THE NIGHT OF JUBILEE
Unnumbered joy fires were writing the nation's thanksgiving across the
starry darkness of a night in June. Throughout the confines of
Britain--on knolls arising beside populous towns, above the wild cliffs
of our coasts, in low-lying lands, upon the banks of rivers, at the
fringes of forests and over a thousand barren heaths, lonely wastes, and
stony pinnacles of untamed hills, like some mundane galaxy of stars or
many-tongued outbreak of conflagration, the bonfires glimmered. And
their golden seed was sown so thickly, that from no pile of those
hundreds then brightening the hours of darkness had it been possible to
gaze into the night and see no other.
Upon the shaggy fastnesses of Devon's central waste, within the bounds,
metes, and precincts of Dartmoor Forest, there shone a whole
constellation of little suns, and a wanderer in air might have counted a
hundred without difficulty, whilst, for the beholders perched upon Yes
Tor, High Wilhays, or the bosom of Cosdon during the fairness and
clearness of that memorable night, fully threescore beacons flamed. All
those granite giants within the field of man's activities, all the
monsters whose enormous shades fell at dawn or evening time upon the
hamlets and villages of the Moor, now carried on their lofty crowns the
flames of rejoicing. Bonfires of varying size, according to the energy
and importance of the communities responsible for them, dotted the
circumference of the lonely region in a vast, irregular figure, but
thinned and ceased towards the unpeopled heart of the waste. On Wattern,
at Cranmere, upon Fur Tor, and under the hoary, haunted woods of
Wistman, no glad beacons blazed or voices rang. There Nature, ignorant
of epochs and heeding neither olympiad nor lustrum, cycle nor century,
ruled alone; there, all self-centred, self-contained, unwitting of
conscious existence and its little joys, her perfection above praise and
more enduring than any chronicle of it, asking for no earthborn
acclamations of her eternal reign, demanding only obedience from all on
penalty of death, the Mother swayed her sceptre unseen. Seed and stone,
blade and berry, hot blood and cold, did her bidding and slept or
stirred at her ordinance. A nightjar harshly whirred beneath her
footstool; wan tongues of flame rose and fell upon her quaking altars; a
mountain fox, pattering quick-footed to the rabbit warren, caught light
from those exhalations in his round, green eyes and barked.
Humanity thronged and made merry around numberless crackling piles of
fire. Men and women, boys and girls, most noisily rejoiced, and from
each flaming centre of festivity a thin sound of human shouting and
laughter streamed starward with the smoke.
Removed by brief distance in space, the onlooker, without overmuch
strain or imagination, might stride a pace or two backward in time and
conceive himself for a moment as in the presence of those who similarly
tended beacons on these granite heights of old. Then, truly, the object
and occasion were widely different; then, perchance, in answer to evil
rumour moving zigzag on black bat-wings through nights of fear, many a
bale-fire had shot upwards, upon the keystone of Cosdon's solemn arch,
beckoned like a bloody hand towards north and south, and cried danger to
a thousand British warriors lurking in moor, and fen, and forest.
Answering flames had leapt from Hay Tor, from Buckland Beacon, from
Great Mis Tor in the west; and their warning, caught up elsewhere, would
quickly penetrate to the heart of the South Hams, to the outlying
ramparts of the Cornish wastes, to Exmoor and the coast-line of the
north. But no laughter echoed about those old-time fires. Their lurid
light smeared wolfskins, splashed on metal and untanned hide, illumined
barbaric adornments, fierce faces, wild locks, and savage eyes. Anxious
Celtic mothers and maidens stood beside their men, while fear and rage
leapt along from woman's face to woman's face, as some gasping wretch,
with twoscore miles of wilderness behind him, told of high-beaked
monsters moving under banks of oars, of dire peril, of death and ruin,
suddenly sprung in a night from behind the rim of the sea.
Since then the peaks of the Moor have smiled or scowled under countless
human fires, have flashed glad tidings or flamed ill news to many
generations. And now, perched upon one enormous mass of stone, there
towered upward a beacon of blazing furze and pine. In its heart were tar
barrels and the monster bred heat enough to remind the granite beneath
it of those fires that first moulded its elvan ingredients to a concrete
whole and hurled them hither.
About this eye of flame crowded those who had built it, and the roaring
mass of red-hot timber and seething pitch represented the consummation
of Chagford's festivities on the night of Jubilee. The flames, obedient
to such light airs as were blowing, bent in unison with the black
billows of smoke that wound above them. Great, trembling tongues
separated from the mass and soared upward, gleaming as they vanished;
sparks and jets, streams and stars of light, shot from the pile to
illuminate the rolling depths of the smoke cloud, to fret its curtain
with spangles and jewels of gold atid ruby, to weave strange, lurid
lights into the very fabric of its volume. Far away, as the breezes drew
them, fell a red glimmer of fire, where those charred fragments caught
in the rush and hurled aloft, returned again to earth; and the whole
incandescent structure, perched as it was upon the apex of Yes Tor,
suggested at a brief distance a fiery top-knot of streaming flame on
some vast and demoniac head thrust upward from the nether world.
