AMARYLLIS did not look back as she walked beside her grandfather slowly
up the street, or she would have seen the company of relations watching
them from the bow-window.
Iden went straight through the crowd without any hesitation on account
of his age--angry as she was, Amaryllis feared several times lest the
clumsy people should over-turn him, and tried her best to shield him.
But he had a knack of keeping on his feet--the sort of knack you learn
by skating--and did not totter much more than usual, despite the press.
The world gets on with very little amusement somehow. Here were two or
three thousand people packed in the street, and all they had to enliven
their festive gathering was the same old toys their fathers' fathers'
fathers had set before them.
Rows of booths for the display of "fairings," gingerbread, nuts, cakes,
brandy-balls, and sugar-plums stood in the gutter each side.
The "fairings" were sweet biscuits--they have been made every fair this
hundred years.
The nuts were dry and hard, just as Spanish nuts always are. The
gingerbread was moulded in the same old shapes of clumsy horses outlined
with gilt.
There was the same old trumpeting and tootling, tom-tomming, and roaring
of showmen's voices. The same old roundabouts, only now they were driven
by steam, and short, quick whistles announced that the whirligig caravan
was travelling round the world. The fat woman, the strong man, the
smashers tapping the "claret," the "Pelican of the Wilderness," that
mystic and melancholy bird, the rifle galleries, the popping for
nuts--behold these are they our fathers have seen.
There is nothing new under the sun--not even at Epsom. The first time I
saw the wonderful crowd of the Derby Day--perhaps the largest crowd in
the world--I could scarcely believe my eyes, for I found on passing
through it that the hundreds of thousands of people there had nothing
more to amuse them than they would have found at an ordinary country
fair. Swings, roundabouts, cockshies at cocoa-nuts, rootletum,
tootletum, and beer. That was all. No new amusement whatsoever: a very
humdrum sort of world, my masters!
The next finest crowd is the crowd on August bank-holiday all along the
Brighton beach, and there it is just the same. Nothing for the folk but
Punch, brass bands, and somersaulters--dull old stories in my
grandmother's time.
Xerxes offered a reward to anyone who could invent him a fresh
pleasure--the multitude of the Derby Day and Brighton beach should do
the same. But indeed they do, for an immense fortune would certainly be
the reward of such a discoverer. One gets tired of pitching sticks at
cocoa-nuts all one's time.
However, at Woolhorton nobody but the very rawest and crudest folk cared
for the shows, all they did care was to alternately stand stock still
and then shove. First they shoved as far as the "Lion" and had some
beer, then they shoved back to the "Lamb" and had some beer, then they
stood stock still in the street and blocked those who were shoving.
Several thousand people were thus happily occupied, and the Lion and the
Lamb laid down together peacefully that day.
Amaryllis and old Iden had in like manner to shove, for there was no
other way to get through, no one thought of moving, or giving any
passage, if you wanted to progress you must shoulder them aside. As
Grandfather Iden could not shove very hard they were frequently
compelled to wait till the groups opened, and thus it happened that
Amaryllis found herself once face to face with Jack Duck.
He kind of sniggered in a foolish way at Amaryllis, and touched his hat
to Iden. "You ain't a been over to Coombe lately, Mr. Iden," he said.
"No," replied the old man sharply, and went on.
Jack could hardly have struck a note more discordant to Amaryllis. The
father had not been to visit his son for more than a year--she did not
want unpleasant memories stirred up.
Again in another group a sturdy labourer touched his hat and asked her
if her father was at fair, as he was looking out for a job. Old Iden
started and grunted like a snorting horse.
Amaryllis, though put out, stayed to speak kindly to him, for she knew
he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong
man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower
at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before
he was discovered in California.
When she overtook Iden he was struggling to pass the stream of the
Orinoco, which set strongly at that moment out of the "Lamb" towards the
"Lion." Strong men pushed out from the "Lamb" archway like a river into
the sea, thrusting their way into the general crowd, and this mighty
current cast back the tottering figure of old Iden as the swollen
Orinoco swung the crank old Spanish caravels that tried to breast it.
It was as much as Amaryllis and he together could do to hold their
ground at the edge of the current. While they were thus battling she
chanced to look up.
A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow
was staring down at her. He stood in his shirt-sleeves with a
billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young
fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her
that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by to fair.
He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had passed
Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather
delicate face which was not in the coarse lineaments of the "varmers"
and "drauvers" and "pig-dealers" who had gone by under the wall.
Something that insulted her.
The face at the window was appraising her.
It was reckoning her up--so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for
figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an
elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that
calculation--no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a
billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a glass of spirits and water, and
an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory balls at the back
of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a
better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he had chalked it
with dissipation. His physical body was whitened--chalked--a whited
sepulchre; his moral nature likewise chalked.
At the back of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker
for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism of the XIXth century.
