highway that goes towards Bath there stands, or once stood, a strongly
built stone cottage confronting, on the opposite side of the high road,
a large barn and some cattle stalls. A man named Cotton lived with his
wife lonely in this place, their whole horizon bounded by the hedges
and fences of their farm. His Christian name, for some unchristian
reason, was Janifex; people called him Jan, possibly because it rhymed
with his wife's name, which was Ann. And Ann was a robust managing
woman of five and thirty, childless, full of desolating cleanliness
and kindly tyrannies, with no perceptions that were not determined by
her domestic ambition, and no sympathies that could interfere with her
diurnal energies whatever they might be. Jan was a mild husbandman,
prematurely aged, with large teeth and, since 'forty winters had
besieged his brow,' but little hair. Sometimes one of the large teeth
would drop out, leaving terrible gaps when he opened his mouth, and
turning his patient smile to a hideous leer. These evacuations, which
were never restored, began with the death of Queen Victoria; throughout
the reign of her successor great events were punctuated by similar
losses, until at last Jan could masticate, in his staid old manner,
only in one overworked corner of his mouth.
He would rise of a morning throughout the moving year at five of the
clock; having eaten his bread and drunk a mug of cocoa he would don
a long white jacket and cross the road diagonally to the gate at the
eastern corner of the sheds. These were capped by the bright figure of
a golden cockerel, voiceless but useful, flaunting always to meet the
challenge of the wind. Sometimes in his deliberate way Jan would lift
his forlorn eyes in the direction of the road coming from the east,
but he never turned to the other direction, as that would have cost him
a physical effort, and bodily flexion had ceased years and years ago.
Do roads ever run backward--leaps not forward the eye? As he unloosed
the gate of the yard his great dog would lift its chained head from
some sacks under a cart, and a peacock would stalk out from the belt of
pines that partly encircled the buildings. The man would greet them,
saying, "O, ah!" In the rickyard he would pause to release the fowls
from their hut and watch them run to the stubbles or spurn the chaff
with their claws as they ranged between the stacks. If the day were
windy the chaff would fall back in clouds upon their bustling feathers,
and that delighted his simple mind. It is difficult to account for his
joy in this thing, for though his heart was empty of cruelty it seemed
to be empty of everything else. Then he would pass into the stalls and
with a rattle of can and churn the labour of the day was begun.
Thus he lived, with no temptations, and few desires except perhaps for
milk puddings, which for some reason concealed in Ann's thrifty bosom
he was only occasionally permitted to enjoy. Whenever his wife thought
kindly of him she would give him a piece of silver and he would traipse
a mile in the evening, a mile along to the _Huntsman's Cup_, and take a
tankard of beer. On his return he would tell Ann of the things he had
seen, the people he had met, and other events of his journey.
Once, in the time of spring, when buds were bursting along the hedge
coverts and birds of harmony and swiftness had begun to roost in the
wood, a blue-chinned Spaniard came to lodge at the farm for a few
weeks. He was a labourer working at some particular contract upon the
estate adjoining the Cottons' holding, and he was accommodated with a
bed and an abundance of room in a clean loft behind the house. With
curious shoes upon his feet, blazing check trousers tightly fitting
upon his thighs, a wrapper of pink silk around his neck, he was an
astonishing figure in that withdrawn corner of the world. When the
season chilled him a long black cloak with a hood for his head added
a further strangeness. Juan da Costa was his name. He was slightly
round-shouldered with an uncongenial squint in his eyes; though he
used but few words of English his ways were beguiling. He sang very
blithely shrill Spanish songs, and had a pleasant courtesy of manner
that presented a deal of attraction to the couple, particularly Ann,
whose casual heart he reduced in a few hours to kindness, and in a few
days, inexplicably perhaps, to a still warmer emotion--yes, even in the
dull blankness of that mind some ghostly star could glimmer. From the
hour of his arrival she was an altered woman, although, with primitive
subtlety, the transition from passivity to passion was revealed only by
one curious sign, and that was the spirit of her kindness evoked for
the amiable Jan, who now fared mightily upon his favorite dishes.
Sometimes the Spaniard would follow Jan about the farm. "Grande!" he
would say, gesturing with his arm to indicate the wide-rolling hills.
"O ah!" Jan would reply, "there's a heap o' land in the open air."
The Spaniard does not understand! He asks: "What?"
"O ah!" Jan would echo.
