Chapter IV: Will on His Way (1)

_Permit me of these unknown lands t’inquire,_
_Lands never till’d, where thou hast wandering been,_
_And all the marvels thou hast heard and seen:_
_Do tell me something of the miseries felt_
_In climes where travellers freeze, and where they melt._
CRABBE, “Tales of the Hall.”

I

THE coach from railhead to Chipstone was an hour and a half late, and not all the flourish of its horn as it thundered into the courtyard of “The Black Sheep” could disguise the fact. Not that it was the fault of the coach: it had waited for the mail train, and this, for those parts, parvenu monster had found an obstruction on the line, and was helpless to go round it, as the driver and the guard complacently pointed out. Their glory and their tips were shrunk like their circuit—unchanged along the short route, they could no longer prod the slumbering traveller with insinuatory farewells: they knew themselves, these Chipstone worthies, a last lingering out-of-the-way survival of the old order, doomed like the broad coaching road and the old hostelries to decay; already they had seen the horned guard decline in places to the omnibus cad, even as the ancient “shooter” of highwaymen had sunk to the key-bugler; yet they preserved the grand manner before the revolution that was deposing them—the Tom Pratt and Dick Burrage of a generation of travellers—and while dispensing their conversation like decorations and drinking your health as a concession, they retailed with gloomy satisfaction every railway collision and holocaust, as though coaches never overturned, and declared the English breed of horses would be ruined. And when certain lines set up third-class carriages they denounced the cruelty of packing the poor in roofless, seatless trucks, as though they themselves had never brought into port frost-bitten peers or dames sodden through their oilskin umbrellas.

But to-day “Powerful warrum” was the grumble of the passengers, even of those on the roof, the majority being—thus early in May—still smothered in box-coats; as for the unfortunates compressed inside, who had likewise not yet cast a clout, and had similarly mistrusted the sunshiny spell with which that pouring April had ended, they mopped their brows and cursed the fickle British climate. But though the sun had suddenly become hot enough to sour milk, it could not sour the temper of the bronzed young man—his face nigh as ruddy as his hair—who sat on the box-seat and conversed with Tom Pratt almost as an equal. Even the long delay on the line had left him unruffled, thanks largely to the blue-eyed girl in the train who before his clean-shaven cosmopolitan air had shown signs of tenderness, and whose address his purse now held—more precious than a fiver. Verily a pleasant change after the Eveless back-blocks of Canada.

And the idea of calling this “warrum”! He smiled to think of the hells he had known—Montreal with mosquitoes, New York in a damp heat. Why, this couldn’t even melt a man’s collar. And how refreshing was the trimness of the Essex countryside—the comfortable air of immemorial cultivation—after the giant untidiness of the New World. How soothing these long, green, white-sprinkled hedgerows with their ancient elms, this old, historic highway with thatch and tile, steeple and tower, after the corduroy roads of round logs or the muddy, dusty, sandy tracks. How adorable these creeper-covered cottages after log-cabins in backwoods; rotting floors on rotten sleepers and the mud paste fallen out of the walls. He forgot that it was precisely this that he had fled from nearly a decade ago—this dead, walled-in life, so petty and pietistic—and he congratulated himself afresh on the wisdom of that abrupt resolution to sell his clearing to a second-hand pioneer and to farm at home with the profits.

His clothes alone would have kept him in good humour. Not only were the heavier in what he had learned to call his trunk, but those on his back were the first he had ever had made to measure. And they were made too—like the neckcloth and shawl and fal-lals he was bringing to his parents “from America”—by the world-famous firm of “Moses & Son” (opposite Aldgate Church), whose imposingness was enhanced in his eyes by finding it—on the Saturday he first hied thither—haughtily aloof: a blank wilderness of shutters in a roaring world, with no gleam through their chinks from the seven hundred gas-burners. But he had finally stormed the “Private Hall,” toiling—as invited by rhyme—up “the stairs of solid oak,” and had gained the heights “where orders were bespoke,” and there—in that rich-carpeted “showroom with the giant chandelier,” in a setting of Corinthian columns, sculptured panels, and arabesque ceilings—dark enchanters with tape-measures like serpents over their shoulders had made obeisance to him and enfolded him with their coils. Even his billycock hat verified the bardic boast:

_There’s not another Hat-mart in the town_
_Which casts such lustre on the human crown._

Left to himself he would have liked a wideawake, but that _arbiter elegantiarum_, the small boy, he was warned, had not quite acquiesced in that. If it was not a coat of many buttons that he now sported, it was scrimp enough to show off the fine lines of his figure; for the movement towards ample waistcoats and wide trousers was not yet encouraged by his Aldgate mentors, and pockets on the hips had been conceded him with reluctance. In his large American trunk reposed a still grander suit of Sunday sable, though he had shied at a frock coat, and was glad to learn from these hierophants of the mode that morning jackets were no longer confined to the stable-yard or the barrack-room, but were permissible even in the country house—and there was no question but Frog Farm was that. He had already worn his blacks once, on his visit to the Great Exhibition, and they made, he found, a distinct difference to the policemen in top-hats whose guidance he sought in the labyrinths of the metropolis.