Great splendour of light gleamed upon a ring of human beings.
Adventurous spirits leapt forth, fed the flames with faggots and furze
and risked their hairy faces within the range of the bonfire's scorching
breath. Alternate gleam and glow played fantastically upon the
spectators, and, though for the most part they moved but little while
their joy fire was at its height, the conflagration caused a sheer
devil's dance of impish light and shadow to race over every face and
form in the assemblage. The fantastic magician of the fire threw humps
on to straight backs, flattened good round breasts, wrote wrinkles on
smooth faces, turned eyes and lips into shining gems, made white teeth
yellow, cast a grotesque spell of the unreal on young shapes, of the
horrible upon old ones. A sort of monkey coarseness crept into the red,
upturned faces; their proportions were distorted, their delicacy
destroyed. Essential lines of figures were concealed by the inky
shadows; unimportant features were thrown into a violent prominence; the
clean fire impinged abruptly on a night of black shade, as sunrise on
the moon. There was no atmosphere. Human noses poked weirdly out of
nothing, human hands waved without arms, human heads moved without
bodies, bodies bobbed along without legs. The heart-beat and furnace
roar of the fire was tremendous, but the shouts of men, the shriller
laughter of women, and the screams and yells of children could be heard
through it, together with the pistol-like explosion of sap turned to
steam, and rending its way from green wood. Other sounds also fretted
the air, for a hundred yards distant--in a hut-circle--the Chagford
drum-and-fife band lent its throb and squeak to the hour, and struggled
amain to increase universal joy. So the fire flourished, and the
plutonian rock-mass of the tor arose, the centre of a scene itself
plutonian.
Removed by many yards from the ring of human spectators, and scattered
in wide order upon the flanks of the hill, stood tame beasts. Sheep
huddled there and bleated amazement, their fleeces touched by the
flicker of the distant fire; red heifers and steers also faced the flame
and chewed the cud upon a spectacle outside all former experience; while
inquisitive ponies drew up in a wide radius, snorted and sniffed with
delicate, dilated nostrils at the unfamiliar smell of the breeze, threw
up their little heads, fetched a compass at top speed and so returned;
then crowded flank to flank, shoulder to shoulder, and again blankly
gazed at the fire which reflected itself in the whites of their shifty
eyes.
Fitting the freakish antics of the red light, a carnival spirit, hard to
rouse in northern hearts, awakened within this crowd of Devon men and
women, old men and children. There was in their exhilaration some
inspiration from the joyous circumstance they celebrated; and something,
too, from the barrel. Dancing began and games, feeble by day but not
lacking devil when pursued under cover of darkness. There were hugging
and kissing, and yells of laughter when amorous couples who believed
themselves safe were suddenly revealed lip to lip and heart to heart by
an unkind flash of fire. Some, as their nature was, danced and screamed
that flaming hour away; some sat blankly and smoked and gazed with less
interest than the outer audience of dumb animals; some laboured amain to
keep the bonfire at blaze. These last worked from habit and forgot their
broadcloth. None bade them, but it was their life to be toiling; it came
naturally to mind and muscle, and they laughed while they laboured and
sweated. A dozen staid groups witnessed the scene from surrounding
eminences, but did not join the merrymakers. Mr. Shorto-Champernowne,
Doctor Parsons, and the ladies of their houses stood with their feet on
a tumulus apart; and elsewhere Mr. Chapple, Charles Coomstock, Mr. Blee,
and others, mostly ancient, sat on the granite, inspected the
pandemonium spread before them, and criticised as experts who had seen
bonfires lighted before the greater part of the present gathering was
out of its cradle. But no cynic praising of past time to the
disparagement of the present marked their opinions. Mr. Chapple indeed
pronounced the fire brilliantly successful, and did not hesitate to
declare that it capped all his experience in this direction.
"A braave blaze," he said, "a blaze as gives the thoughtful eye an' nose
a tidy guess at what the Pit's like to be. Ess, indeed, a religious
fire, so to say; an' I warrant the prophet sat along just such another
when he said man was born to trouble sure as the sparks fly up'ard."
Somewhat earlier on the same night, under the northern ramparts of
Dartmoor, and upon the long, creeping hill that rises aloft from
Okehampton, then dips again, passes beneath the Belstones, and winds by
Sticklepath and Zeal under Cosdon, there rattled a trap holding two men.
