VI. SUNDAY AT CHIPSTONE…

VI. SUNDAY AT CHIPSTONE

This zealot Is of a mongrel, diverse kind; Cleric before, and lay behind; A lawless linsey-woolsey brother, Half of one order, half another. BUTLER, “Hudibras.”

I

AS old England has always been rich in “characters,” in those grotesque or gnarled individualities that have escaped the common mould, the superabundance of sects, which, in conjunction with the paucity of sauces, amused Voltaire, has its natural explanation.

John Bull—himself a “character” among nationalities—could not long endure the Papal leading-strings, and ever since the days of Wycliffe a succession of free spirits has founded “heresies,” not a few based on misunderstood mistranslations of Greek or Hebrew texts, torn from their literary and, above all, their historical context. But why during these five centuries Essex has been a breeding-place for Nonconformity, second to no other county, is a problem to tempt the philosopher. For its ministers have been silenced or ejected in numbers almost unparalleled; some indeed merely for tippling, dicing, carding, and womanizing, but the majority for the more serious offences of heresy or disrespect towards Parliament; while simple peasants—men, women, and girls—for their participation in seditious conventicles or practices, have been fined, jailed, transported to “His Majesty’s plantations,” and even nailed to stakes and burnt alive, clapping their hands the while with joy. Some of the most moving scenes of “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs” and Bloomfield’s “History of the Martyrs” are laid in Essex. Triumphant descendants of these opinionated saints were now converging on Chipstone from every quarter of the compass—it was but a toy-model of a town, yet it held in its petty periphery chapels, meeting-houses, or churches—ancient-towered or drably wooden or offering the image of a tinned congregation, tightly packed—for Baptists (Particular or General), Quakers, Wesleyans, Congregationalists, Peculiars, and Primitive Methodists, as well as your everyday Churchgoer; nothing indeed was wanting except an Ecclesia for the variation represented by Martha. And as most of these structures were in the High Street, or just off it, you beheld in that ancient thoroughfare of a Sunday a crowd of Christians, as like to the naked eye as a flock of sheep, sorting themselves into their denominational pigeon-holes, and disappearing as suddenly to right or left as the pedestrians in “The Vision of Mirza” vanished downwards through the trap-doors in the bridge.

Of all these types of Christian none seemed so indigenous to Essex as that aptly christened “Peculiar”: it was as though peculiar to the marshes, an emanation of the soil. Though the first apostolic fervour was over in Chipstone, and the spirit was moving rather towards Woodham and Southend, the sect was still young and persecuted enough to be a devoted brotherhood, as Will soon realized from the greetings which his father exchanged with fellow-pilgrims, who grew more and more frequent as they drew nigh the outskirts of the theological town.

There was, among others, a cheerful-looking woman pushing a four-wheeled baby-cart, which held an infant back and front, and a food-parcel sandwiched between them. Caleb, addressing her as Sister, offered to wheel it, but she replied that the children would cry at a stranger. “Well, you’ll soon be comin’ to your destiny,” said Caleb. But before Will and he had forged ahead of her, she had begun pouring out a premature confession. Two or three were gathered together, and the Spirit seemingly blew through her. That time last year she hadn’t trusted the Lord: when they were wheeling the cart to chapel, she had wondered to her husband how she could fit in the coming baby. And the Lord had now made room by taking the prior baby, so that she was well chastised: moreover they had “parsecuted” her husband before a magistrate for not calling in a doctor for the child, but as it wasn’t insured, they had only put him in prison for a little. All the same he was “broke up,” having always been a “forthright” man. The Lord was indeed trying him by fire.

“Ay, ’twas the same, Willie, when your brother what’s-a-name died,” said Caleb as they drew ahead of the labouring baby-cart. “But the Brethren now exhort one another not to insure their childer, Satan being swift to cry child-murder.”

“But isn’t it child-murder if a doctor might have saved it?” asked Will coldly, for the woman’s story had shocked him.

Caleb looked pained. “Ef the Lord wouldn’t listen even to prayers, is it likely He’d regard doctors? Howsomever the Brethren stand fast and faithful—they goo to prison even at harvest-time when you’re worth forever o’ money. But the Lord’s people are wunnerful good to one another, and the Elders look arter the families. Oh, what a joyous Harvest Thanksgivin’ we had two years agoo, time the martyrs came out o’ their cells. All in the open air it was, and Deacon Mawhood brought out be-yu-tiful lessons. No matter you lost your harvest money, he says, you won the palm and the crown, and ’tis the Second Harvest in the heavenly fields with angels to squinch your thirst from golden wessels that shall be yourn, says the Deacon.”

Will received the rat-catcher’s rhetoric with a snort, which put Caleb again on the defensive.

“Oi’ve never took no medicine for ten year,” said Caleb. “And look at me!”

“Well, I’ve taken plenty,” said Will. “And look at me!”

“Oi allow Oi ain’t a Samson like you,” admitted Caleb honestly, “nor couldn’t carry a box that far. And when Oi say no medicine, Oi don’t mean when Oi’m not ill. For same as Oi’m well, mother makes me take a little pill afore meals, bein’ a wegeble as stops the gripes. There ain’t naught about that in the Bible, seein’ as the text starts onny when you git sick. And arter she lost your brother Jim—or maybe he was Zecharoiah—she did fetch a doctor for the tothers, argufyin’ that when the child’s too young to seek grace of itself, oil inside ain’t no wuss than oil outside. And then they Christy Dolphins come along——”

“Who are they?” inquired Will.

But Caleb drew up with a sudden remembrance. “You’ll find that out for yourself. They ain’t far from Daniel.”

“Live on the Common, do you mean?”

“Noa—there ain’t none near us—there was two in Long Bradmarsh, but they’ve gone back to the Joanna prophet woman, so your poor mother ain’t got—” he broke off again. “Oi don’t say ef mother was took real bad, Oi shouldn’t goo and git Doctor Gory, seein’ as she threatens to goo for him same as Oi’m ill. It ain’t the doctor, it’s the faith, says mother, and so long as you don’t believe in the doctor, there ain’t no harm in lettin’ him thump you about. So long as your heart turns to God, says mother, the doctor can listen to it all he likes.”

“Then you do have the doctor!” Will was amused at these compromises exacted by his masterful mother, whose heretical evolution after the loss of offspring he could, however, well understand.

“Noa—noa, not for us—leastways not yet,” Caleb protested. “That was onny for the childer. That made us feel free.”

“Free?” Will queried.

“Not responsible like.” He was somewhat embarrassed. “Faith-healin’ ain’t the main thing,” he expounded anxiously, “it’s faith-gittin’; it’s lovin’ God and seekin’ His grace, just as you’re doin’ to-day.”

Will was silent.

“Bless me!” cried Caleb suddenly. “Ef that don’t look tempesty!”

Will’s eyes went skywards and found indeed a livid patch of gloom, like a ghastly sag of sky, suddenly splotched in the warm blue. And as he looked, a zigzag flash stabbed through it.

“Quick,” cried Caleb, indicating a fairly leafy oak, “git under that tree!”

“No, no,” said Will, “it’s dangerous.” And a terrible peal of thunder accentuated his words.

“Oi’ll hazard it,” said Caleb, hastening towards the shelter. “The Lord is marciful—He can kill us when He pleases. He ain’t got no need o’ lightnin’. But that’s gooin’ to pour like billyho—and the rine falls alike on the just and the unjust—unless the roighteous man’s got an umberrella.”

Will smiled, though humour was as far as ever from Caleb’s intentions. Unwilling to desert the old man, and perhaps weighing the improbability of an electric stroke against the certainty of spoiling his jacket, and the last surviving sheen of his boots, Will stood pluckily beside his parent, while, after another celestial salvo, great drops began to patter on the leaves and even to drip through them. “Lucky that thunder dedn’t come in the middle o’ last night,” mused the old man gratefully as it roared on. “It’s sech a bother dressin’ yourself agen to set up till it stops. Hark at they Tommy Devils squealin’,” he cried, indicating the startled swifts. But after a few minutes Caleb’s patience gave out: the distant chiming of Chipstone Church bells, with which the way had been piously enlivened, was now chillingly inaudible; the thought that they would be late for chapel gnawed at his heart; and dryness seemed a poor equivalent for those missed moments of spiritual ecstasy. He was about to dash through the storm, when the rain ceased as suddenly as it came, the blackbirds began to whistle and forage merrily, and the sun, bursting out more brilliantly than ever, soon licked up the modicum of moisture that had percolated to their Sunday exterior. But Caleb’s apprehensions were justified. He had overrated the pace of his aged legs, and despite the gain through Plashy Walk, he got no compensation for the missed Half-Way Service, for when they arrived at the little meeting-house, the Morning Service proper had begun.

II

The chapel of the Peculiars was one of the minor religious edifices that did not aspire to the High Street. Behind an iron gate and a petty stone courtyard, it displayed a gabled front, with a roof of pantiles, and a row of dull windows of an ecclesiastical order on either side.

As Will passed through the door, all his tardily born sympathy vanished, and a wave of the old insufferable boredom smote him like a breath of the steerage on his Atlantic steamer. Almost ere his hat was off, his eye had taken in the whole once-familiar scene, the painfully crude walls, a little dingier with the passing of the years, the broad table-desk at the head of the hall, at which Deacon Mawhood and the Elders throned it in Sunday black, the rows of spruce wooden chairs sexually divided by a gangway, and exhibiting in its left section a desert of elderly females with a few oases of hobbledehoy girls. He thought of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and calculated whimsically that if that cost twopence to see, how much ought one not to pay to escape seeing this!