The delay in this visit to the Exhibition—the goal of his journey to London—had turned out an advantage, he felt, giving him time for these measured elegancies. If he had been unable to be in at the opening, as he had grandly designed in Canada when ignorant that this involved guineas and season-tickets, he had managed to squeeze for a glimpse of the Queen outside if not inside the Park, and the first five-shilling day—after all, only the fourth—was grandeur enough for a whilom ploughboy and cabin-boy. Although nine ten-pound notes made a warm waistcoat-lining, he was not under the illusion that he had returned with more than a competence.

One would have thought London itself a Greater Exhibition to a young man who had never seen it before: especially London at carnival with its colossal crowds swollen by visitors from all countries in all complexions and costumes: London with its numberless gay ’buses (plying mostly to Hyde Park), its swifter gliding cabriolets of the new pattern invented by Mr. Hansom, and the more stolid procession of four-wheeled clarences, not to mention the fashionable and civic carriages with the scarlet-and-gold pomp of flunkeys and outriders: London with its countless curious street-criers, costermongers, ballad-mongers, watercress sellers, muffin and hot-pie men, birdcage dealers, tract-peddling Lascars in white robes, and vendors of everything from corn-salves to speeches on the scaffold; blowsy, rowdy London that turned into a dream-city when those strange figures with rods glided through the twilight, flecking the long, grey streets with points of fire.

But though Will Flynt was not insensitive to these fascinating phenomena, and even rode about recklessly in the cabriolets at eightpence a mile, yet London had not the spell to hold him. Only the Great Exhibition had drawn him across the Atlantic. While awaiting impatiently for the five-shilling day, he duly did the Tower and the Zoo (sixpence extra for Mr. Gould’s humming-birds in the twenty-five glass cases), paid twopence to go into St. Paul’s, and a shilling to see the Great Globe in Leicester Square, patronized Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, and the horses at Astley’s, had a peep at Vauxhall, enjoyed “Rush, the Norwich Murderer,” at Madame Tussaud’s, and submitted the boots these operations begrimed to the red-coated shoeblacks of the Ragged Schools—London’s new word in philanthropy. But though he liked the quarter in which his quaint galleried hotel, “The Flower Pot,” was situated, with the Spitalfields Market and the tall old houses of the silk-weavers, whose vast casements with their little panes rose story on story, he was no sooner through with the visit to the Exhibition than without a day’s delay—as promised in that letter to Martha—he took train and coach to Little Bradmarsh.

Beholding him thus on the County Flyer hurrying towards Frog Farm, after only a single visit to the stupendous spectacle, one may suspect that he did not know his own heart as well as he imagined. But he himself had no doubt of the magnet he obeyed, and he had found on his boat not a few rich Canadians—and the Dominion already boasted four thousand carriage-folk—who confessed to have yielded to the same irresistible attraction. There was indeed little else talked of on the voyage: even the wonders of the boat itself—a new Yankee iron and screw steamer of nearly two thousand tons and quite five hundred horse-power that brought them to Liverpool in eleven days from Halifax, and had spittoons and wedding-berths like the Yankee river-steamers, and to see which the Liverpudlians had flocked with their sixpences—paling before the world-marvel awaiting them in London.

And London itself was talking of it no less: for once London was staggered. And if London was thus shaken, how much more the provinces and the world at large? Did not indeed the flags of all nations wave over the great glass building, whose mere material would have been enough to set the globe agog, even if it had not contained contributions from every corner of civilization except Germany, which in that antediluvian age figured in the catalogue only as “The States of the Zollverein.” What wonder if with all the excursions and alarums and millennial visions that attended its birth, the Press reeking with paragraphs, poems, discussions, wrangles, skits, prophecies, and forebodings, crowds equal to the population of provincial towns gathered at the Park to watch it rise, and to stare at the endlessly inrolling vans and the sappers and miners at work in their uniforms. One M.P.—military and moustachio’d—won the immortality of the comic prints by fulminating against the invasion of Freethinking foreigners who would pillage London and ruin the honour of British womanhood: more sober minds feared the Chartist mobs and the Red Republicans: even the Catholics, already flaunting their cardinals and ringing their unhallowed church bells, would profit by the Continental wave. The House of Lords resounded with protests and petitions against the profanation of the Park, and apprehensions as to the fate of the building erected therein were equally rife: the great glass roof would be splintered by hailstones, the walls would be overturned by the wind, the galleries would collapse under the swarming multitudes, and Anarchism would seize its opportunity amid the dismantled treasures of the globe. But one unfailing factor was on the Exhibition’s side: the scheme was attacked by the _Times_. And so Paxton’s building rose steadily till the great day when through an avenue of three-quarters of a million spectators the Queen and “that Queen’s indefatigable husband”—as a panegyrist of the period put it—drove to declare it open to the elect thirty thousand who had already found it so, while through glittering nave and transept, with their fountains, trees, flowers, and statues, the “Hallelujah Chorus” thundered from a thousand voices, two hundred orchestral instruments, and a dozen giant organs; and the millennial hope welled up in a grand climax of universal emotion. And hoary grandsires should hereafter tell—proclaimed the poet of the Great Catalogue—what in this famous century befell: grey Time should chronicle the victories gained, since Mercy o’er the world and Justice reigned:

_What time the Crystal Hall sent forth her dove_
_And signed the League of Universal Love._