But it was the cleanly buxom Ann to whom Da Costa devoted himself.
He brought home daily, though not ostensibly to her, a bunch of the
primroses, a stick of snowbudded sallow, or a sprig of hazel hung with
catkins, soft caressible things. He would hold the hazel up before
Ann's uncomprehending gaze and strike the lemon-coloured powder from
the catkins on to the expectant adjacent buds, minute things with stiff
female prongs, red like the eyes of the white rabbit which Ann kept in
the orchard hutch.
One day Juan came home unexpectedly in mid-afternoon. It was a cold dry
day and he wore his black cloak and hood.
"See," he cried, walking up to Ann, who greeted him with a smile; he
held out to her a posy of white violets tied up with some blades of
thick grass. She smelt them but said nothing. He pressed the violets to
his lips and again held them out, this time to her lips. She took them
from him and tucked them into the front of her bodice while he watched
her with delighted eyes.
"You ... give ... me ... somethin ... for ... los flores?"
"Piece a cake!" said Ann, moving towards the pantry door.
"Ah ... cake...!"
As she pulled open the door, still keeping a demure eye upon him, the
violets fell out and down upon the floor, unseen by her. He rushed
towards them with a cry of pain and a torrent of his strange language;
picking them up he followed her into the pantry, a narrow place almost
surrounded by shelves with pots of pickles and jam, plates, cups and
jugs, a scrap of meat upon a trencher, a white bowl with cob nuts and a
pair of iron crackers.
"See..., lost!" he cried shrilly as she turned to him. She was about to
take them again when he stayed her with a whimsical gesture.
"Me ... me," he said, and brushing her eyes with their soft perfume
he unfastened the top button of her bodice while the woman stood
motionless; then the second button, then the third. He turned
the corners inwards and tucked the flowers between her flesh and
underlinen. They stood eyeing one another, breathing uneasily, but with
a pretence at nonchalance. "Ah!" he said suddenly; before she could
stop him he had seized a few nuts from the white bowl and holding open
her bodice where the flowers rested he dropped the nuts into her warm
bosom. "One ... two ... three!"
"Oh...!" screamed Ann mirthfully, shrinking from their tickling, but
immediately she checked her laughter--she heard footsteps. Beating
down the grasping arms of the Spaniard she darted out of the doorway
and shut him in the pantry, just in time to meet Jan coming into the
kitchen bawling for a chain he required.
"What d'ye want?" said Ann.
"That chain for the well-head, gal, it's hanging in the pantry." He
moved to the door.
"'Taint," said Ann barring his way. "It's in the barn, I took it there
yesterday, on the oats it is, you'll find it, I took it over yesterday,
clear off with your dirty boots." She 'hooshed' him off much as she
'hooshed' the hens out of the garden. Immediately he was gone she
pulled open the pantry door and was confronted by the Spaniard holding
a long clasp knife in his raised hand. On seeing her he just smiled,
threw down the knife and took the bewildered woman into his arms.
"Wait, wait," she whispered, and breaking from him she seized a chain
from a hook and ran out after her husband with it, holding up a finger
of warning to the Spaniard as she brushed past him. She came back
panting, having made some sort of explanation to Jan; entering the
kitchen quietly she found the Spaniard's cloak lying upon the table;
the door of the pantry was shut and he had apparently gone back there
to await her. Ann moved on tiptoe round the table; picking up the
cloak she enveloped herself in it and pulled the hood over her head.
Having glanced with caution through the front window to the farmyard,
she coughed and shuffled her feet on the flags. The door of the pantry
moved slowly open; the piercing ardour of his glance did not abash her,
but her curious appearance in his cloak moved his shrill laughter. As
he approached her she seized his wrists and drew him to the door that
led into the orchard at the back of the house; she opened it and pushed
him out, saying "Go on, go on." She then locked the door against him.
He walked up and down outside the window making lewd signs to her. He
dared not call out for fear of attracting attention from the farmyard
in front of the house. He stood still, shivered, pretended in dumb show
that he was frozen. She stood at the window in front of him and nestled
provocatively in his cloak. But when he put his lips against the pane
he drew the gleam of her languishing eyes closer and closer to meet his
kiss through the glass. Then she stood up, took off the black cloak,
and putting her hand into her bosom brought out the three nuts, which
she held up to him. She stood there fronting the Spaniard enticingly,
dropped the nuts back into her bosom ... one ... two ... three ... and
then went and opened the door.