But if his entry meant ennui to himself, it was a most dramatic event to the congregation. At first, indeed, this stranger in the fashionable jacket was not associated with Caleb, whose return to the fold was a separate thrill. It was believed for an instant that a veritable gentleman had succumbed to the Truth, and even when it was perceived that he was no other than Will Flynt, the news of whose home-coming had reached the majority, the sensation did not abate, for was not God still visibly with His peculiar flock, turning back the hearts of the wanderers, whether of the old generation or the young? A breath of new inspiration shook the hall, and the grey-haired Brother who had just begun reading the thirteenth chapter of Acts faltered in his mispronunciation of Cyrene. As he went on droning out the chapter—surely the longest in the Bible, chosen maliciously to depress him further, thought Will—its burden of the people of God, set for a light to the Gentiles, evoked a mounting exaltation, and those who had come with no thought of testifying, found themselves possessed of the Spirit. There was in particular a man with mutton-chop whiskers, on the bench in front of Will, whose body swayed with excitement, and who punctuated the reading with breathless jerks of nasal interpolation. “Be-yu-tiful!” “Yes!” “Amen!” “Thank Gord!” “Mercy!” and the like. And when at last the chapter ended on the verse “And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Ghost,” it lifted the man to his feet and he poured forth the story of his sinful past.

“Oi was Church of England—in the choir—and wore black and whoite gowns—and rang the bells—and was confirmed and all—but Gord had never pardoned my sins.”

Will stifled a yawn and looked towards the door. But the rest of the audience hung upon the tale—the tale of a death-bed repentance of Churchmanship and the miraculous recovery to lead the better life of the Peculiar Brotherhood.

“Oi asked the Elder to howd up my hands, so that Oi might die praising Gord for the revelation.”

Sobs came from the left benches, but they only fevered Will. He sat in a dull fury, dazed by words that passed over his brain without leaving a meaning.

“Oh, what a thronging boy and boy—a land where we shall never say ‘Good noight’—engraved in eternal brass—the Lord shoines on your heart—sheep and goats—streets paved with pure gold as it were transparent glass!” It was not till he felt his arm clutched by Caleb in the old man’s excitement at hearing this last phrase that Will connected such words with reality at all, and they faded back into mere religion till a sudden mention of “John in the oil of Patmos” shot up a quaint picture of a too profuse anointment.

Other speakers followed with the same transcendental vocabulary, and then hymns, in an interval between which, the black-garmented Deacon with a royal gesture, that seemed to sweep away the remotest effluvium of aniseed or moleskins, sent Will a hymn-book by a deferentially wriggling Brother. It seemed an ironic revenge for the book he had flung into the bushes, but it saved him from the oppressive proximity of his father’s, which he had been sharing; for the old man, though he could not read the book, liked to hold it as he had always held it with Martha, and indeed could not have sung without feeling it at his fingers’ ends. Will turned its pages with curiosity, thinking of Bundock’s “village idiot,” and noting that it was still published by a village barber. Then a gaunt, horn-spectacled man was seized of the Spirit.

“I’ve been looking for a han’kercher,” he began, to Will’s surprise. “I’ve been looking for a han’kercher,” he repeated. “I’ve been looking for a han’kercher,” he recapitulated with rising rhetoric, “to wipe my tears away.” But the thrilling level, of this exordium was not maintained, and the stock phrases started again, merciless, unendurable, beating on Will’s brain till they beat vainly against the depths of his reverie—or was it his doze? Ah, surely that was Jinny’s horn at last! No, it was only his father blowing emotionally into his red cotton handkerchief—too huge to need looking for—a duplicate of that which held their meals. Besides, Jinny wouldn’t be blowing her horn of a Sunday. But why didn’t she come to chapel, the graceless minx? Was she careering around with that Farmer Gale, or was it her grandfather’s illness?

If flighty young girls, with hearts sound at bottom, would come here and unfold the error of their independent ways, the practice of confession might be justified, and chapel-service become both useful and exciting. But these faded people, these ungainly men and fubsy females! Who on earth cared for their drab histories? Ah, there was Mother Gander, not so podgy as most—in the blue silk of auld lang syne—if only she would get up—or even Charley Mott—there would be some spark of interest. But no, the horn-spectacled bore held the floor pitilessly, and the phrases beat on.

“Be-yu-tiful, be-yu-tiful words—I thought I should die!—Poor me! What a comfort in them words!”

And the nasal voice, its fervour unallayed by its own outpouring, still punctuated the other speeches with jerky interpolations. “Praise the Lord!” or “Glory!” came with fiery iteration, and sometimes this saint with the mutton-chop whiskers said “Lord bless me!” or “Lord bless my soul!” and these frayed and almost meaningless ejaculations seemed full of a startling significance in his mouth and nose.

“Brother Bridges, they said to me, how’s your soul? I couldn’t give ’em a straightforward answer.”

Will woke up again. It was not now the horn-spectacled speaker—he had apparently been wiped off the floor at last, and was not even visible—it was a man with a humorous twinkle and a red beard.

“But if they had asked me, how’s your body——?”

There was a faint snigger from a thick-set girl, instantly repressed by her shocked mother; but after Will had extracted what relief he could from this incident, he tried vainly to extract from the anecdote the exciting edification it held for the others. “How can I go to Romford and tell people I haven’t got salvation?” A dramatic crisis indeed for all save Will, who did not even stifle his yawn. The man’s journey to Romford seemed infinitely unimportant compared with journeys going on every Tuesday and Friday, and despitefully checked on Sunday.

Once the door opened, but it was only for a shambling youth in his teens, and Will did not share the satisfaction of the congregation at this new, if belated, proof of their vitality.

“We’re not afeared, no, not the humblest of us,” pursued the red-bearded man, catching fresh inspiration from this continuous rise in their numbers. “And why? Because we don’t go to work without a Partner.”

Here at last was a definite image through the blur, and if Will in a vivid flash saw a working-partner for himself in a less sublime incarnation than the speaker had in mind, he was for once as a-quiver as his father, who now, albeit with the stock exclamation of “Be-yu-tiful!” proceeded to add real tears to the contents of his capacious handkerchief.

When Will became attentive again, it was a new voice testifying, and the matter seemed quite sensational.

“They used to be carried away and buried in a day. But when our Brother Bundock’s boy got it, we had a special prayer-meeting, and even the marks were light!”

Oh! So it was only the postman’s smallpox. He looked round in vain for Her Majesty’s servant: indeed a general consciousness that the hero of the story was ungratefully absent, damped its appeal—only the man with the mutton-chop whiskers called out with unabated ardour, “Glory!” Will felt that the glory was to Bundock, thus valiantly sticking to his lack of convictions. More than even during the last week, life at Little Bradmarsh seemed impossible, as impossible as in his boyhood; better had he rushed with the mob of his mates to California; even now it was probably the best thing to do with his ninety pounds, unmanly though it were to flee and leave this girl carrier with her arrogance unbroken.

In her absence, if only one of the females would get up! That would be at least a change. But no! The sex was shy to-day, though the forenoon was, he remembered, the traditional time for its testifyings. Perhaps it was the presence of this stalwart young stranger that tongue-tied it.

But the males seemed to be telling their soul-stories at him, challenging his eye, appealing to his black jacket—or was that only a morbid impression of his? An outsider might have been touched by the thread of spiritual poetry in these outwardly commonplace lives, but Will, being of them, had the familiarity that breeds boredom, if not contempt. And contempt, too, was not wanting to this elegantly clad and much-travelled connoisseur of men and women and creeds, who had seen even French cathedrals in Canada, and knew that Roman Catholics were not the scarlet beasts his infancy had somehow imagined them. Once he caught Mr. Charles Mott’s eye fixed upon him with a curious, wondering gaze, which seemed to change to a wink as eye met eye. Will’s eye, however, remaining serious, a flush overspread the ex-potboy’s face, and he looked away.

But Will’s contempt passed into alarm when, at a sudden pause in the testifyings, all other eyes unquestionably converged on him. He turned as red as Charley Mott, and glued his eyes to his hymn-book, not daring to look up till another voice indicated that the Spirit had found a more willing tongue for its organ. But his relief was mixed with disgust, for it was the dry voice of the original grey-haired reader, and it seemed bent on a sermon which had not even the mitigated brightness of a confession. Then, autobiography seemed suddenly to break through it, for Will’s wandering thoughts were fixed by an anecdote about riding to Rochester seven miles on a donkey on a winter’s evening. “Lord bless me!” interpolated the nasal voice, so distracting Will that he never understood how the story led up to a doctor’s remark: “I must have your leg off,” a design the medical materialist appeared to have carried out.

Will tried to peer under the table to see the preacher’s peg, but failing to perceive any signs of corkiness, concluded that the anecdote was not personal. He gathered that after this melancholy amputation by impotent Science, Faith had sufficed to keep the rest of the man together. Medicine had subsequently proclaimed he was in a galloping consumption, “but he ain’t dead yet—he’s still sound and whole,” cried the preacher paradoxically, to the applausive “Glory!” of the tireless commentator.

Another illustrious example of regeneration—the preacher kept Will awake by recounting—had begun life as a parson. But none is beyond hope; even in the sacristy one is not safe from the Spirit, and unable to go any longer through the flummeries and mummeries of the Established Church, he had given up his living and fallen—at one time—so low that he was glad to become a potman in a public-house.