But although our Canadian pioneer had thus ample excuse for the unrest that forbade him to miss this Messianic spectacle, it was not—even he would have admitted—the Great Exhibition which had first unsettled his stolid labours. That oscillation had been communicated some two years earlier, and by a shock that had set the New World rattling even more noisily than the Old was shaken by the Great Exhibition. The discovery of gold in California was a seismic vibration that depopulated Eastern towns, shot sober lawyers into wagons, sent clergymen flying along mule-trails, swept timid tradesmen across the foodless and robber-haunted Rocky Mountains, whirled schoolmasters fifteen thousand miles round Cape Horn, and dumped them all waist-high in auriferous mud and shimmering water, to be fed by Indian squaws. It was under the lure of the Californian legend that Will had originally looked about for a purchaser of his cleared acres. But by the time the farm was off his hands, the glamour of easy gold had faded, and with a sum in his pockets sufficient for a little respite, life seemed suddenly larger than lucre, and he found himself possessed by a strange craving not to be away from the old country in that year of years—the year of the Great Exhibition.

II

Chipstone had seemed strangely shrivelled as the County Flyer tore through it; the High Street unexpectedly narrow and the great, gorgeous shops, against whose panes he had flattened his youthful nose, curiously small and drab, with diminutive sun-blinds; yet the quaint, blistered bulge of the old timbered houses was fascinatingly as he remembered it, and when the spirited quartet of tinkling steeds slackened under the archway crowned by the ironwork sign of “The Black Sheep,” he saw through a warm dimness that the ancient inn still gave on the stable-yard with this same Tudor bulge, and that the courtyard itself was little less rambling than the picture he carried in his memory. There was the same mass-meeting of cocks crowing on the same golden dunghill, the same litter of barrels, boxes, baskets, and parcels of laundry-work, while the gardens of the whitewashed old cottages backing the black-tarred stables and cartsheds seemed caught up as incongruously as ever in the horsey medley. Why, there was the very shed which had sheltered the farm-wagon the Sunday he was to drive it to Harwich. And there—yes, actually there on the same doorstep, under the same hanging ironwork lamp, was Ostler Joe, the shambling, bottle-nosed hunchback, whose figure—in its reassurance of stability—struck him as positively beautiful, and whose head seemed aureoled by the mist. But where was that more expected face, where was the hair-swathed visage of Caleb Flynt? Brushing the mist from his eyes, he looked anxiously round the seething, sun-drenched courtyard. “Hullo, Joey,” he said at last. “Wouldn’t my dad wait?” It was a pleasant voice with something of a twang: but the twang was no longer local.

“Oi dunno your feyther from Adam,” said Joe cheerfully, mopping his face with his shirt-sleeve.

“Yes, you do—old Mr. Flynt—Frog Farm.”

Joe shook his head—it seemed no longer a saint’s. “Oi never heerd nobody mention Frog Farm nowadays. It’s a dead place.” He shambled off on his many tasks with an aliveness that tightened the contraction Will felt at his heart. His father dead?

“But look here, Joe!” He pursued the factotum. “You remember me—little Will Flynt?”

“Can’t say as Oi does—moind that box now.”

“It’s _my_ box—and I wrote to dad to meet me with a trap. Guess he got tired of fooling around.”

“There’s warious traps.” The hunchback waved a busy hand.

“No—he’s not here. And how am I to get my trunk home?”

“Bradmarsh carrier goos at three—you’re in luck.”

He heaved a parcel now into a driverless tilt-cart, where a little white dog boisterously mounted guard. “That’s ’er!” he said. “Take you too if you’re smart.”

“Daniel Quarles!” A fresh wave of reassurance radiated from that old household word on the familiar tilt. So the venerable carrier was still plying, how then could the comparatively juvenile Caleb be extinct? The May Day ribbons not removed from Daniel’s horse, and making it a snow-white steed from fairyland, dispelled the last funereal images. Surely had Caleb Flynt really died, old Quarles would never have left so lively a topic untapped with Joey.

But here Will’s meditations were agreeably cut short by another vision from auld lang syne—the laced mob-cap and blonde kiss-curls of Mother Gander, to whom Dick Burrage was gloating over the train’s misadventure. There were pouches under the blue eyes, and no gold chain now heaved with her blue silk bosom: otherwise she was her old comely self. But fresh from his grand hotel in Spital Square, Will no longer regarded her as an awful and aristocratic personage, able to eat meat at every meal. An easy accost and inquiry about the old Flynts of Frog Farm brought him soothing information. Lord bless his soul, people living a healthy life like that never died—unless they took medicine. She couldn’t say they had been to chapel lately—indeed she had gathered from the postman that the old wife had taken up with some New Jerusalem crankiness. “But you’ll find the Bradmarsh carrier in the parcel-shed—that black one. You ask _her_!” And with a wave towards the arch she turned again to the beaming Dick Burrage.

Will thought the “her” referred to a chambermaid who was just passing, but he saw no need of such guidance—the parcel-shed was obvious enough. His mind was occupied with the odd fact that Mother Gander had apparently become a sister in the spirit to his own father, while his mother had moved on to another eccentric doctrine. Ah well, changes were bound to come. Not everybody could be of the same immutable granite as himself.

