I
You enter the village of Gantick between two round-houses set one on
each side of the high road where it dips steeply towards the valley
bottom. On the west of the opposite hill the road passes out between
another pair of round-houses. And down in the heart of the village
among the elms facing the churchyard lych-gate stands a fifth, alone.
The five, therefore, form an elongated St. Andrew's cross; but nobody
can tell for certain who built them, or why. They are all alike; each,
built of cob, circular, whitewashed, having pointed windows and a
conical roof of thatch with a wooden cross on the apex. When I was a
boy these thatched roofs used to be pointed out to me as masterpieces;
and they still endure. But the race of skilled thatchers, once the
peculiar pride of Gantick, has come to an end. What time has eaten
modern and clumsy hands have tried to repair; yet a glance will tell
you that the old sound work means to outwear the patches.
The last of these famous thatchers lived in the round-house on your
right as you leave Gantick by the seaward road. His name was old Nat
Ellery, or Thatcher Ellery, and his age (as I remember him) between
seventy or eighty. Yet he clung to his work, being one of those lean
men upon whom age, exposure, and even drink take a long while to
tell. For he drank; not socially at the King of Bells, but at home in
solitude with a black bottle at his elbow. He lived there alone; his
neighbours, even of the round-house across the road, shunned him and
were shunned by him: children would run rather than meet him on the
road as he came along, striding swiftly for his age (the drink never
affected his legs), ready greaved and sometimes gauntleted as if in
haste for his job, always muttering to himself; and when he passed us
with just a side-glance from his red eyes, we observed that his pale
face did not cease to twitch nor his lips to work. We felt something
like awe for the courage of Archie Passmore, who followed twenty paces
behind with his tools and a bundle of spars or straw-rope, or perhaps
at the end of a ladder which the two carried between them. Archie
(aged sixteen) used to boast to us that he did not fear the old man a
ha'penny; and the old man treated Archie as a Gibeonite, a hewer of
wood, a drawer of water, never as an apprentice. Of his craft, except
what he picked up by watching, the lad learned nothing.
What made him so vaguely terrible to us was the common rumour in the
village that Thatcher Ellery had served once under his Majesty's
colours, but had deserted and was still liable to be taken and shot
for it. Now this was true and everyone knew it, though why and how
he had deserted were questions answered among us only by dark and
frightful guesses. He had outlived all risk of the law's revenge;
no one, it was certain, would take the trouble to seize and execute
justice upon a drunkard of seventy. But we children never thought of
this, and for us as we watched him down the road there was always the
thrilling chance that over the hedge or around the next corner would
pop up a squad of redcoats. Some of us had even seen it, in dreams.