All eyes were here turned towards the unfortunate Charley Mott, and from his squirming figure to Mother Gander, sitting so stern and stiff; but the tension relaxed when the preacher—perhaps tactfully—went on to mention that it was at “The White Hart” in Colchester: where the landlord and landlady had both “parsecuted” him. They were now both dead. (“Glory!” from the nasal punctuator.) “I am sorry they are dead,” said the preacher magnanimously. “But the Lord’s arm is not short.” And while they were well dead, Will learnt that their poor, persecuted potman had now a chapel of his own, where he preached “Full Salvation.” Twenty or thirty were, it appeared, saved regularly and punctually every Sunday evening. “Glory!” trumpeted the nasal voice, and again Will, sullen and glowering, felt that the whole congregation was palpitating with expectation that he would leap to his feet and declare himself similarly saved, or at least not lost during his long absence. But he was not going to make a fool of himself, he told himself harshly. He would sooner face the ordeal of escape, of running the gauntlet of the Brothers and Sisters, and he looked round wildly towards the door, perceiving with satisfaction that the late youth had left it slightly ajar. Then, to his joy and the congregation’s disappointment, another worshipper took the word, or was taken by it; Bidlake, the bargee, with his dog-eyes now shining and his shaggy face sublimated, who declared with touching fervour that he would praise God as long as breath was in him, and with the death-rattle in his throat he would cry: “You can do, Gord, what you like with me!” Ephraim recalled the coup by which he had converted his wife, whom family sorrows had made an infidel. “Ef you won’t goo to heaven with me, says Oi, Oi’ll goo to hell with you!” Now they both pulled and poled together and were happy—so happy, despite family losses and troubles. “Most men ain’t fit to live nor ready to die. Just drifters. Throw ’em the life-line—the life-line afore they drift away!” And with a vivid gesture he threw an imaginary rope. By accident or design it was in Will’s direction, and again the poor young man, with a stifling sense of being lassoed, became the cynosure of every eye. But, fortunately for him, Ephraim Bidlake did not pause here, and his rhapsody poured on; “Glorious truth”—“one generation to the tother”—“the prayer of roighteousness”—“come as you are”—“wain to trust in man”—a veritable cascade of phrases that, falling on Will’s head, gradually lowered it in sleep. An impromptu speech is usually one the speaker cannot wind up, and the worthy bargee went on tangling himself up more and more, till it looked doubtful if he would ever have come to a stop, had not something happened which stole even his breath away.

Through the interstice of the door came suddenly sidling a little white dog. But this accession to the congregation produced no joy, merely a sense of profanity as it pattered up the central parting, leaving, moreover, wet prints of its paws. Springing without hesitation or apology upon the sleeper’s best trousers, it curled itself up comfortably with a grunt. Assuredly Will was not fated to-day to escape the centre of the stage.

The young man recognized Nip instantly, and his yawn of awakening changed into a gasp, and his somnolent pulse into a precipitate beat. The animal’s leap was indeed sudden enough to startle the strongest heart. Will turned his head instinctively towards the door—oblivious even of his damped trousers—but there was no sign of Nip’s mistress. Still, whether she was in the vicinity or not, the dog was clearly out of place. Grasping his pretext of escape firmly by the collar and clasping his struggling opportunity to his breast, he stole from the meeting-house.

III

He expected to see Nip’s owner outside. In his reading of the situation she had arrived so late that while she was hesitating whether to come in, the shameless dog had burst through the door, attracted doubtless by the aroma of all those dinner-packets, and this had made her still more ashamed to enter. But the quaint little street was bare of Jinny. So sunless did it appear without her, that he scarcely noticed that the sky was actually overcast again, and that the black cloud had regathered. He stood still, hesitating; in which relaxed mood of his the spasmodic struggles of the animal were successful, and Will became painfully aware that he was alone with his moist trousers and his London coat snowed over with little hairs, while Nip, after some preliminary gambollings and barkings at the recovery of the liberty he had himself abandoned, was vanishing into the High Street. So assured were Nip’s movements that Will divined at once he had only to follow him to restore him to his mistress, and without waiting even to brush off the little white hairs, he darted towards the street corner, and was happily just in time to see the excellent creature trotting into the courtyard of “The Black Sheep.”

His pleasure was not, however, free from surprise. What was Jinny doing at her business headquarters on the Lord’s Day? Or had she come in her cart to chapel, and put it up there? He ran towards the picturesque stable-yard. There were a good many chaises, gigs, dog-carts and even carriages standing—the countryside drove to its churches—but there was no trace of either Jinny or Methusalem, while Nip was standing with hang-dog air by the doorstep, under a poster of “Duke’s Marionettes.” But as Will drew nearer, he turned tail, sauntered down the passage, surveyed the painted hand, and then with an air of decision bounded up the stairs. Ah, she would be in the parlour! And Nip’s follower bounded upstairs too, keeping closely to heel. But no! Nip was not on dining bent, though the door was open. Rejecting all the appetizing scents that already emanated from the eating-room, Nip pit-patted along the dusky corridor and began whining and scrabbling outside a closed and numbered door. Very soon it receded before his pleadings; and as he scampered in, “You poor dog!” came out in the girlish voice that had so lacerated him with “Fol de rols!” But not the worst of that musical torment could vie with the jar to his heart-strings when, through the reclosing door, came another unforgettable voice with the jovial interrogatory: “Well, Nip, and what was the parson’s text?”

He remembered now—with a cold sick horror—that this was the very bedroom from which indignant housemaids had excluded its tenant—yes, there was Reynard opposite with his glassy eye and his erected brush. Possibly Tony Flip was not even up. That was what came of minxes driving Methusalems! Instead of being at divine service, like all God-fearing humanity, she was coquetting—or worse—with a mountebank in an inn bedroom. Yet he felt he must not spy upon her—any moment, too, she might come out—and he hurried downstairs and stood on the step under the ironwork lamp, louring like the great black cloud, which he now perceived to be in heaven-sent harmony with his mood. And that drivelling patriarch had foamed at the mouth when he had hinted that woman’s place was not a cart!

But Jinny did not keep him more than five endless minutes.

“Hullo, Will,” she cried gaily, as she tripped from the passageway with Nip in her arms. “What are you doing here?”

How the broad frame of her bonnet set off the picture of her face! Small wonder a loose-living showman found it bewitching. Not so William Flynt—with his high ideals of womanhood! Even to be called “Will” was provoking rather than flattering: he felt it now less the perquisite of the old friend than the proof of an indiscriminating levity.

“I’ve come for the dinner,” he said coldly. Nip gazed straight at him with his mild brown eye, but although Will did not suppose that the brute would open its mouth like Balaam’s ass and give him away, he could not look it in the head. He turned his shoulder on dog and damsel and stared at the poster.

“I wish I could have dinner with you,” replied Jinny frankly. “But I must be off to feed Gran’fer. Farmer Gale’s trap should be here by now.”

“He drives you home too?” He turned towards her, startled.

“Within half a mile—it is a treat for me to have another carrier.”

“But he isn’t a Peculiar,” he observed severely.

“No, he’s a Wesleyan like Gran’fer, who used to drive his father about. He puts up at ‘The Chequers’ hard by his chapel—his service ought to be over. I hope his horse hasn’t taken fright again—we had just got to the High Street when the storm broke, and at the first flash the horse was off, galloped miles beyond the town before he could be got to a standstill.”

“He might have killed you, the silly!” cried Will, meaning the farmer.

“Yes,” said Jinny simply, meaning the animal. “By the time he was walked warily back, it was too late to go in. But I don’t wonder Nip was worried about me. You see he likes to run behind the trap, poor fellow”—she wasted a kiss upon his unresponsive head—“and he always comes up in time to say good-bye at the chapel door, where he hangs about till I come out. But this time, of course, he must have been wandering about in search of me. He wasn’t there when I passed just now. Mr. Flippance declares he must have gone to Chipstone Church, in the idea I’d suddenly joined it.”

And the girlish laugh rang out, dissipating some of his humours as much by its joyousness as by the innocent mention of the Showman.

“But why shouldn’t you join it, Miss Quarles?” he said. “It can’t be duller than chapel.”

“Now, now, Will.” She shook a serious finger. “You ought to have gone to chapel yourself this morning. And don’t call me Miss Quarles.”

“But I prefer to call you Miss Quarles.”

“But why not Jinny?” Her voice was plaintive.

“Because everybody else calls you that.”

“Is that any reason why you should call me Miss Quarles?”

“If you can’t see it——!” he began.

“I can’t, and I hope you won’t call me Miss Quarles.”

“And why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I won’t answer to it.”

“And why not?”

“Because, Will, it’s not my name.”

He gasped. “Not your name?”

She laughed merrily at his discomfiture. “It’s a long story and Farmer Gale will be here. Hulloa,” she went on, making his confusion worse confounded, “how did Nip’s hairs get on you?”

He flushed, and flicked nervously at his coat. “There are other white dogs,” he said evasively.

“Well, don’t let him spoil your coat.”

“And what about your bodice?”

“Oh, mine isn’t new and Londony.”

He was gratified at her perception: still more at her setting down Nip. That animal, however, was in the rampageous mood which always followed his restoration to freedom, and he began leaping up at his mistress’s hand.

“Down, Nip, down! Oh, I do believe he’s bitten through my new glove!” She pulled it off ruefully to examine the damage.

“Sensible dog!” Will growled. “He knows you oughtn’t to be wearing Mr. Flippance’s gloves.”