He found the parcel-shed deserted save for a young girl who, busily heaping up parcels into the willing arms of Joey, did not even look up. Somewhat depressed by the chapel-memories the landlady had conjured up, he stood a moment, absently watching the operation, and wondering why the agreeably pretty creature should be dispatching so many parcels—wedding-cake came into his mind, though the oddly varying shape of the parcels was not consistent with the hypothesis. He would willingly have loitered—the chapel-cloud was dissipating—but the carrier was clearly not here, and, as the church clock opposite was booming three, he was afraid old Daniel might be starting off without him, so he hurried back to the pranked and pawing steed, only to find himself derided and defied by the little dog, which he now observed was also adorned with a May Day bow.

And then he remembered he was hungry. The block on the line had robbed him of his dinner, and he wondered whether to go off with that grim Gaffer Quarles would be so enjoyable as walking—after a square meal. No, why should he be thus whisked off? Why not a leisurely spread at “The Black Sheep” preceded by another glimpse of the girl in the shed, and then a long stroll home by the dear old field-paths, through Plashy Walk and Swash End, dry enough doubtless under this sun? Besides, his slow old parent might be on the way after all—there was no certainty the carrier with his compulsory windings and detours would not miss him. Yes, it would be kinder to his father to give him another hour or so. “The May Queen” he murmured to the air, brooding over Methusalem’s belated ribbons. Yes, they would surely have made her that; though perhaps the old custom was no longer kept up. True, she hadn’t the blue eyes or the plumpness of the girl in the train, and was not stately enough for a queen—though of course you couldn’t really tell how Victoria looked outside her royal carriage. But then you couldn’t imagine the blue-eyed minx in a royal carriage at all: you placed her smiling behind bars, manipulating beer-handles.

“It’s all right,” Joey startled him by announcing, toppling his tower of parcels into the cart. “Oi’ve made inquirations. The old Flynt chap be aloive and kickin’.”

“Oh, thank you.” Will’s last shade of uneasiness vanished. He slipped a sixpence into Joey’s palm. “Put my box in—I’m not going myself—say it’s for Frog Farm.” And he jostled back to the parcel-shed, through the bustle of boxes and jangling of bells, barging into other carriers from other circuits, stumbling over dogs that yelped, tangling himself in the whip of a postboy who was frantically buttoning his waistcoat, and nearly run over by the great coach just wheeling round. He was more disappointed than surprised when he at last reached the shed to find it empty, though far fuller than before of mere people. Still, there was always dinner.

III

But dinner was not always.

“No, I’m afraid it’s all gone,” said Mother Gander. She was blocking the way at the foot of the stairs, where a painted hand under pendent stag-horns directed you upwards to the “Parlour”—“The Black Sheep” would have none of your new-fangled “Coffee Rooms”—and Will Flynt, sniffing up the odours of beer, sand, tobacco, gin, snuff, and tallow like an ambrosial air, felt a further elation in the thought of its being now a beckoning not a monitory hand: to ascend to those unexplored heights, mysteriously grand to the boy, seemed symbolic of his rise in life.

“But haven’t you got _any_thing?” His face fell.

“Nothing fit to offer,” said the landlady.

“But I’m hungry—and I’ve got to wait here.”

“You’re not staying for the night?” she queried.

“I may,” he said, to encourage her to produce some food.

“Oh, but we haven’t a room empty.”

He reddened. Was it possible she recognized the hobnailed lad of yore, refused to serve him or to allow him up her aristocratic stairs?

“You haven’t a room empty?” he repeated incredulously.

“There’s a poky garret,” she said, “and another man would have to go through it to his bedroom, and he goes to bed very late and gets up very early. But even our best rooms are stuffy and our corridors are that dingy people are always tumbling against the brooms the maids leave about; when they’re not tumbling down the stairs. Look how steep they are! The whole house is badly built—it was never meant for an hotel—and the service is disgraceful.”

Will, overwhelmed, stammered out deprecation of her abuse. The inn was most picturesque, he urged, and it was not the fault of the house if the coach was late; as for himself a crust of bread and cheese would suffice to stay his pangs.

“Well, go up and see what you can get,” she rejoined sceptically, moving aside. Relieved to find the barrier raised, he ascended the dog-legged staircase; his boyish awe resurging. Alas! even the landlady’s disparagement had not prepared him for this dishevelled scene—dirty plates and greasy knives and forks and tobacco-stoppers and sloppy pewter pots that had stamped bleary rims on the fly-haunted table-cloth, and a waiter in his shirt-sleeves dining, like a gentleman, off the ruins.

“Wegetables and pastry is hoff!” murmured this disturbed gentleman.

Will was retreating—bread and cheese at the bar amid the glinting bottles and shining beer-handles seemed more appetizing—but the waiter had sprung up, his mouth still masticating but his coat conjured on, and had him fixed instanter on a Windsor chair at a clean little sun-splashed table by a side window that was refreshingly open and gave on the cheery courtyard.

A cut of the devastated joint, strong mustard pickles, a hunch of good bread, a pint of porter and the freedom of the cheese to follow, soon dispelled the dismalness of the room; an effect to which the attendant magician contributed more literally by his great trick of vanishing crumbs and disappearing plates, including his own half-eaten meal. How good it was, this cold roast beef of old England, how equally redolent of the dear old country those hunting pictures on the low wainscoted walls, with all their gay bravado. There were four of them: _The Meet_, _Breaking Cover_, _Full Cry_, _The Death_; all populous with spirited pink gentlemen and violently animated dogs and horses, culminating in the leading dog tearing the fox, and the leading gentleman waving his tall hat in rapture. He quaffed voluptuously at his frothing pewter pot. To the Queen of the May—ay, why not drink to _her_?