In a few weeks the contract was finished, and one bright morning the
Spaniard bade them each farewell. Neither of them knew, so much was
their intercourse restricted, that he was about to depart, and Ann
watched him with perplexity and unhappiness in her eyes.
"Ah, you Cotton, goodbye I say, and you _señora_, I say goodbye." With
a deep bow he kissed the rough hand of the blushing country-woman.
"_Bueno._" He turned with his kit bag on his shoulder, waved them an
airy hand and was gone.
On the following Sunday Jan returned from a visit in the evening and
found the house empty; Ann was out, an unusual thing, for their habits
were fixed and deliberate as the stars in the sky. The sunsetting light
was lying in meek patches on the kitchen wall, turning the polished
iron pans to the brightness of silver, reddening the string of onions,
and filling glass jars with solid crystal. He had just sat down to
remove his heavy boots when Ann came in, not at all the workaday Ann
but dressed in her best clothes smelling of scent and swishing her
stiff linen.
"Hullo," said Jan, surprised at his wife's pink face and sparkling
eyes, "bin church?"
"Yes, church," she replied, and sat down in her finery. Her husband
ambled about the room for various purposes and did not notice her
furtive dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief. Tears from Ann were
inconceivable.
The year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown,
the corn stooked in rows; Ann was with child and the ridge of her stays
was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. Fruit dropped from
the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the hunt
swept over the field. Christmas came and went, and then a child was
born to the Cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened Juan.
"He was a kind chap, that man," said Ann, "and we've no relations to
please, and it's like your name--and your name _is_ outlandish!"
Jan's delight now was to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever
mused upon chicken, lambs and calves. "O ah!" he would say, popping a
great finger into the babe's mouth, "O ah!" But when, as occasionally
happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his
mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of
suspicion.
Snow, when it falls near spring on those Cotswold hills, falls deeply,
and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. Sickness, when it comes, comes
with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. Contagious and baffling,
disease had stricken the district; in mid-March great numbers of the
country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were
harried from one dawn to another. Jan would come in of an evening
and recite the calendar of the day's dooms gathered from men of the
adjacent fields.
"Amos Green 'ave gone then, pore o' chap."
"Pore Amos," the pitying Ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.
"And Buttifant's coachman."
"Dear, dear, what 'ull us all come to?"
"Mrs. Jocelyn was worse 'en bad this morning."
"Never Jan! Us'll miss 'er."
"Ah, and they do say Parson Rudwent won't last out the night."
"And whom's to bury us then?" asked Ann.
The invincible sickness came to the farm. Ann one morning was weary,
sickly, and could not rise from her bed. Jan attended her in his clumsy
way and kept coming in from the snow to give her comforts and food,
but at eve she was in fever and lay helpless in the bed with the child
at her breast. Jan went off for the doctor, not to the nearest village
for he knew that quest to be hopeless, but to a tiny town high on the
wolds two miles away. The moon, large, sharp and round, blazed in the
sky, and its light sparkled upon the rolling fields of snow; his boots
were covered at every muffled step; the wind sighed in the hedges and
he shook himself for warmth. He came to the hill at last; half-way
up was a church, its windows glowing with warm-looking light and its
bells pealing cheerfully. He passed on and higher up met a priest
trotting downwards in black cassock and saintly hat, his hands tucked
into his wide sleeves, trotting to keep himself warm and humming as
he went. Jan asked a direction of the priest, who gave it with many
circumstances of detail, and after they had parted he could hear the
priest's voice call still further instructions after him as long as
he was in sight. "O ah!" said Jan each time, turning and waving his
hand. But after all his mission was a vain one; the doctor was out and
away, it was improbable that he would be able to come, and the simple
man turned home with a dull heart. When he reached the farm Ann was
delirious but still clung to her dusky child, sleeping snugly at her
bosom. The man sat up all night before the fire waiting vainly for the
doctor, and the next day he himself became ill. And strangely enough as
he worked among his beasts the crude suspicion in his mind about the
child took shape and worked without resistance until he came to suspect
and by easy degrees to apprehend fully the time and occasion of Ann's
duplicity.
"Nasty filthy dirty thing!" he murmured from his sick mind. He was
brushing the dried mud from the hocks of an old bay horse, but it was
not of his horse he was thinking. Later he stood in the rickyard and
stared across the road at the light in their bedroom. Throwing down the
fork with which he had been tossing beds of straw he shook his fist
at the window and cried out: "I hate 'er, I does, nasty filthy dirty
thing!"
