at a pace both unhealthy in itself and unchivalrous to the
unpunctual. The habit of loading the table with all the courses
simultaneously took off the edge of his appetite if he was early, and
left only universal ruins if he was late. He had no patience with clams
that were not oysters, egg-plants that were not eggs, and corn that had
to be munched cow-like. Accustomed to the clean linen of the paternal
farm, he loathed the insect-ridden bedrooms one divided with a varying
number of strangers. He liked to see pigs, but not perambulating and
scavenging the streets; why, in New York they were more numerous than
the dogs! Providence had designed tobacco, he opined, for smoking and
not for chewing; and saliva for swallowing, not for spitting.
It was, in fact, a most unpleasant America that loomed up to Jinny’s
vision that day, especially in contrast with this lovely wood,
overbrooded by the white moon now growing faintly golden: a sort of
spittoon of a continent, mitigated by dollars and dancing. Even in
Canada, for which Will had felt a more personal
responsibility—accentuated by the British soldiers to be met at every
turn—and in which he gladly picked out points of superiority to the
States, a similar sense of massive untidiness had weighed upon him and
jarred every home-born instinct.
He tried to convey to Jinny the desolation of zigzag rail-fences that
took the place of these hedges now glorious with hawthorn and
fool’s-parsley and the starry stitchwort; the raw settlements, the
half-built log huts hardly superior to yon derelict charcoal-burner’s
hut (their windows stuffed sometimes with old straw hats), the
unachieved roads, full of mud or dust, the ubiquitous stumps that were
once trees, the piles of logs that were not yet habitations, all that
crude civilization arising shoddily out of the virgin forest on the sole
principle of the cheapest practicable, with nothing whole-hearted but
the lust for dollars. Caleb Flynt’s slow English conservatism, Caleb’s
unworldly standards, spoke again through his son. But even Will was too
inarticulate to put his feeling precisely into words—and when Jinny
reminded him that in this very wood trees had been cut down and burned,
and that he himself had spoken of cutting down the aspens, he could not
quite make clear to her, who had never known any but long-humanized
places, the peculiar indecency of a forest at the stage of
semi-transformation into a mushroom settlement.
Beautiful enough the backwoods, he laboured to explain, where man’s
fight with the forest was only begun, where great beeches and maples,
and wild flowers still possessed the black mould the settler was to lay
bare for wheat; where his pioneer hut was circled by a green gloom, and
the chink of his cow-bells or the laughter of his children alone vied
with the ring of the axe and the thunderous fall of the giants. But
later on—“it’s like that plover’s egg you opened once,” he burst forth
with a sudden inspiration. “No longer an egg, not yet a bird; only a
smell!”
“But it was you who gave it me,” laughed Jinny. There was a great
content at her heart, sitting here and seeing her little world open out
in forests and seas and emotions still stranger. And he—he for the
first time enjoyed the society of woman as spiritual counterpart, had
moments in which he forgot Jinny was pretty, in which her hand—now
unconsciously nestling in his in her absorption in his narration—was
felt as a friendly rather than as a physical glow. Unfortunately in this
sense of a sympathetic Jinny lay the serpentine temptation which
shattered their paradise. For, beguiled by her apparent subjugation, he
went on to improve the occasion. “And it’s just the same with women who
are neither women nor men. A woman’s place is the home.”
The slipping of Jinny’s hand out of his was the first sign that he had
roused her to reality. Her cry, “How late it is!” was the next. And she
looked at the sunset glowing in glamorous gold through the trees. There
was a magic peace in the air, and a rare thrush sang as in a dream. It
seemed a tragedy to move.
Will protested vehemently. “It’s not late at all. You were unusually
early this afternoon. No, don’t go—you’ll wake up poor Nip.”
“Did your story send him to sleep? Rude dog! But I must go—a woman’s
place is the home!” She got up, smiling, with the snoring dog in her
arms, but her mockery was friendly enough: the intimate atmosphere could
not be dissipated at a jerk. He was constrained to follow her, if only
to precede her through that jungly path: the prospect of driving home
with her still shone rosy.