“How’s Mr. Gander?” he asked irrelevantly, with a sudden image of the bull-necked landlord and his massive gold scarfpin.

The waiter—on the point of disappearing—materialized himself again, and stared at the questioner.

“He ain’t _any_how,” he gasped at last. “At least that’s a secret ’twixt him and his Maker.”

“Dead?” It was Will’s turn to gasp. Could so much gross vitality be extinct, or even rarefied?

“Dead and married over. She’s Mrs. Mott now, though the old customers will keep on with the Mother Gander, just as I have to bite my tongue not to call her husband Charley.” He lowered his voice. “He was the potboy once.”

Will whistled. “What women are!” was in that knowing note. How pleasant it was thus to discuss—with beer and pickles!—life and death and the sex.

“Yes, sir—the potboy, and busting with pride if I let him hand up the plates at the Bowling Club dinner.” A sigh accented the cruel change. “You’ve been away, sir, I presoom.”

“Half round the world,” said Will with airy inaccuracy. “But why didn’t _you_ go in for her?”

“Me! With my old woman! Besides _I_ wasn’t going to turn Peculiar—no, not for ten ‘Black Sheep.’ You’ve heard o’ Peculiars, sir?”

“Ye-es.” A cayenne pod in the pickles made him cough.

“Thick as blackberries about these parts—and as full of texts as the bush of prickles.” The waiter’s voice sank again. “She made poor Charley into one of ’em. He’s got to go to chapel three times every Sunday and once on Wednesday.”

“Poor chap!” There was sympathy as well as mockery in Will’s tone. “But can you tell me”—he had a sudden remembrance—“why she runs down this place so? Is it her Peculiar conscience?”

“Ah! I’ve heard others arx that too. My opinion ain’t worth a woman’s tip, but I can’t help fancying it’s more defiance than conscience. Time was, you see, sir, folks kept away, and it sort o’ soured her. I don’t want your rotten custom, she as good as says to all and sundry. Take it to landladies who’ve arxed your permission to marry. And so they come all the more, sir, yes, and cringing to have rooms, and pays her whatever she asks. There was lots o’ grumbling in the old days: now you never hear a complaint, except from herself. My stars, the money she’s making! But I can’t say I envy Charley—not even when he bullies me. Although in marriage if it’s not one cross it’s another, ain’t it, sir? Or perhaps you’re one o’ the lucky ones.”

“I’m not married at all.”

“That’s what I mean.” And the waiter sighed again. “Got all you want, sir?”

“Everything, thank you—not wanting a wife.”

His laugh, gurgling away into his pewter pot, evoked only a deeper sigh, on which the waiter seemed wafted without.

IV

Simultaneously—through the opening or closing door—something was wafted within. Our complacent young man at his place in the sun, with the glow of freedom at his heart and of porter at his throat, was startled by something leaping on his knees, which, automatically fended and thrust away, was felt as clinging claws scraping down his new trousers. Coughing and spluttering, and with the beery glow changing to a choke, he perceived that it was the carrier’s little white dog, the very same that had warned him off its master’s goods; unmistakable by its pink bow. So the doddering patriarch had not yet started, he thought lazily, though he must now be back in his cart or his canine sentry would not have gone off for a farewell prowl. He helped himself to another cut of beef, and his thoughts wandered from Mother Gander to a builder’s widow he had known in a Montreal boarding-house, a widow to whom he could certainly have played the Charley had he cared to go so far. He seemed to hear her foolish whimpering the day he left for the backwoods, but he became aware that it was only the carrier’s dog whining.

It was begging so prettily on its hind legs, looking so appealing in its pink bow, that he was soon feeding it rather than himself, and morsel after morsel fell to it, each gulped down with such celerity that from the creature’s instantly renewed and unchangingly pathetic posture of supplication, an absent-minded man would have doubted if he had fed the brute at all. But finally the young man pushed away his cheese-plate, and dropping with plenary satisfaction upon a horsehair and mahogany arm-chair that stood by the empty grate, he lit his cherrywood pipe with a brimstone match and followed his springtide fancies in clouds of his own making. Thus the second pounce of the dog on to his knees found him acquiescent, even caressing, and with a beatific grunt the animal curled itself up as to an æon of repose.

Then a horn sounded, and with a convulsive start the creature was off his lap and scratching and yapping at the closed door. Will, too, had a moment of wild wishing he had engaged a seat in the cart—the thought of walking in this heat was no longer alluring—but it was equally unimaginable to get up now and rush like the animal. Besides, he hadn’t paid his bill, he remembered not discontentedly. Meanwhile the distracted little dog had darted back to the window and leapt on the sill, but it was obviously cowering before the depth of the jump. He was feeling he really must get up and do its will, when to the satisfaction of the slothful man and the bliss of the active beast, the door opened, and like a streak of lightning the white figure had forked across the room and vanished. He turned his head lazily to the window to see if it would catch its cart, but was only in time to see the tail-board with his own box disappearing through the archway, pursued by Joe with a belated bundle. Then the new-comers claimed his languorous attention.