Her own little white teeth flashed out in a mocking smile: “Lucky you are going to buy me another pair!”

“Me! Why, you wouldn’t let me when I offered.”

“Of course not. I’m thinking of the pair you’ll be owing me.”

“Owing you?”

“You don’t suppose you’ll win the wager, do you?”

“Oh, that!” He was disconcerted again. “Of course I’ll win it,” he said defiantly in a bombastic burst. “It won’t take me a day’s practice to blow down the walls of Jericho.”

She laughed. “So you do remember your Bible. Well, I’ll be satisfied if you blow Nip back from a rabbit.”

“We shall see. Have you superscribed again?” he asked pompously, assured of his accuracy this time.

“Not yet—I expect the horn’ll be at Chipstone by Tuesday—you shall have it the same evening.”

“And the next day I’ll be wanting gloves,” he said loftily.

“We shall see—or rather hear. What size do you take, though?”

“Oh, I don’t know—twice yours, I suppose.”

“Oh, not twice!”

“Why, sure!” And he suddenly prisoned her little ungloved hand between his brawny palms. “I could easily crush it,” he said, with a strange desire to do so, pressing it indeed almost to hurting-point. At that instant a far-palpitating blueness transfigured the courtyard, and from above-stairs came a terrific racket as if all the plates and dishes in the dining-room were hurling themselves at one another. Will felt the girl’s fingers curl spasmodically round his and hold them tight: her face went white, and he seemed to hear her heart thumping.

“Don’t be frightened!” he said, with his first manly satisfaction in her. Surely she was clinging to him for protection.

“That’ll be a fireball down the chimney,” she observed with disappointing coolness. “There was one came down last year in Long Bradmarsh and killed a poor little chimney-sweep who had got stuck in the flue. It’ll set the chimney on fire, I expect.”

“This rain will put it out,” he said, still cheerfully conscious of her warm fingers, and feeling a joy in the deluge that had been so damp in his father’s company. She drew back, however, into the passage to avoid the big plopping and ricochetting rain-drops and her hand got disentangled. “What fun if it’s fallen down Mr. Flippance’s chimney,” she laughed. “Make him get up early.”

Her laughter seemed to ring untrue, hysterical.

“Isn’t he up yet?” he asked, trying to speak lightly.

“Oh, he never gets up on a Sunday—not properly, I mean. I saw him half up, but he’s gone back to bed and is already snoring—I heard him.”

“But how could you hear him?” he asked, with careful carelessness.

“Oh, I was in his daughter’s room, whiling away the time of waiting—she’s got ten times his sense—when, woke up by our voices, I suppose, in he trails through the communicating door in his fancy dressing-gown, yawning like a mouse-trap, and asks me to buy him a horse at the fair.”

“A horse at the fair!” Scarcely had he enjoyed the relief of working out that he had taken the harmless adjoining bedroom for the Showman’s, when this new blow struck him, like hooves on his chest.

“Of course I wouldn’t listen to him,” she said.

“Of course not!” His breast expanded again. “How can a woman understand buying horses?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that.” Jinny was distinctly colder. “I mean it’s the Lord’s Day. He’ll have to repeat his order on Tuesday.”

“But surely you wouldn’t go to a horse fair?”

“Why not?”

“Because—it’s—it’s so horsey.”

She laughed again. “And so fairish, too, isn’t it?”

“What does he want a horse for?” he asked sullenly.

“I don’t suppose it’s for dinner—he isn’t a Frenchy. But he’s got a caravan, hasn’t he?—and he has to begin his summer tour soon.”

“And why can’t he buy his own horses?”

“That infant? Why his last horse died of old age at four!”

“And what about that sensible daughter of his?”

“She hasn’t got horse-sense,” said Jinny, smiling.

“Well, I don’t see how it comes into your business.”

“A carrier has to buy whatever she’s asked.”

“Whatever she can carry. You can’t carry a horse.”

“No, but it can carry me. Besides, I’ve often carried a calf or a pig, and where am I to draw the line?”

“You’ll be buying elephants next,” he said, with a bitter remembrance of Mr. Flippance’s story.

“I’m too old for gingerbread,” she replied unexpectedly. “But I haven’t forgotten the one you gave me once.” He trembled under her radiant gratitude, with its evocation of the poetry of childhood. But a convulsive bound forward on the part of Nip broke up the argument. “Ah, here’s Farmer Gale coming along,” she said cheerfully.

Just like the fellow, he thought, to come just at that moment. And his resentment at the arrival of the dog-cart was not even mitigated by the watery spectacle presented by its red-faced driver, whose personable and still youthful figure rose from a streaming tarpaulin, to which a hat with an unremoved mourning-band contributed its drippings.

“You can’t go in that rain,” Will protested. “Let him go without you—I’ll order a trap myself.”

“But you said you were dining here—I can’t wait.”

He winced—his white lie had come home like a curse to roost.

“You can dine with me!”

“And what about Gran’fer?”

“Well, I can dine at home.” But she scarcely heard him. She was already fastening a handkerchief over her Sunday bonnet—a fascinating process. “There’s a good cover—I’ll snuggle right in.”

Shameless, he thought, riding about cheek by jowl and skirt by trouser with a young man not even of her own faith. That thin tiny boy sandwiched between was no real separation: why, the tarpaulin almost swallowed him under! They ought at least to sit back to back, and if there was any chivalry in the pudding-faced lout, he would transfer the tarpaulin to the back seat. How could Jinny forget that the magnate of Little Bradmarsh—cursèd Cornish interloper—was no fit company for the likes of her? He wondered that people did not warn her: but they were inured to her vagaries, he supposed. And even if the man meant honourably, in his reckless passion, how dare a widower with a great thumping boy approach a rosebud? Ah, now she was talking to this second-hand, warmed-up aspirant, who had already killed off one wife; inquiring sweetly about his animal’s behaviour under the recent flash.

“Steady as a plough-horse!” came the cheery reply. “My eye, Jinny, you did handle him wonderful. I reckon you saved my life!”

“And what about my own?” With a laugh whose gaiety stabbed, she sprang upon the step. “Good-bye, Will. Hope you’ll enjoy your dinner.”

“Good-bye, Miss Quarles,” he said coldly. “I mean, Miss——” But before he had realized he could not fill up the blank, the trap had started, and he could not even bound behind, like the joyous-barking Nip. Nothing tangible was left of the whole delectable and distressing episode except some white hairs on the fashionable fabric of Moses & Son.

IV

“Hope you’ll enjoy your dinner!” Her last words still rang in his ear. His dinner! Cold meat wrapped in a “muckinger,” and consumed on chapel benches among drab Elders and elderly Sisters and better-lost Brothers and dismal rat-catching Deacons. No, sooner a crust and cheese at the bar. But why not roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the parlour—why not make his lie true? Yes, lies were reprehensible: truth was always best, and his chaps began to water with ethical excitement. But alas, with a sudden misgiving he put his hand in his pocket. Not a farthing! In the agitation of his chapel-going, he had forgotten to transfer his purse to the Sunday suit—nay, even the ninety pounds were left in the discarded waistcoat, he remembered with an unreasonable chill. He was to be nailed to his lie, then. True, he might possibly get credit, but it was an awkward situation at best. No, better go back to his cold meat—besides, his poor old father would be wondering and waiting. It would be cruel to desert and distract him, and, the rain appearing somewhat thinner, he turned up his coat-collar and started out, almost colliding at the archway with the Mott couple, lovingly entwined under a spacious umbrella. They at least had no need to dine in chapel. Mr. Charles Mott looked at him again with the same curious wonder. “You’re not going back?” he cried involuntarily.

“I can’t desert my dad!” Will answered, somewhat shamefacedly.

“And he must eat, Charley darling,” Mother Gander intervened. “You know how bad our Sunday dinners are.”

“I haven’t even got any money with me,” he cried, with a last wild hope. But Mother Gander did not respond to his longing for truth. “Lend him the umbrella, dearest,” she said ruthlessly. “We’ve another for the afternoon service.”

Accepting it with mitigated gratitude—the umbrella he was trusted with was worth more than the dinner, he thought bemusedly—he moved more slowly to the chapel; wondering, too, how hotel-keeping could be reconciled with the Sabbatarian conscience.

He found the meeting-house now turned into an eating-house. The congregation had, however, visibly thinned: only those who had no hosts or homes in Chipstone remaining for this love-feast, with the exception of Deacon Mawhood, who, rather than go home to his wife, remained at the table as presiding dignitary, flanked by great glass jugs of water. The ravages in the ranks appeared to Will an eloquent testimony to the spread of the doctrine in Chipstone proper: in his young days the sect had been more suburban and rural, and the chapel at that hour had seethed with hungry pilgrims. Still, there was quite a happy hubbub, and the spectacle, with its real sense of brotherhood, struck from him more sympathy than anything in the service; and when a Sister told her cherub not to “goffle” so, he was mysteriously touched by the old word, and the memories it roused, to a sincerer respect for the creed which satisfied Jinny. What fun the boys had had in the wagon, driving home with her!

Caleb was chewing a hunk of bread and meat. The handkerchief-parcel—shrunk like the congregation—incarnadined the bench. “Oi had to begin,” he explained apologetically, “seein’ as Oi’d said grace, expectin’ you back every second, and it seemed foolin’ with the Lord to wait more than ten minutes. Pity that dog worrited you. Be-yu-tiful things were brought out when you was gone. Where did you git to?”