When he went into the house he replenished the fire, but found he could
take no further care for himself or the sick woman; he just stupidly
doffed his clothes and in utter misery and recklessness stretched
himself in the bed with Ann. He lay for a long while with aching brows,
a snake-strangled feeling in every limb, an unquenchable drouth in his
throat, and his wife's body burning beside him. Outside the night was
bright, beautiful and still sparkling with frost; quiet, as if the
wind had been wedged tightly in some far corner of the sky, except for
a cracked insulator on the telegraph pole just near the window, that
rattled and hummed with monstrous uncare. That, and the ticking of the
clock! The lighted candle fell from its sconce on to the mantelpiece;
he let it remain and it flickered out. The glow from the coals was
thick upon the ceiling and whitened the brown ware of the teapot on
the untidy hearth. Falling asleep at last he began dreaming at once,
so it seemed, of the shrill cry of lambs hailing him out of wild
snow-covered valleys, so wild and prolonged were the cries that they
woke him, and he knew himself to be very ill, very ill indeed. The
child was wailing piteously, the room was in darkness, the fire out,
but the man did not stir, he could not care, what could he do with that
flame behind his eyes and the misery of death consuming him? But the
child's cries were unceasing and moved even his numbed mind to some
effort. "Ann!" he gasped. The poor wife did not reply. "Ann!" He put
his hand out to nudge her; in one instant the blood froze in his veins
and then boiled again. Ann was cold, her body hard as a wall, dead ...
dead. Stupor returned upon him; the child, unhelped, cried on, clasped
to that frozen breast until the man again roused himself to effort.
Putting his great hands across the dead wife he dragged the child from
her arms into the warmth beside him, gasping as he did so "Nasty ...
dirty ... thing." It exhausted him, but the child was still unpacified
and again he roused himself and felt for a biscuit on the table beside
the bed. He crushed a piece in his mouth and putting the soft pap upon
his finger fed thus the hungry child until it was stilled. By now the
white counterpane spread vast like a sea, heaving and rocking with a
million waves, the framework of the bedstead moving like the tackle of
tossed ships. He knew there was only one way to stem that sickening
movement. "I hate 'er, I does," rose again upon his lips, and drawing
up his legs that were at once chilly and streaming with sweat, full of
his new hatred he urged with all his might his wife's cold body to the
edge of the bed and withdrew the bedclothes. Dead Ann toppled and slid
from him and her body clumped upon the floor with a fall that shook the
room; the candle fell from the mantelpiece, bounced upon the teapot
and rolled stupidly along the bare boards under the bed. "Hate 'er!"
groaned the man; he hung swaying above the woman and tried to spit upon
her. He sank back again to the pillow and the child, murmuring "O ah!"
and gathering it clumsily to his breast. He became tranquil then, and
the hollow sounding clock beat a dull rhythm into his mind, until that
sound faded out with all light and sound, and Jan fell into sleep and
died, with the dusky child clasped in his hard dead arms.
POMONA'S BABE
POMONA'S BABE
Johnny Flynn was then seventeen years old. At that age you could
not call him 'boy' without vexing him, or 'man' without causing
him to blush--his teasing ruddy and uproarious mother delighted to
produce either or both of these manifestations, for her offspring
was a pale mild creature--but he had given a deal of thought to many
manly questions. Marriage, for instance, was one of these. That was
an institution he admired, but whose joys, whatever they were, he
was not anxious to experience; its difficulties and disasters as
ironically outlined by the widow Flynn were the subject of his grossest
scepticism--scepticism in general being not the least prominent
characteristic of Johnny Flynn.
Certainly his sister Pomona was not married; she was only sixteen,
an age too early for such bliss; but all the same she was going to
have a baby. He had quarrelled with his mother about most things; she
delighted in quarrels, they amused her very much; but on this occasion
she was really very angry, or she pretended to be so--which was worse,
much worse than the real thing.