V

Strictly speaking, there was only one new-comer and he was hanging back at the sight of the London-tailored guest, being himself in moleskins and bent and fusty, though Mother Gander was clearly beckoning him forward. “The gentleman’s just going,” she said sweetly. Will knew not whether to be drowsily pleased at the status he had achieved in his own neighbourhood, or sluggishly wrathful at this renewed attempt to be rid of him.

“Plenty left,” he observed encouragingly, puffing immovably.

“Oi reckon, sister, Oi’ll feed in the taproom.” The voice sent strange vibrations of resentment through Will’s being, and particularly through his nostrils, where a mysterious smell of aniseed was called up, whether from memory or the actual moleskins he could not make out.

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Mother Gander sharply. “It’s less trouble here. Remember what James says.”

Who was James—was her husband not Charley?—Will was wondering dreamily.

“Chapter two, warse two—Oi take your p’int,” answered this odd figure, whose wizened face with the straggling whiskers seemed loathsomely familiar. But though the beady eyes under the moleskin cap were turned for a moment full on his, remembrance stirred but feebly through his after-dinner lethargy, and it was not till the intruder had sinuously and softly skirted the great dining-table and begun solemnly turning the faces of the hunting pictures to the wall, like naughty schoolchildren, that he was dully conscious of the secret of his abhorrence. There—on the very first day of his return—was Joshua Mawhood, the button-snipping villain of his story!

Mother Gander stood by silent, as one properly censured. Neither did she protest when, slashing a giant gobbet off the beef, he carried it on the point of the carving-knife to Will’s mustard-strewn meat-plate, and bearing the same with its dirty knife and fork to the remotest corner of the table, fell to with audible enjoyment.

“I’ll send you your milk, Deacon,” she said, turning to leave the room.

“Don’t copy Jael too far,” he answered, with a grimace.

“Copy who?” asked Mother Gander, mystified.

“Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite—her as killed Sisera. Like me he asked for water, and, like you, she gave him milk. But she meant to nail him like a stoat.”

“Me murder you!” said Mother Gander with a scandalized air. But she was clearly impressed by his erudition.

“’Tis onny my fun. But you look up Judges, chapter fower. They’re beacons to us—they old Hebrews and Hebrewesses—beacons.”

“Would you rather not have the milk?” Mother Gander was still a little puzzled.

“’Tain’t for me to refuse a sister’s kindness. And the best way to repay her is to take it with rum. Bein’ as there’s a wisitor, the leetlest drop o’ rum in it, to show Oi don’t howd with your rebukers in that regard. Send the bottle separate, to be plain to all beholders.”

“And send me another pint of porter, please,” added Will. He felt he must justify his stay even as the Deacon must justify his drink. The ecclesiastical preferment that had come to Elder Mawhood amused him—his boyish resentment faded suddenly, and the respectable rat-catcher—after all, the motor-impulse of his fortunes—now loomed through a cloud of kindly indulgence; even touched with the glamour of early memories, with the magic of those far-off winters whose approach had brought the expert to Frog Farm, as surely as it brought in from the hedges the creatures against whom he waged cunning battle in the war-zone of the barns and outbuildings. How thrilled the boy had been by the great traps and the pack of ferrets—nay, had not the strange old man seemed himself a larger ferret, with his tight-fitting moleskins, sidling motions, and curiously small shining eyes? What a joy his annual visit—with what fearful interest the bunch of children had listened to the annual contract, made for gross sums, or for particular buildings, sometimes calculated per tail of rats! The Elder had always made a point of the cost of the shoe-leather involved in the isolation of Frog Farm. Aniseed, Will suddenly remembered, had played a considerable part in beguiling the victims, and the scent of it, coming up again,—dream-whiff or reality—was now incongruously mingled with a flavour of youth and innocence, touching our rustic Ulysses almost to tears. He wheeled his arm-chair window-wards to hide his emotion, and puffed into the courtyard.

“Oi don’t object to your smokin’,” mumbled the Deacon.

“Thank you,” said Will. “You don’t remember me, I’m afraid, Mr. Mawhood.” “Deacon” he could not bring his tongue to. “I’m Will Flynt, the looker’s boy you were always so kind to. You let me set your traps and dose the bait.”

The Deacon shot a beady look at him, but shook his head.

“Why, you let me smell your ferret once, don’t you remember, when it came out of the hole by the Brad, and you said that though I hadn’t heard a squeak or a scamper, your nose could tell there had been rats in the run.”

“There was swarms of boys at Frog Farm, all bad ’uns. Oi never knew ’em by tail—but Oi dessay Oi do remember ye in the rough.”

Will was strangely disappointed. “Don’t you remember I lent you my slate to hide the trap from that cute old rascal?”

“Ay, warmints allus runs to cover,” said the Deacon vaguely.

“And when caught he wouldn’t eat the bait, surely you remember?”

“They never does. Rats has more sperrit than lions,” said the Deacon with enthusiasm.

The abortive attempt to recall himself to the rat-catcher was ended by the return of the waiter, whose delicate balance of rum-bottle, milk-glass, and pewter pot on the tiniest of trays, was almost upset by the sight of the blank backs of the hunting pictures. He seemed as startled as though he was not in the conjuring line himself. Depositing the drinks, with his usual sleight of hand, at both ends of the room simultaneously, he made as if to reverse the pictures. But the Deacon emitted a sibilance so terrifying that he did the vanishing trick instead. The old man then produced from either pocket a pale-yellow, pink-eyed creature, and emptied the milk-glass into a saucer. “How thirsty they gets this weather,” he observed, as they lapped greedily at the milk. “Pore things—their need is greater than mine.”