From their conversation it appeared that one was a traveller who now
returned southward from a journey.
"Gert, gay, fanciful doin's to-night," said the driver, looking aloft
where Cosdon Beacon swelled. "You can see the light from the blaze
up-long, an' now an' again you can note a sign in the night like a
red-hot wire drawed up out the airth. They 'm sky-rockets, I judge."
"'T is a joyful night, sure 'nough."
The driver illustrated a political ignorance quite common in rural
districts ten years ago and not conspicuously rare to-day. He laboured
under uneasy suspicions that the support of monarchy was a direct and
dismal tax upon the pockets of the poor.
"Pity all the fuss ban't about a better job," he said. "Wan auld,
elderly lady 's so gude as another, come to think of it. Why shouldn't
my mother have a jubilee?"
"What for? 'Cause she've borne a damned fule?" asked the other man
angrily. "If that's your way o' thought, best keep it in your thoughts.
Anyhow, I'll knock your silly head off if I hears another word to that
tune, so now you knaw."
The speaker was above medium height and breadth, the man who drove him
happened to be unusually small.
"Well, well, no offence," said the latter.
"There is offence; an' it I heard a lord o' the land talk that way
to-night, I'd make un swallow every dirty word of it. To hell wi' your
treason!"
The driver changed the subject.
"Now you can see a gude few new fires," he said. "That's the Throwleigh
blaze; an' that, long ways off, be--"
"Yes Tor by the look of it. All Chagford's traapsed up-long, I warn 'e,
to-night."
They were now approaching a turning of the ways and the traveller
suddenly changed his destination.
"Come to think of it, I'll go straight on," he said. "That'll save you a
matter o' ten miles, tu. Drive ahead a bit Berry Down way. Theer I'll
leave 'e an' you'll be back home in time to have some fun yet."
The driver, rejoicing at this unhoped diminution of his labours, soon
reached the foot of a rough by-road that ascends to the Moor between the
homesteads of Berry Down and Creber.
Yes Tor now arose on the left under its cap of flame, and the wayfarer,
who carried no luggage, paid his fare, bid the other "good-night," and
then vanished into the darkness.
He passed between the sleeping farms, and only watch-dogs barked out of
the silence, for Gidleigh folks were all abroad that night. Pressing
onwards, the native hurried to Scorhill, then crossed the Teign below
Batworthy Farm, passed through the farmyard, and so proceeded to the
common beneath Yes Tor. He whistled as he went, then stopped a moment to
listen. The first drone of music and remote laughter reached his ear. He
hurried onwards until a gleam lighted his face; then he passed through
the ring of beasts, still glaring fascinated around the fire; and
finally he pushed among the people.
He stood revealed and there arose a sudden whisper among some who knew
him, but whom he knew not. One or two uttered startled cries at this
apparition, for all associated the newcomer with events and occurrences
widely remote from the joy of the hour. How he came among them now, and
what event made it possible for him to stand in their midst a free man,
not the wisest could guess.
A name was carried from mouth to mouth, then shouted aloud, then greeted
with a little cheer. It fell upon Mr. Blee's ear as he prepared to start
homewards; and scarcely had the sound of it set him gasping when a big
man grew out of the flame and shadow and stood before him with extended
hand.
"Burnish it all! You! Be it Blanchard or the ghost of un?"
"The man hisself--so big as bull's beef, an' so free as thicky fire!"
said Will.
Riotous joy sprang and bubbled in his voice. He gripped Billy's hand
till the old man jumped and wriggled.
"Free! Gude God! Doan't tell me you've brawke loose--doan't 'e say that!
Christ! if you haven't squashed my hand till theer's no feeling in it!
Doan't 'e say you've runned away?"
"No such thing," answered Will, now the centre of a little crowd. "I'll
tell 'e, sawls all, if you mind to hear. 'Tis this way: Queen Victoria,
as have given of the best she've got wi' both hands to the high men of
the land, so they tell me, caan't forget nought, even at such a time as
this here. She've made gert additions to all manner o' men; an' to me,
an' the likes o' me she've given what's more precious than bein' lords
or dukes. I'm free--me an' all as runned from the ranks. The Sovereign
Queen's let deserters go free, if you can credit it; an' that's how I
stand here this minute."
A buzz and hum with cheers and some laughter and congratulations
followed Will's announcement. Then the people scattered to spread his
story, and Mr. Blee spoke.
"Come you down home to wance. Ban't none up here as cares a rush 'bout
'e but me. But theer 's a many anxious folks below. I comed up for auld
sake's sake an' because ban't in reason to suppose I'll ever see another
joy fire 'pon Yes Tor rock, at my time o' life. But us'll go an' carry
this rare news to Chagford an' the Barton."
They faded from the red radius of the fire and left it slowly dying.