He evaded the question. “I’m not hungry.”

“Not arter that walk of ourn!” cried Caleb incredulously. “Oi count you’ve had your dinner somewhere else.”

“Yes, off the dog!” he said a bit crossly.

Caleb smiled. “Oi’ll not believe that,” he said with an air of infinite cuteness.

“I’ll have a drink,” condescended Will.

“Do!” Caleb passed him a large tin mug of water. “And there’s plenty more where that come from.” Will knew it was Brother Quint—the “snob” or shoemaker who lived next door—who supplied these limitless streams.

“Ain’t she beautifully polished?” Caleb went on naïvely, when his thirsty son set the mug down. “Holds noigh a quart—Oi never see sech mugs nowhere else! And Brother Quint’ll fill it with biling for our tea. There, Will! There’s your favourite sausages mother put in for you, special. None o’ your dogs in that!” And he chuckled, brimming over with holy glee.

Cooled by the long draught, Will allowed himself to be seduced by the veal sausages, and, finding with surprise that the first slid down his throat in a twinkling, he was soon depleting the parcel into a mere “muckinger.” And at this Caleb’s innocent happiness was complete.

But the fate that stalks mortals at their culminating felicities now sped its arrow. In excavating a pickled walnut from the remains of the parcel, Caleb loosed a minute cardboard box, which sprang maliciously to the floor and then, to the agitation of the neighbours, rolled round and round towards the table under the very eyes of the rat-catcher.

The Deacon stooped down zealously to pick it up, and then held it on high. It was a pill-box! “Who brought this?” he cried in stern prophetic accents, across the table.

The happy hubbub ceased, the holy glee was frozen. In a tense silence all eyes were turned on the profane symbol. Will saw his wretched father’s face go red and white, and his scraggy throat work painfully below the ragged white beard. Both the Flynts guessed at once that the careful Martha had slipped into the packet her husband’s usual pill before meals!

It was a dreadful moment. For a space in which all nature seemed to hold its breath, Caleb sat rigid and dumb.

“Whose propity is this?” asked the Deacon still more sternly, and Will divined the mighty struggle going on in his father’s quaint conscience; casuistic questions as to how far a pill-box conveyed unconsciously had been “brought” by him, or in what sense pills administered to him remorselessly from without could be said to be his “property.”

Then suddenly Caleb’s lips opened. “Oi count ’twas in my parcel,” he said in tremulous accents.

The sublimity of the confession thrilled Will: he even felt a curious moisture at his eyes. But before the Deacon, sitting there like a judge about to pronounce sentence, could say a word, a blinding glare, followed almost instantaneously by an appalling crashing and smashing right overhead, showed that nature had indeed held its breath and had now spoken in flame and thunder. Will’s first reflection when the daze had passed away, and the congregation found itself and its building providentially safe, was that it was indeed lucky his father had spoken first; otherwise his confession might have seemed extorted by terror. But Joshua Mawhood was not the Deacon to let such a situation pass without profit. “The Lord havin’ spoke, brethren,” said he, “there ain’t no need for my opinion. The thing Oi hate most in this lower world is hypocrisy and dissemblin’. ‘Roight up and down, Jo Perry,’ as the sayin’ goos. Ef we ain’t been destroyed, as we sat here guzzlin’ and guttlin’, ’tain’t no merit of the congregation, ’tis because the Lord bein’ marciful don’t destroy Sodom and Gomorrah so long as there’s one roighteous man.” He rose majestically and drew himself up to his full height, and held the pill-box even higher. “Brother Flynt, if you’ll kindly step out, Oi’ll hand you back your propity.”

No fiercer punishment could have been devised for Caleb’s gentle soul: the sinner, isolated, passing through his shrinking Brethren and Sisters, must come forward as to a confession table. No wonder the poor man held back.

“Oi don’t need it now, Deacon,” he said, with lips almost as white as his hair. “You can throw it away ef you like.”

With malicious enjoyment the Deacon slowly and solemnly lifted the lid of the pill-box and dipped in his fingers, to hold up the impious contents to the public execration. Then his face changed.

“Why, it’s salt!” he cried in angry disappointment. It was as if the devil were playing thimblerig with him.

“Oi was thinkin’ the missus had ought to put some in,” said Caleb, beaming again.

The woman of the baby-cart now found herself possessed of the Spirit. She sprang to her feet, a baby on either arm.

“We are the salt of the earth,” she shrilled, “wherewith the others shall be salted.”

“Hallelujah!” burst from the mutton-chop whiskers.

“Hallelujah!” responded the congregation, and a great anthem rolled out, outshouting the thunder.

V

To the disappointment of his father, who still hoped he would testify, Will would not stay for the Afternoon Service. But his worthy sire could bear a disappointment after the revulsion in his favour, he thought. He had to take back the umbrella to the Motts, he insisted, or, with this weather, the good Samaritans might be unable to return to their worshipping: in any case he had to see somebody at “The Black Sheep” on urgent business: business, he corrected hastily, of a spiritual nature, calculated to save certain souls from temptation.

“Well, Oi’m glad the Sperrit’s workin’!” said Caleb, “and do ye git back to mother quick as you can, for it ain’t fair as she should be left at home, time Oi’m enjoyin’ myself. Not that ’tis my fault there ain’t no chapel for Christy Dolphins—!” He checked himself and added hurriedly: “Do ye don’t tell her about the pill-box: happen she’d think Oi was wexed.”

“And do ye don’t say you can’t carry a box to Chipstone!” mocked Will gaily, glad to be released. “And of a Sunday too—you old Sabbath-breaker!”

Caleb did not smile: the episode had left too deep a scar. “Oi count the Deacon’s in the roight,” he said. “’Tis hypocrisy and dissemblin’ to take pills at home and salt in public. Oi count Oi’ll testify to the truth this arternoon.”

“But you only take pills to keep off the indigestion, not to cure it,” urged Will, giving him his own plea back. “Besides, salt is a sort of medicine too: without it you might get scurvy and goodness knows what.”

Caleb shook his head. “Lot’s wife wasn’t turned into a medicine. Any man in his seven senses knows the difference ’twixt puttin’ salt or medicine on his wounds.”

Leaving his father to execute his sublime purpose, Will went off on his own mission under protection of the big Mott umbrella. In returning it, he learnt that even its great ribbed dome had not saved Mr. Mott from a wetting, in consequence of which and his delicate health he was now imbibing stiff glasses of grog in his bedroom, hovered over by the anxious Mother Gander. It was pathetically out of the question, Will gathered, for Brother Mott to attend chapel again that day. Will’s “urgent business” lay, however, with Mr. Anthony Flippance: the soul to be saved being Jinny’s, now menaced with still further soilure from the gross contacts of horse-copers, cadgers, kidders, butchers, drovers, shepherds, swineherds, touts, tramps, and all the tricksters and pickpockets of the cattle-market.

The mission did not loom unpleasant, for although he resented the fiction about the Crystal Palace and the stuffed elephant, the tall talk was harmless enough—he had heard taller in America—and he was not indisposed for ungodly society after the reek of the chapel. That the genial Showman would instantly see the matter from his point of view he did not doubt.

But Tony Flip was not in the dining-room even in dishabille, and the waiter was still so occupied with late or leisurely diners as apparently to be unable to conjure him up. “I’ve just taken him up his breakfast,” he said, with an envious sigh. “No. 42. You’ll find him.”

But to intrude thus on the Showman’s privacy seemed indelicate: he waylaid a chambermaid in the corridor and asked her to tell Mr. Flippance a gentleman would be glad to see him when he had finished his meal. She brought back a mysterious answer as from Miss Flippance that he never saw clean-shaven gents.

Will fired up as at an insult. Evidently the rogue was not going to be so malleable: that daughter of his, too, he remembered, had no proper respect for Jinny. “Tell ’em I’ll wait here till my beard grows!” he commanded.

The chambermaid hung back, giggling. He felt in his pocket for a sixpence—again encountering only lining. “If you don’t take my message, I’ll kiss you,” he menaced. It was a jest that never failed him, and it did not fail now, though the fleeing “tucker-in” giggled more than ever. He watched her enter the lion’s den, but hardly had she done so, when the noble animal himself padded forth, grinning like a Cheshire cat, his fork protruded like a claw, and just-spluttered coffee dripping from his great jaws over the breast of his flamboyant hundred-stained hide.

“Where is he?” he roared genially to the dark corridor. “Come in! Come in!”

Will advanced defiantly.

“So it’s you! I was wondering what wit heaven had dropped with the thunder! Yankee yumour—I ought to ha’ guessed it.” And he nearly spitted Will on his fork in his enthusiastic effort to shake hands. “‘I’ll wait till my beard grows’—ha, ha, ha! That goes in this very night—no, there’s no show to-night, hang it! Don’t go, Polly,” he called, as he pulled Will into the room over a barrier of Bluchers and Wellingtons and even Hessian boots with silken tassels, “we must get that into Hamlet. When I say to Ophelia, ‘Get thee to a nunnery; go, farewell’— I’ll wind up ‘Until thy beard grows.’ That’ll be your new cue, Polly.”

“But that’ll spoil the scene,” Miss Flippance protested, poised in a morning wrapper in the open doorway between the two rooms. She was mysteriously mantled in aromatic clouds, like the spirit in The Mistletoe Bough, yet her father did not seem to be smoking.

“Not at all, Polly,” he persisted, “it’s just the right grotesque spirit.”

“There’ll be a laugh.”