The cynicism that deliberately reckons up things a Shakespeare would
admire at their lowest possible sale value. A slow whiff of smoke from a
corner of the sneering mouth, an air of intense knowingness, as much as
to say, "You may depend upon me--I've been behind the scenes. All this
is got up, you know; stage effect in front, pasteboard at the rear;
nothing in it."
In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a
higher nature; "What an artist the world has lost!" he exclaimed, dying.
The empress Theodora craved for the applause of the theatre to which she
exposed her beauty.
This low, cynical nineteenth century blackguardism thinks of nothing but
lowness, and has no ideal. The milliner even has an ideal, she looks to
colour, shape, effect; though but in dress, yet it is an ideal. There
was no ideal in Ned Marks.
They called him from within to take his turn with the cue; he did not
answer, he was so absorbed in his calculations. He was clever--in a way;
he had quite sufficient penetration to see that this was no common girl.
She was not beautiful--yet, she was not even pretty, and so plainly
dressed; still there was something marked in her features. And she was
with old Iden.
Amaryllis did not understand the meaning of his glance, but she felt
that it was an insult. She looked down quickly, seized her grandfather's
arm, and drew him out from the pavement into the street, yielding a
little to the current and so hoping to presently pass it.
By this time, as Ned Marks did not answer, his companions had come to
the window to discover what he was staring at. "Oho!" they laughed.
"It's Miss Iden. Twenty thousand guineas in the iron box!"
Iden's great white hat, which always seemed to sit loosely on his head,
was knocked aside by the elbow of a burly butcher struggling in the
throng; Amaryllis replaced it upright, and leading him this way, and
pushing him that, got at last to the opposite pavement, and so behind
the row of booths, between them and the houses where there was less
crush. Taking care of him, she forgot to look to her feet and stepped in
the gutter where there was a puddle. The cold water came through the
crack in her boot.
While these incidents were still further irritating her, the old Pacha
kept mumbling and muttering to himself, nodding his head and smiling at
each fresh mark of attention, for though he was so independent and
fearless still he appreciated the trouble she took. The mumbling in his
mouth was a sort of purring. Her dutiful spirit had stroked him up to a
pleasant state of electric glow; she felt like a hound in a leash, ready
to burst the bond that held her to his hand. Side by side, and arm in
arm, neither of them understood the other; ninety and sixteen, a strange
couple in the jostling fair.
Iden turned down a passage near the end of the street, and in an instant
the roar of the crowd which had boomed all round them was shut off by
high walls up which it rose and hummed over their heads in the air. They
walked on broad stone flags notched here and there at the edges, for the
rest worn smooth by footsteps (the grave drives such a trade) like
Iden's doorstep, they were in fact tombstones, and the walled passage
brought them to the porch of the Abbey church.
There he stopped, muttering and mumbling, and wiped his forehead with
his vast silk handkerchief. They were no longer incommoded by a crowd,
but now and then folk came by hastening to the fair; lads with favours
in their coats, and blue ribbons in their hats, girls in bright dresses,
chiefly crude colours, who seemed out of accord with the heavy weight as
it were of the great Abbey, the ponderous walls, the quiet gloom of the
narrow space, and the shadows that lurked behind the buttresses.
The aged man muttered and mumbled about the porch and took Amaryllis
under it, making her look up at the groining, and note the spring of the
arch, which formed a sort of carved crown over them. It was a fine old
porch, deep and high, in some things reminding you of the porches that
are to be seen in Spain; stone made to give a pleasant shade like trees,
so cut and worked as to be soft to the eye.
He pointed out to her the touches that rendered it so dear to those who
value art in stone. He knew them, every one, the history and the dates,
and the three stags' heads on a shield; there were broad folios in the
smoky room at home, filled with every detail, Iden himself had
subscribed forty pounds to the cost of illustrating one of them. Every
scholar who visited the Abbey church, called and begged to see the
baker's old books.
Iden rubbed his old thumb in the grooves and went outside and hoisted
himself, as it were, up from his crooked S position to look at the three
stags' heads on the shield on the wall; dim stags' heads that to you, or
at least to me, might have been fishes, or Jove's thunderbolts, or
anything.
Amaryllis was left standing alone a moment in the porch, the deep shadow
within behind her, the curve of the arch over, a fine setting for a
portrait. She stood the more upright because of the fire and temper
suppressed in her.
Just outside the human letter S--crooked S--clad in sad white-grey
miller's garments, its old hat almost falling backwards off its old grey
head, gazed up and pointed with its oaken cudgel at the coat of arms.
Seven hundred years--the weight of seven hundred years--hung over them
both in that old Abbey.
Into that Past he was soon to disappear: she came out to the Future.
Thence he took her to an arched door, nail-studded, in the passage wall,
and giving her the key, told her to open it, and stood watching her in
triumph, as if it had been the door to some immense treasury. She turned
the lock, and he pushed her before him hastily, as if they must snatch
so grand an opportunity.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]