Will helped Billy off rough ground to the road. Then he set off at a
speed altogether beyond the old man's power, so Mr. Blee resorted to
stratagem.
"'Bate your pace; 'bate your pace; I caan't travel that gait an' talk
same time. Yet theer's a power o' fine things I might tell 'e if you'd
listen."
"'T is hard to walk slow towards a mother an' wife like what mine be,
after near a month from 'em; but let's have your news, Billy, an' doan't
croak, for God's sake. Say all's well wi' all."
"I ban't no croaker, as you knaws. Happy, are 'e?--happy for wance? I
suppose you'll say now, as you've said plenty times a'ready, that you 'm
to the tail of your troubles for gude an' all--just in your auld, silly
fashion?"
"Not me, auld chap, never no more--so long as you 'm alive! Ha, ha,
ha--that's wan for you! Theer! if 't isn't gude to laugh again!"
"I be main glad as I've got no news to make 'e do anything else, though
ban't often us can be prophets of gude nowadays. But if you've grawed a
streak wiser of late, then theer's hope, even for a scatterbrain like
you, the Lard bein' all-powerful. Not that jokes against such as me
would please Him the better."
"I've thought a lot in my time, Billy; an' I haven't done thinking yet.
I've comed to reckon as I caan't do very well wi'out the world, though
the world would fare easy enough wi'out me."
Billy nodded.
"That's sense so far as it goes," he admitted. "Obedience be hard to the
young; to the auld it comes natural; to me allus was easy as dirt from
my youth up. Obedience to betters in heaven an' airth. But you--you with
your born luck--never heard tell of nothin' like it 't all. What's a fix
to you? You goes in wan end an' walks out t' other, like a rabbit
through a hedge. Theer you was--in such a tight pass as you might say
neither God nor angels could get 'e free wi'out a Bible miracle, when,
burnish it all! if the Jubilee Queen o' England doan't busy herself
'bout 'e!"
"'T is true as I'm walkin' by your side. I'd give a year o' my wages to
knaw how I could shaw what I think about it."
"You might thank her. 'T is all as humble folks can do most times when
Queens or Squires or the A'mighty Hisself spares a thought to better us.
Us can awnly say 'thank you.'"
There was a silence of some duration; then Billy again bid his companion
moderate his pace.
"I'm forgetting all I've got to tell 'e, though I've news enough for a
buke," he said.
"How's Jan Grimbal, fust plaace?"
"On his legs again an' out o' danger if the Lunnon doctor knaws
anything. A hunderd guineas they say that chap have had! Your name was
danced to a mad tune 'pon Grimbal's lips 'fore his senses corned back to
un. Why for I caan't tell 'e. He've shook hands wi' Death for sartain
while you was away."
"An' mother, an' wife, an' Miller?"
"Your mother be well--a steadfast woman her be. Joy doan't lift her up,
an' sorrow doan't crush her. Theer's gert wisdom in her way of life. 'T
is my awn, for that matter. Then Miller--well, he 'm grawin' auld an'
doan't rate me quite so high as formerly--not that I judge anybody but
myself. An' your missis--theer, if I haven't kept it for the last! 'Tis
news four-an-twenty hour old now an' they wrote to 'e essterday, but I
lay you missed the letter awin' to me--"
"Get on!"
"Well, she've brought 'e a bwoy--so now you've got both sorts--bwoy an'
cheel. An' all doin' well as can be, though wisht work for her, thinkin'
'pon you the while."
Will stood still and uttered a triumphant but inarticulate
sound--half-laugh, half-sob, half-thanksgiving. Then the man spoke, slow
and deep,--
"He shall go for a soldier!"
"Theer! Now I knaw 't is Blanchard back an' no other! Hear me, will 'e;
doan't plan no such uneven way of life for un."
"By God, he shall!"
The words came back over Will Blanchard's shoulder, for he was fast
vanishing.
"Might have knawed he wouldn't walk along wi' me arter that," thought
Billy. Then he lifted up his voice and bawled to the diminishing figure,
already no more than a darker blot on the darkness of night.
"For the Lard's love go in quiet an' gradual, or you'll scare the life
out of 'em all."
And the answer came back,--
"I knaw, I knaw; I ban't the man to do a rash deed!"
Mr. Blee chuckled and plodded on through the night while Will strode far
ahead.
Presently he stood beside the wicket of Mrs. Blanchard's cottage and
hesitated between two women. Despite circumstances, there came no
uncertain answer from the deepest well-springs of him. He could not pass
that gate just then. And so he stopped and turned and entered; and she,
his mother, sitting in thought alone, heard a footfall upon the great
nightly silence--a sudden, familiar footfall that echoed to her heart
the music it loved best.
THE END.