“By the way,” he said lightly, “I’ve been talking with Mr. Flippance
about getting that horse for him.”
“What!” She stopped and turned on him, her eyes blazing.
“His last animal was faked,” he explained mildly. “He was badly taken
in, and you can’t know all the tricks of the trade as well as a man.”
“And isn’t Mr. Flippance a man?”
“Yes, of course. But—but——”
“It all depends on which man, you see—and which woman.”
“But I’m sure no woman knows properly about horses,” he said. “How would
you tell the age, for instance?”
“By the teeth, of course.”
“Which teeth?”
Jinny flushed. She really did not know, and that made her only angrier:
“If I wanted your help in my affairs, I should have asked you.”
“Well, there’s nothing to be mad about.”
“There is everything to be mad about. How did you know he wanted me to
get a horse? Only because I told you. And then you go to him and
interfere with my business and insinuate I’m incapable.”
“It’s not so much you’re incapable——” he began.
“It’s because a woman’s place isn’t the cattle-market, I know. But why
can’t we buy cows as well as butter, and horses as well as
horse-collars?”
“Because only men go—and it’s rough.”
“Well then, let women go and it won’t be.”
“And do you want women to be horsemen too, get up at four o’clock and go
ploughing?”
“Why not?”
“They haven’t the strength, for one thing. There’s lots of things they
can’t do, and never will. Take thatching, for instance—you can’t
imagine a woman sprawling along a roof.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Of course _you_ can,” he sneered. “You can imagine her in breeches.”
“If petticoats get in the way.”
“There’ll never be Bloomerites in England,” he said grimly. “You mark my
word. If a woman can’t plough or dig without leggings, that’s a proof
she wasn’t meant to plough or dig.”
They had reached now the pleached and tangly path back to the road, but
she darted ahead of him, battling with the branches herself in her
revolt from dependence. He could not regain the lead unless he jostled
rudely, and every now and then—not with wilful malice, but no less
maddeningly—she held back for him the boughs she had parted. And all
the while the sleeping Nip was protected too: clasped by one hand to her
bosom.
Suddenly the circle of her little horn got caught in the bushes like the
horn of Isaac’s ram. “Why, Jinny,” he cried, “we forgot all about the
horn! Wait! Wait!”
She disentangled it calmly. “You shan’t blow mine. You must blow your
own now.”
He fired up. “You want to get out of the gloves.”
“Now you’re going horn-mad,” she jested icily, emerging on the high
road. “Good-bye, Mr. Flynt.”
It was the first time she had withheld the Will.
“Good-bye, Miss Boldero,” he said as frigidly, removing his hat with an
exaggerated gallantry. Each felt that the parting was final: never would
they even speak to each other again.
But they had yet to reckon with Nip. For that intelligent creature,
waking into the distressing atmosphere that had been generated while his
vigilance was relaxed, would be no party to the breach. When he
perceived that the cart was to go off without Will, he jumped down and
tried to chevy him into it, and as the parties went off at a tangent, he
ran desperately from one to the other, striving to shepherd them
together, barking and pleading and panting like a toy engine. It was
only a peremptory blast from a distant horn that at last persuaded the
distracted animal where his first duty lay.
The dying day still flooded the earth with warmth and radiance: the
little coffee-and-cream-coloured calves still frisked in the meadows
that the buttercups turned into fields of the cloth of gold: the
forget-me-nots were still gleaming in the cottage gardens, the lilac was
still peeping over manorial walls, the laburnum still hanging down its
yellow chandeliers, and the horse-chestnut upholding its white
candelabras. But for these twain, obstinately and against the best
canine advice going their separate ways, the colour had been sucked out
of the landscape and the clemency from the air. Before Will, wandering
deviously, had remembered his evening sausages, these also had grown
cold; mist and clouds had turned the moon to a blood-red boat, and the
bats were swooping and the wood-owls shrilling where larks had soared
and sung.