“The one thing Hamlet needs. Even the ghost don’t carry it off.”

“You’d better give me the line,” persisted Miss Flippance. “It’ll come better in the mad scene.”

“Well, we’ll talk about it—I think you’ve seen our American friend before.”

“Before and behind,” said Miss Flippance viciously, a scowl traversing her pockmarks. “And since he left me in the lurch, I wasn’t sorry to think I’d seen the back of him.”

“But as Miss Quar—as the Carrier hadn’t got your drumstick, there was nothing to return for,” apologized Will.

“Then why have you?” she snapped, and closed the door behind her with a similar snap.

VI

“Polly’s in a pet,” commented her parent. “She don’t like being worried by actors in search of jobs, specially on Sundays. It’s your hairless phiz, you know.”

“But I’m not an actor.”

“Of course not—she ought to have seen you haven’t the face—only the razor: ha, ha, ha!”

Will was vaguely resentful. “But I dare say I could black my face.”

“There’s more to the drama than Othello, and more to Othello than burnt cork.” And Mr. Flippance laughed again as he dropped into his wooden arm-chair and resumed his breakfast at a little table ’twixt the bed-canopy and the window. “Sit down, won’t you? Excuse my back—I can hear all you say behind it. Ha, ha! That’s another good gag, eh?”

Will, glancing round, saw that the chair not occupied by his host was hopelessly littered by his garments, mixed with papers: he therefore dropped on the high four-poster—it was now made—and cleared his throat for action.

“You’ll have a drop of something,” Mr. Flippance threw backwards, mistranslating the sounds.

“No, thank you!” He must not be bribed or drugged, Will felt: he had stern work before him. It was as well, however, to placate the adversary. “Glad to hear the show’s a big draw,” he said.

“And who told you that?”

“Er—the Bradmarsh Carrier!”

“Bless her—she carries all the lies I tell her.”

“Aren’t things rosy then?”

“I never lie on Sundays. Ha, ha, ha! Perhaps it’s just as well Jinny won’t do business with me to-day. No, old man, I ought to be middling mollancholy, as they say here. But I’m as happy as the day is long—and it’s getting longer every day.” He drained his coffee-cup voluptuously. “Never mind my business—what’s yours?”

“Mine? I haven’t come on business.”

“Then you must have a brandy.” He reached out and pulled the green bell-rope.

“No thank you. You see—” Will swung his legs hesitatingly. “Surely you don’t think she ought to carry lies——?”

“Who?”

“The Bradmarsh Carrier.”

“Jinny! She has to carry anything—at the proper tariff.”

“But is it fair to her?”

“If you mean our doing bumper business, she don’t know it’s a lie, and her telling it helps to make it true. Why, you were itching to see the show yourself, as soon as you heard other fools were flocking.” He turned a grinning face. “Come now, confess.”

“I didn’t come to see the show,” Will contradicted, feeling vaguely baffled.

“Of course not, being Sunday. But what did you come for? Cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.”

“I will,” he said eagerly. “I hear you want to buy one.”

Mr. Flippance swung round, chair and all. “Then you have come on business!”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, have you got a horse?”

“No, but I could get one.”

“And you don’t call that business!”

“I didn’t mean to—!” Will was getting embarrassed. “It just slipped out. What I want to ask of you is——”

“Where the devil is that waiter?” broke in the Showman, reaching for the cord again.

“What I mean is,” said Will, determined to get it out before the waiter popped up, “that there’s a girl you’re leading into brazen courses!”

“A girl! Me!” Mr. Flippance pulled himself angrily to his feet, and stood glaring at Will, with the snapped bell-cord in his hand like a green serpent. “You son of Ananias, if you’ve listened to any of those scandal-mongering swine you ought to be jolly well ashamed of yourself. There isn’t a cleaner man—for a widower—in all the circuit. Why, I could pile up the dollars—as you call it—if I’d only darken my tent a bit, so that the lovers of the drama could go rubbing their noses and licking one another like the calves in the next field. But there isn’t a brighter show this side of the Atlantic. Besides, my girls are all wood—there’s not a flesh and blood female with me except Polly, and she’s my own daughter, born on the right side of the blanket, too. Which is more than can be said for all of us. What may be your name, now?”

“What has my name to do with it?” He got off the bed.

“What has his name to do with it?” asked Mr. Flippance of the waiter, who now shot in with a well-divined bottle and appurtenances.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“And so you may, you son of a slug. Here, take this rope and hang yourself with it! So you won’t tell your name, you son of a flea,” he went on, when the waiter had spirited off the breakfast-tray. “Well, here’s my back—bite away.” And with a high tragic gesture he turned to open the brandy-bottle.

“I’m not a backbiter,” said Will angrily. “I’m a front-puncher, and my name is——”

“Never mind your name. I accepted you. You came like the spirit of the May Day—mixed with the Mayflower. I opened my heart to you. I gave you three names. I was Duke, I was Anthony Flippance, I was Tony Flip.” He gurgled the brandy into his glass. “I demanded no references. I entrusted you with posters for my daughter.”

“Which I delivered honestly.”

“But anonymously.”

“My name is——”

“Hush! Not for a million pounds would I hear it now. But the girl’s name?” he turned round, glass in hand. “That at least I beg.”

“I’ve mentioned it already. It’s—it’s the Carrier.”

“Jinny!” Tony Flip burst into an explosive laugh of relief. “Fancy calling Jinny a girl!”

“And what else would you call her?”

“What you just called her—the Carrier.”

“Then if she is a carrier, why should you degrade her into a horse-broker?”

“Oh, that’s all you mean, is it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Here, have a drink.”

Will waved the glass away.

“Would you like to send your daughter bargaining among a lot of rough men?”

Tony grinned. “I don’t think Polly ’ud mind the men. It’s the horse she’d come a cropper over. Jinny’s had a long experiance of horses, and she’s smart enough to buy anything. If I wanted the moon, she’d get it for me—and cheap too!”

“And why can’t you buy your own horses?”

“Why? Because I’m a child of nature—a simple player—who wears his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at. My last mare crocked up in a week in the flower of her youth—seems to have been bought in a knacker’s yard, shaved and singed and brushed and combed till she was as shiny as a Derby winner. They gingered her ears and jaws and cayenne-peppered her nostrils till she seemed clothed in thunder, like the war-horse in the Bible.”

Will smiled despite himself. “And you expect a girl to see through all that! Look here, I’ll buy your horse.”

Mr. Flippance paused in the act of imbibing. “Oh, there we are,” he said, looking shrewd. “Want to cut out Jinny’s business!”

Will’s cheeks became chromatically indistinguishable from his hair.

“Me! Do you think I want your dirty commission?”

“And do you think I want your stinking horse? Why the devil do you come interfering?”

Will was silent. Tony finished his glass like a victor.

“If it ain’t the commission, what are you after?”

“That’s my business,” said Will sullenly.

“Just what I said!” crowed Tony. “But I’d rather pay Jinny a quid than you a bob. She’s got her old grandfather to keep!”

“Yes, and he’s as selfish and inconsiderate as you. But she shan’t get you a horse, and there’s an end of it.”

“Oho!” Brandy had made him genial again. “Who’s going to prevent it? Now don’t say ‘I will,’ because that’s in our dramas—attitude and all. Though judging by the way you’ve been going on, Mr. Anon, I’m not so sure you wouldn’t make an actor! Perhaps Polly smelt right and you are one after all. But don’t you come disturbing my peace of mind, you son of a star. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back to the legitimate.”

“We’re talking of caravan horses,” said Will, at once mystified and mollified.

“You seem to know all about it. I guess you ran a show yourself in the States.”

Will smiled darkly. “That’s not your affair.”

“But it might be. I’m not above a partner with capital. Duke’s Marionettes are getting shabby. The ghost is nearly black; Ophelia wants a new coat of paint. Harlequin is out of joint and the Clown’s cheeks are worn white. And we’ve got too few characters and too many plays. The public are on to it when they see Hamlet turning up again in The Beggar of Bethnal Green. Some new scenery too would smarten up the show. I shan’t expect you to pull the strings—just put up the chinkers and we’ll divvy up, you and me and Polly. Now don’t say ‘No’ too quick. Drink it over.” And, beaming beneficence, he again tendered Will the other glass.

This time Will took it, hearing himself clink it against Tony’s through a daze, as he asked himself whether, after all, this notion—utterly fantastic and unexpected as it was—mightn’t be as good a way as any other of investing his ninety pounds: he would certainly be in a position then to stop Jinny from buying the horse!

“Well, what do you say?” cried Tony.

“But you don’t know my name?” murmured Will, with the stir of adventure and brandy in his veins.

“Pooh! What’s in a name? A nose by any other name would swell as red.” And, laughing, he clapped Will on the shoulder. “We’ll spruce up the tent too, and slick up the caravan—a dingy old hearse ain’t the best advertisement on a tour. And why shouldn’t you take some of the parts? Pity to waste your twang. We’d get some American figures made—cowboys and slave-dealers and such—and spice our ghosts and goblins with Colonel Bowie knives and Yankee yumour. We might even turn the bridegroom in The Mistletoe Bough into a rich New-Yorker, and make the bride moulder away in an American trunk. There’s a fortune in it. I don’t mean in the trunk—ha, ha, ha!”

With a last instinct of sanity Will observed maliciously that it was Sunday. He merely meant to remind Tony that that was his day for truth. But the Showman’s glass nearly fell from his fingers.