VI

Will was sipping his porter _piano_, and the Deacon his rum _strepitoso_—the ferrets back in his pockets—when the door opened afresh, and a new figure protruded through it, likewise drawing back when the room which should have been empty at that hour was seen to be in occupation. This was, however, a very different figure from the Deacon’s: a figure jovial and ponderous, sporting a floral dressing-gown and carpet slippers, and with all the air of having just left an adjacent bedroom.

“Come in—don’t mind me,” called Will cheerfully.

The smoker’s invitation not being negatived by the muncher and bibber, the massive visitor padded forwards, revealing more clearly his heavy-jowled hairless rubicund face and the motley multitude of stains on his gay dressing-gown, and waving a roll of clammy-smelling posters. “Just come by the coach—and in the nick o’ time,” he observed genially. And espying in the reversed pictures a favourable background for his operations, he circumvented the table (not without surprise and disgust at the corner where the moleskinned man grunted, guzzled, and guttled), and hung up two of the bills on the nails without any observable astonishment at the state of the pictures or any apparent attention to anything but his own interests; stepping backwards to survey the effect with such absorption of mind that through the girdle of his dressing-gown his spine collided with the table.

“No, my boy!” he addressed Will. “They can’t print like that in Chipstone.”

From his arm-chair Will could easily read the more glaring headlines:

TO-NIGHT AT SEVEN—LIFE-SIZE
DUKE’S MARIONETTES
_Hamlet And The Ghost_
MARGARET CATCHPOLE
_Pantomime-Ballet_

THE MISTLETOE BOUGH
_The Beggar of Bethnal Green_
EDMUND, ORPHAN OF THE CASTLE
_The High Road to Marriage_

AS PERFORMED BEFORE ALL THE CROWNED HEADS
_Of Europe, America, and Australia_

N.B.—Miss Arabella Flippance at the Piano

“Sounds bully,” he observed politely.

“Bully’s the word, my young American friend,” said the Showman. “What a pity the mail-coach was late—we might have had ’em stuck up for the ordinary and caught some shilling patrons. You’re staying here for the night, I hope.”

“No—I’ve got to go on.”

“What a pity! I was about to offer you a front seat.”

“Me? Why?”

“Must fill up somehow,” said the Showman frankly. “People never go to a play unless they think they can’t get in. And as we only open to-night, there’s not been time to advertise our bumper houses. You see, sonny, we lay up here for the winter, and if we’d started before this heat-wave we’d have caught more colds than coppers.”

“Is it open-air then?”

“No, but the next thing to it—a tent! By squinting out of that window you’ll see the whole caboodle rising on the meadows like a giant mushroom. Why not stop here and pick up a young lady? I’ll give you _two_ seats.”

“Don’t want more than one seat when I’ve got a girl,” laughed Will. Then the face of the girl in the parcel-shed came up, at once alluring and rebuking, and he repeated that seriously he must be off.

“Never mind—better luck next act,” said the Showman, and tugged furiously at the bell-pull, and the waiter appeared with a glass of brandy and water, as though he added thought-reading to his conjuring accomplishments.

“Well, here’s to our better——!” began the Showman. His eye, raised towards Will at the window, caught suddenly something in the courtyard, and setting down his untasted glass and snatching up his posters he disappeared almost as frantically as the dog.

“He’s forgot he ain’t dressed,” chuckled the waiter.

“Seems to be a merry gent,” said Will.

“Lives here all the while the show is on,” said the waiter, not without pride. “Pays me a shilling every time I go in.”

“I hope on the same principle Mother Gander will pay _me_,” said Will, laughing, and ordered his bill: which he found as unreasonable as the food was excellent. He did not, however, mulct the waiter of the handsome tip, designed to show him not a woman but a man and a gentleman at that, and the waiter finally disappeared with congees instead of with conjurings.

“I know you will excuse me, old fellow,” said the Showman, re-entering, “but business before pleasure. Fact is, I got up too late to catch the carriers, but now I’ve got the postman to leave my bills at all the public-houses on his next round. Good fellow, Bundock, though why he should boast so over killing two frogs with one stone, I don’t understand. It seems an operation as cruel as it is simple.” Here he swigged at his neglected glass. “He made a point, too, of my not employing the Bellman.”

“You’d have done better with the Bellman here in Chipstone and over at Latchem,” volunteered Will. “Where Bundock mostly goes, you’ll never get ’em to come.”

“That’s what Bundock said. But don’t you believe it, sonny.” He held up a huge hairy forefinger, half gilded with a great ring. “They’re only a canting lot o’ sons of slow-coaches. They’ve never had the chance of knowing what they like. Temptation’s the thing.”

The diaconal sibilance that greeted this sinister sentiment fell unheeded on the Showman’s ear, or rather he did not distinguish it from the worthy Mawhood’s general medley of guttural and nasal noises.

“There’s no greater temptation,” added the Showman, “than Shakespeare and the Ballet.”