The Flynns were poor people, quite poor, living in two top-floor rooms
at the house of a shoemaker, also moderately poor, whose pelting and
hammering of soles at evening were a durable grievance to Johnny. He
was fond of the shoemaker, a kind, bulky, tall man of fifty, though
he did not like the shoemaker's wife, as bulky as her husband, and as
tall, but not kind to him or to anything except Johnny himself; nor
did he like any of the other lodgers, of whom there were several, all
without exception beyond the reach of affluence. The Flynn apartments
afforded a bedroom in front for Mrs. Flynn and Pomona, a room where
Johnny seldom intruded, never without a strained sense of sanctity
similar to the feeling he experienced when entering an empty church,
as he sometimes did. He slept in the other room, the living room, an
arrangement that also annoyed him--he was easily annoyed--for he could
never go to bed until mother and sister had retired, and for the same
reason he had always to rise before they got up, an exasperating abuse
of domestic privilege.
One night he had just slipped happily into his bed, and begun to read
a book called _Rasselas_, which the odd-eyed man at the public library
had commended to him, when his mother returned to the room, first
tapping at the door, for Johnny was a prude, as she knew, not only from
instinct and observation but from protests which had occasionally been
addressed to her by the indignant boy. She came in now only half clad,
in petticoat and stockinged feet, her arms were quite bare. They were
powerful arms, as they had need to be, for she was an ironer of linen
at a laundry, but they were nice to look at, and sometimes Johnny liked
looking at them, though he did not care for her to run about like that
very often. Mrs. Flynn sat down at the foot of his couch and stared at
her son.
"Johnny," she began steadily, but paused to rub her forehead with her
thick white shiny fingers. "I don't know how to tell you I'm sure, or
what you'll say...." Johnny shook _Rasselas_ rather impatiently and
heaved a protesting sigh. "I can't think," continued his mother, "no,
I can't think that it's our Pomony, but there she is, and it's got to
be done--I must tell you; besides, you're the only man in our family
now, so it's only right for you, you see, and she's going to have a
baby--our Pomony!"
The boy turned his face to the wall, although his mother was not
looking at him--she was staring at that hole in the carpet near the
fender. At last he said "Humph! ... well?" And as his mother did not
say anything, he added, "What about it? I don't mind." Mrs. Flynn was
horrified at his unconcern, or she pretended to be so; Johnny was never
sure about the genuineness of her moods. It was most unfilial, but he
was like that--so was Mrs. Flynn. Now she cried out, "You'll _have_ to
mind, there, you must. I can't take everything on my own shoulders.
You're the only man left in our family now--you must, Johnny. What are
we to do?"
He glared at the wallpaper a foot from his eyes. It had an unbearable
pattern of blue but otherwise indescribable flowers; he had it in his
mind to have some other pattern there--some day.
"Eh?" asked his mother sharply, striking the foot of the bed with her
fist.
"Why ... there's nothing to be done ... now ... I suppose." He was
blushing furiously. "How did it happen--when will it be?"
"It's a man she knows. He got hold of her. His name is Stringer.
Another two months about. Stringer. Hadn't you noticed anything?
Everybody else has. You are a funny boy, can't make you out at all,
Johnny, I can't make you out. Stringer his name is, but he shall pay
dearly for it, and that's what I want you--to talk to you about. Of
course, he denies of everything, they always do."
Mrs. Flynn sighed at this disgusting perfidy, brightening however when
her son began to discuss the problem. But she talked so long, and he
got so sleepy at last, that he was very glad when she went to bed
again. Secretly she was both delighted and disappointed at his easy
acceptance of her dreadful revelation; fearing a terrible outburst
of anger, she had kept the knowledge from him for a long time. She
was glad to escape that, it is true, but she rather hungered for
some flashing reprobation of this unknown beast, this Stringer. She
swore she would bring him to book, but she felt old and lonely, and
Johnny was a strange son, not very virile. The mother had told Pomona
terrifying prophetic tales of what Johnny would do, what he would be
certain to do. He would, for instance, murder that Stringer and drive
Pomony into the street; of course, he would. Yet here he was, quite
calm about it, as if he almost liked it. Well, she had told him, she
could do no more, she would leave it to him.
In the morning Johnny greeted his sister with tender affection, and
at evening, having sent her to bed, he and his mother resumed their
discussion.
"Do you know, mother," he said, "she is quite handsome; I never noticed
it before."
Mrs. Flynn regarded him with desperation, and then informed him that
his sister was an ugly, disgusting little trollop who ought to be
birched.
"No, no, you are wrong, mother, it's bad, but it's all right."
"You think you know more about such things than your own mother, I
suppose." Mrs. Flynn sniffed and glared.
He said it to her gently: "Yes."