“You too!” he said. “And that Jinny—as lively a girl as ever stepped. And Mother Gander—as buxom a landlady as ever bussed a bagman. What’s come over the East Anglian circuit? And I took you for a man of the world.”

Unwilling to repudiate that status, Will remarked flabbily that precisely as a man of the world he didn’t see any money in marionettes.

“No money!” Mr. Flippance swelled with indignation as he pointed out that Drury Lane and the mines of Golconda were not in it with marionettes, properly equipped and spring-cleaned; the public was simply panting for high-class puppets.

It goaded Will to emphasize his meaning. “Is this your Sunday talk or your week-day talk?” he interrupted dryly. “Didn’t you just tell me that you’re doing badly?”

Mr. Flippance admitted it almost without a wince. And had he not given the reason? To take money out you must put money in. “I tell you there’s a fortune in it,” he repeated.

“Sunk?” asked Will blandly. He added vengefully that he would consider a partnership when the stuffed elephant came home from the Crystal Palace. Tony, in crimson comprehension, rushed at the litter on the spare chair and dragged out a newspaper from under the neckties. “Read that!” he said sublimely, “the Essex County Chronicle!” And his semi-gilded forefinger indicated a heavily blued passage. “Our readers will be interested to know,” read Will, “that it is a local showman who supplied the great stuffed elephant that holds Her Majesty’s gorgeous howdah in Mr. Paxton’s marvellous glass——”

He dropped the paper. “I beg your pardon!” he said, too disconcerted to realize that the “local” showman need not necessarily be Tony Flip. “But I really would rather not talk business to-day, and I don’t know anything about yours—that wasn’t my line in the States. I never even saw a puppet-show in my life, outside Punch and Judy. A real live drama now——” he concluded vaguely, meaning that he had at least seen real plays, and utterly unforeseeing the effect the remark would have upon his host.

For Tony Flip bounded like a large mechanical toy, plumped down again in his chair, turned its back and his own to his guest, and stuffing jewelled forefingers into both his ears cried out: “Get thee behind me, Satan! Avaunt! Avaunt!”

VII

“Me, Satan!” said Will, astonished. “Who ever heard of Satan refusing to do business on Sunday?”

If his last innocent remark had produced convulsive effects in a perpendicular direction, this set Tony Flip rolling from side to side in his chair. “Yankee yumour,” he gasped between the spasms. “Lord!” he said at last. “You’ll drive me to set up a minstrel show, only to get that in.”

Will, though puzzled, could hardly help being flattered by these proofs of his facetious talents. It was strange, he thought, how different the conversation went when he was with Jinny. Then the laugh seemed always at his expense.

“I should think a minstrel show would be more fun,” he observed.

Tony veered round with his arm-chair, ceased to laugh, and regarded Will with large, reproachful eyes. “And you cant about Sunday!” he said. “And then to come tempting me back to that Witches’ Sabbath of a profession.”

“Nigger minstrels?” Will murmured, more dazed than ever.

“As if nigger minstrels weren’t half-way to your Othello. No, you son of Satan. To hell with your capital! Didn’t you hear me say ditto to the rat-catcher? They are dens of the devil—theatres.”

“Then why do you run one?”

“Me! I don’t class my show as a theatre. Marionettes keep themselves to themselves.”

“But you play Shakespeare.”

Tony held up his fat glittering forefinger. “We pull Shakespeare’s strings—Polly and me. But there’s no actors the public can drag before the curtain.”

Will admitted the difference, but not the moral distinction.

“You ever met any actors and actresses?” said Tony.

Will could not pretend to that privilege—if Mr. Flippance and his daughter refused to be counted—and there was a long silence, in which Tony seemed to the outer eye to keep sips of brandy-and-water lingering on his palate, though he was really—it transpired—chewing the cud of bitter memories. For suddenly he burst out: “I lived all my life with ’em. I’ve managed ’em for years—or, rather, failed to manage ’em. Born in a Green Room, rocked in a Witches’ Cauldron, and baptized in grease-paint. My ma was a leading lady—she played heroines and my father wrote the melodramas. And they know a good melodrama at the ‘Eagle.’”

“Yes—I’ve heard of the ‘Eagle’ in London,” said Will.

“Ah, you know it by the song, perhaps:

Up and down the City Road, In and out the ‘Eagle.’ That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel!”

“I never heard a weasel go pop,” Will laughed. “It was the mouse, if anything, though I did once see a stoat crack up before a cat.”

Tony’s mien relaxed in a faint smile.

The weasel was a tailor’s iron, he explained, pawned by the reckless snip to raise money for treating the damsels who danced with him on that open-air platform to which the “Eagle’s” audience streamed out betwixt the drama and the farce. He added simply: “That’s where my Don Juan of a dad first clapped eyes on a girl, pretty, of course, but with no more acting in her than Mother Gander. Yet, would you believe it, he shoved her into the lead instead of ma, and wrote a piece all for her, and what was worse it was a big go. That was the last straw, and clasping me to her wounded bosom, she left him, poor ma.”

“I should have thought she’d ha’ left him sooner,” murmured Will, vaguely uncomfortable under these frank domestic revelations.

“It isn’t so easy to leave a man you’re not married to!” said Tony.

Will gasped.

“Ah, that surprises you?” said the Showman complacently. With a cautious glance at his daughter’s door of communication, he produced two cigars furtively from his washstand drawer—was he forbidden to smoke, Will wondered. “You’ll find that good,” he said, pressing one upon his guest.

“You see,” he explained, as they puffed at these excellent weeds in a new intimacy, “if a woman leaves her husband it makes a scandal he don’t like, whereas a man that’s not tied is only too glad to be rid of her. Oh, I ain’t defending ma, mind you—it only shows she was a born actress. I dare say she’d only sucked up to pa to get parts. But when he unstarred her, fine emotional actress as she was, she could never get her foot in again in London, to play leads I mean, for she was too proud to play anything else. ‘I can play anything except second fiddle,’ she used to say, and rather than cave in, she married a fifth-rate manager, called Jim Flippance, who had only a fit-up theatre (carries its own props, scenery, and proscenium, but not open-air, you know), and made him put up pieces with a kid in ’em to keep me out of mischief, but it wasn’t long before I soared out of the parental nest, and by the time they both joined the majority, poor old birds, I’d been leading man or manager or both in half a dozen theatres, two of ’em London houses.” Will receiving this information with a silent curl of his smoke, as though it were another elephantine claim, Mr. Flippance added vehemently: “Real London theatres, mind you, not those swindling gaffs for paying amateurs described by Boz—that’s Charles Dickens, you know. You’ve read Dickens?”

Will shook his head. “Too heavy and high-class for me. They don’t like him in the States either—I’ve heard he wrote a piece against them——”

“Ah, but you should hear him read his ‘Christmas Carol!’ There’s a wasted actor for you! Lord, if I’d had the running of that chap!”

Will was more interested in the girl who cut out Mr. Flippance’s ma. “I hope your father—your pa—” he substituted politely, “married his new flame,” he said. Even through the glow of the brandy and the blur of the smoke he was dismayed by this dishevelled life.

“How could he? He had a wife in Cork. Yes, I forgot to say pa was Irish. I’ve always gone by my mother’s married name, but you can have my father’s name if you wish!”

“Not for a million pounds,” said Will.

“You Yankee yumorist!” Tony blew a playful puff of smoke at him. “Well, you’ll see it if you come across the old ‘Eagle’ playbills or those of Flippance’s Fit-Up for that matter, for we did all pa’s plays—ma had played them so long she knew all the parts. Pa sent her a lawyer’s letter—for she didn’t even trouble to change the titles or the author’s name—but she defied him to wash his dirty linen in court, knowing how virtuous his ‘Eagle’ public was, and that it might ha’ ruined him and his moral melodramas.”

“They seem a funny lot—stage folk,” Will commented.

“Bless you, there’s no bearing of ’em.”

Will, relieved, said he was glad Mr. Flippance didn’t approve of such morals.

“Morals!” Tony glared at him. “Who’s talking of morals? Men will be men and women women whether they’re pro’s or public. You didn’t find America a Sunday-school, I reckon?”

Will, coughing over his liquor, supposed a man could have his fun anywhere.

“That’s what I say!” said the Showman. “And on the other hand I’ve known actors as respectable as your rat-catcher. I’m one of ’em myself, as I told you just now. I’d seen too many dead flies in the honey—and my Polly’s as pure as her poor dead mother. No, it ain’t their morals that bother me, it’s their ways. Holy Moses! To think of the time I had travelling round managing these sons of dragons and hell-cats! I envied ma and Flippance in the churchyard under their favourable stone notices. The jealousies! The cat-and-dog bickerings! The screams and hysterics! Who should play this or that, who should be largest on the programmes and posters, who should stand in the limelight, who should take the call—they never quarrelled who should take the bird: that’s the hiss in our lingo. They were always hissing at one another, or at the poor manager, that’s me! I’ve seen the leading man and the leading lady take their call hand in hand, and the moment the curtain was down resume spitting fire at each other. It wasn’t that they had any vanity, they said, it was only that their position demanded they should take calls singly or be printed larger than each other. Cocks and catamarans! I tell you if I hadn’t swopped with Duke for his marionettes, I should have had little rose-bushes growing out of me now, and that favourable stone notice over me. Oh, the peace of it—it’s Sunday all the week!”

“I can see marionettes would be easier to manage,” said Will, smiling.

“Ah, but to feel it as I do, you must have lived through it.” Mr. Flippance rose in his emotion and paced animatedly. “You must have had a hornets’ nest for your seat and a brood of vipers in your bosom, and shared diggings with the Furies. Oh, my radiant juvenile, your sun-coloured hair would have been snow if you had gone through what I have! If you’d had Ophelia in hysterics and Hamlet in liquor and even the ghost hardly able to walk, and the call-boy crying the curtain was up, and the audience stamping and whistling, and short-tempered people at the box-office demanding their money back, you’d be able to measure the feeling of thankfulness that comes over the cockles of my heart when I stand in my theatre and see my leading lady sitting so angelic on her wires unable to move hand or foot without me, or when I jerk my leading man out of the centre of the stage all in a heavenly calm; And to see the curtain come up and down with nobody scuffling behind it to bob and smirk—oh, the Jerusalem restfulness! There mayn’t be as much rhino in marionettes as in flesh and blood——”

“You just said there was more,” Will reminded him, unkindly.

“I meant compared with the capital put in,” said Tony, without turning a hair. “You don’t risk much when you don’t have to pay your actors. But Duke wasn’t mercenary, and it was the glory that appealed to him, poor man. He’d inherited the business, like me, but he’d always been ambitious after high art, he told me, and Flippance’s Fit-Up was his boyhood’s dream. We did the swop over mulled claret last Christmas Eve in this very inn. Peace and goodwill, thinks I, as we clinked tumblers on the deal. You’ve got the goodwill, but peace, no, that you’ll never see again.”

Will smiled. “I’ll really have to come and see those blessèd puppets,” he said, as the Showman replenished the glasses.

Tony replied that he should see the whole boiling of them either before or after the show, neatly packed in their big box. “And if there’s any you’d like to kick, you’re welcome,” he said.

“What! Damage your property?”

“It would work off my bitter memories.”

“But they’re not the real live actors.”

“No—there’s the pity!” said Tony. “But they look so real—they’re life-size, you know—that I sometimes yell at ’em and abuse ’em just for the satisfaction of their not answering back. And the leading lady looks as if she had a tongue to her—I promise you. A tongue—but thank the Lord it can only talk Shakespeare or noble sentiments—can’t even nag the management for a new dress. As for the juvenile lead, I can’t help tweaking his nose sometimes for the sake of auld lang syne. Polly can’t understand my spoiling his beauty—I can’t make her see I’m getting a bit of my own back—and when she catches me punching the low comedian’s head with a boxing-glove she saucers her eyes, as though I was going dotty. But she never had to manage ’em. And I had to travel ’em too—don’t forget that. Fancy carting around a menagerie, all in the same cage! But I have my revenge when I travel ’em now—into the box they go—leads below and the heavy man sitting on their heads, ha, ha, ha!—and utilities and supers on top of all! And it don’t raise a whisper. Talk of the lion lying down with the lamb. Believe me, old cock, that there millennium will never come till we’re all on wires.” He drew vigorously at the cigar his eloquence had all but extinguished.

“There’s a lot of the brutes,” he mused between the puffs, “that don’t know Tony Flip’s escaped out of hell, and they write and call for engagements—same as Polly thought you did—and if it isn’t Sunday I take ’em to see my company and rub their noses into ’em, so to speak. Look at ’em, I say, every man and woman knowing their place, and when to speak and when to hold their blooming tongue, every one knowing their parts too, which is more than you ever did, I’ll be bound. No wigs, no make-ups, no dresses, no young bloods or decrepit dandies coming behind, no prompter, nobody missing their cue, or unpunctual or hysterical. No Bardell versus Pickwick. Nobody drunk, married, divorced, deceased, laid up, locked up, or run over, between the dress rehearsal and the first night. No understudies, eating their heads off: in the way when they’re not wanted, and missing their cues when they are. No sore throats, no funerals to go to, no babies to get—if there’s a baby wanted, I order it from the makers. And above all, my boy, say I to ’em, no treasury.”

“What’s that?” inquired Will.

“What’s that? Well I’m blowed. That’s pay-day. And kindly note, I say to ’em, that lead don’t get more than utility, nor responsibles than walking gentlemen. It’s Owenism, you sons of Mammon, I tell ’em, sheer Owenism. Everybody getting the same nothing, and nobody coming carneying for advance half-crowns. As for curtain-calls, the singing chambermaid’s got the same chance as Lady Macbeth. And when it is a leading man that’s come for a berth, I take him to the front of the booth where there’s a retired village idiot I picked up, banging the drum. Look there, says I, he’s not got much brains but he isn’t wood, and that’s the only flesh-and-blood job I’ve got left in this blooming shop. If you like to take it, why, in recognition of your position, I’ll throw in an extra naphtha flare.”

“And what do they say?” laughed Will.

“It can’t be repeated on a Sunday! But you can picture ’em black in the face—all except the nose. That gets redder than ever! Hullo, Charley! Come in! Come in!”

Through the open door he had caught sight of the landlord in the corridor.

“Can’t stop, Tony.” Mr. Mott was, in fact, hurrying to take advantage of his spouse’s return to chapel.

“Gander-pecked again, I suppose,” laughed the Showman. “Ah, Charley, you’d be much happier if you had a wife on wires.”

“There you go again!” And Mr. Mott, eager to join old pals at their fishing, sniggered past, leaving a reek of hair-oil.

“Poor chap!” sighed Tony. “But there’s always hope for a man whose wife won’t call in a doctor.”

Will laughed, and cunningly took advantage of all this expansive geniality to escape from the room and the threatened transaction and to call from the doorstep as he took his farewell, “Then it’s settled—I get the horse.”

“If you bring it into the partnership,” cried Tony after him, “not otherwise.”

Will found himself waylaid by Polly as he passed her doorway. She beckoned him within with a mysterious, masterful forefinger, and he, seeing the moreen curtains of her four-poster discreetly drawn, entered, though not without Puritan misgivings. She drew another curtain over the closed door communicating with her father’s room, and turned the key. “Don’t waste my cigar,” she said as he held it behind him. “I can see pa’s given you one of mine.” And taking up her glowing fag-end from the ash-tray, she resumed her suction of it, sipping in the intervals at a glass of milk. “I suppose you won’t share my drink,” she said simply.

“No, thank you,” he said, hardly believing his eyes, though he now understood whence came the clouds in which he had found her mantled. Perhaps she was really a man in disguise, despite her long ear-rings. But then, would ever a male take milk with his cigar? What with tobacco and horsiness, what was the sex coming to? And yet there seemed something symbolic in this combination of stimulants, this masculinity mitigated by milk! “What do you want to say to me?” he asked, keeping the front door open with his hand.

“What’s this about a partnership?” she said softly. “I couldn’t help hearing.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Will in tones hushed as cautiously. “Mr. Flippance did speak of it, but I’ve never thought of the theatre as a business, only as a spree.”

“Did he want you to take a theatre?” she asked anxiously.

“Good heavens, no! He called it hell!”

Miss Flippance smiled sadly. “That’s his way of consoling himself. He’s dying to get a stock company again. But he mustn’t have even a theatre for amateurs. I’d fight it tooth and nail.”

“It’s bad for him, I know.”

“It’s bad for me,” said Miss Flippance. She puffed out a cloud. “You see, there’d be no place for me. I can wipe most actresses off the stage, but I’m not pretty—at least, not since my illness—and the public won’t have me—except at the piano where I turn my back on them. Plain actresses must be heard and not seen.”

“Oh!” Will was taken aback by such candour.

“Besides, one of the women would probably entangle him into marriage. I don’t mind his having a wife on wires!” And a smile came travelling over the pits of her face.

“You don’t mean to say he really wants to go back to hell?” said Will, dazed.

“Don’t the moths after you’ve saved ’em from the lamp? And it was no easy task saving him. Christmas after Christmas I used to jest: ‘Peace and goodwill indeed! You’ll never have peace till you’ve got rid of your goodwill.’”

“But that’s what he says himself,” said Will naïvely. “So he can’t be craving to go back—it’s the marionettes he wanted me to stand in with.”

“That’s all my eye. He don’t know how happy he really is nowadays, playing all the men’s parts. That was always the trouble in a real theatre, especially when he was cock-of-the-walk—he never could make up his mind which part he wanted. First he’d try one, and then think another was better and throw it up in the middle and take away the other man’s part. Nobody likes to give up a half-digested part, and it doesn’t make things easier when, after all, you get it back again. Imagine the ructions he was always making, and I’m not going to have it all over again. He’s got all the parts now, and so it’s going to stay.” With which ultimatum she held out her hand and gripped him with what he felt a manly clasp, and an honest. “Don’t you be his partner,” she counselled. “He’s lost all his own money and it’s not likely he’d multiply yours. He might have been a big London actor or manager, but the Bible sized him up before he was born. ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.’ If only at least one can keep him to water! No, you stick to your cash. There’s no money in the show for more than him and me—my last jewellery will have to go for the horse—and if you’ve really got the dollars, he’d have a theatre, with you as juvenile lead, before you could say Jack Robinson, and then he’d steal your part and drive you to drink.”

Will replied firmly, still holding her hand, that he was going to put his money into farming, and by the way, would she countermand that order to the Carrier for the horse?

“Oh, but we must have a horse,” said Polly.

“Quite so, but why through Jinny?” He was prepared himself, he explained, to get them the best animal at the lowest price.

“And for what commission?” she queried.

“For love!” said Will.

Polly withdrew her hand. “No, thank you. We’d best let it go through Jinny—like everything else.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII. 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.

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