Will shook his head. “They don’t know one from t’other. Did—I mean, if they did”—he had slipped into the old idiom—“they’d be scandalized. Why, I went to see a piece of Shakespeare at Sadler’s Wells myself last week, and I’m bound to say ’twas a bit thick—though splendidly acted, mind you.”

“You needn’t tell me that. Phelps!” He smacked his fleshy lips voluptuously. “Lord! What a job that man had to clear out the beer-sellers, babies, and filthy-mouthed roughs, and now it’s the quietest show in London. What was the piece?”

“Can’t remember the name—about a nigger.”

“_Othello?_”

“That’s it—sounded a rather Irish name for a nigger I thought.”

“Irish? Ah, yes—ha, ha, ha! You had me there! By Jove, that’s a new wheeze!” And he roared genially, while the innocent, and it is to be feared sadly illiterate, Will tried to look like a successful humorist. “Anyhow,” he said, “you won’t get ’em from Little Bradmarsh, no, nor Long Bradmarsh either. They think all actors are wicked.”

“And so they be!” burst forth the Deacon at last. “Hobs and jills ought to be kept apart!” He stuck his knife towards the poster. “_The High Road to Marriage_, indeed! High road to Hell!”

“Hear, hear,” agreed the Showman surprisingly, rattling his glass. “Well put, old cock. But these ain’t actors; only puppets. You can’t be wicked in wood.”

“I’m afraid I must be off,” said Will, rising.

“Then here’s luck to you.” He finished his glass. “And may you die before you’re buried!”

“Thanks, I hope I shan’t do either, Mr. Duke.” He took his hat and stick.

“Not Duke, old man. Flippance, Anthony Flippance, universally docked to Tony Flip. Duke only goes with the Marionettes. I bought ’em lock, stock, and barrel—-the oldest circuit in East Anglia, and the name going well with the crowned heads.”

“But there are no crowned heads in America,” said Will, smiling.

“Pardon me, sonny,” contradicted Mr. Flippance.

“But I’ve just come from there,” said Will crushingly.

“And how about the Emperor of Brazil?”

“Oh!” said Will blankly. He seemed really to have heard of this personage. Then recovering, he said: “But have you played before him?”

“That’s not my affair,” said Mr. Flippance. “It ain’t my responsibility what Duke’s done or left undone—if Duke was his name, which I take leave to question. ’Twixt you and I, I doubt if it would pay to work Brazil. But, as I said, I bought it as a going concern, lock, stock——”

“And lies,” snapped the Deacon.

Mr. Flippance turned his large red face benevolently towards the moleskins.

“Lies is a harsh word. Legends, old cock, legends.”

“Oi bain’t a bird,” rasped the Deacon. “Stick to the truth.”

“Lord love us, a Quaker!” Mr. Flippance winked at Will, who smiled—man of the world to man of the world. “As if anybody would take a thing that size and smell for a rooster!”

The Deacon reached for the rum-bottle in deadly silence. Will, with a fear—soon proved superfluous—that he meant it for a missile, hastened to remark that anyhow there were no crowned heads in Australia.

“Where were you educated, sonny?” retorted Mr. Flippance. And he began whistling the then favourite air: “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” He broke off to point out that kings and queens were as thick in the man-eating islands round Australia as old cocks in Essex, though they didn’t wear moleskins, or indeed anything but their own skins. Besides, he added as an afterthought, wasn’t Queen Victoria monarch of Australia too?

Will, taken aback again, had to admit it. “But you haven’t played before Victoria?” he murmured.

Mr. Flippance winked more widely as he explained that a study of the posters would show that the Marionettes themselves never claimed to have performed before crowned heads. It was the plays that had been performed. He turned suddenly upon the rum-soothed Deacon. “You’re not denying, my Quaker friend, that Queen Victoria’s seen _Hamlet_?”

“You leave me and the Queen out of it,” growled the Deacon.

“Ha! Then you admit she’s seen _Hamlet_?”

“Oi don’t know nawthen about it. Why _should_ she see _Hamlet_?”

“Because he was the Prince of Denmark,” said Tony, winking again at his now bosom friend. “But you Methody Quaker dead-alive go-to-meeting sons of Sundayfied slugs crawl about thinking yourselves holier than Victoria, God bless her, even when it’s wood, never having seen society or ever had a drink outside Chipstone.”

The Deacon was roused at last. “Never had a drink outside Chipstone!” His breast heaved with a sinister movement—was it a wheeze of wrath or of laughter? “Oi’ll goo bail my round is bigger nor yourn. There ain’t scarce a barn in East Anglia what don’t know me.”

Tony’s great jaw fell. “A barnstormer! You! Rats! What do you play?”

“It ain’t play—it’s work.”

“Yes, I know—but what’s your repertory?”

“My what?”

“Your pieces.”

“Oi bain’t onny a piece-worker.”

“In what?”

“In what you said. It ain’t always per tail.”

“Retail, do you mean?” said the puzzled Tony.

Will, who had listened to the conversation with an ever-expanding grin, here burst into a guffaw. Tony turned on him.

“Is he kidding me?” he asked half angrily, half amicably.

The answer—like Will’s departure from this enthralling parlour—was staved off by the advent of yet another head popped into the doorway. This time it was a heavily greased head with scrupulously parted hair, and was attached to a spruce young man with a spring posy in his buttonhole. But his bear’s-grease out smelt his primroses.

“Hullo, Tony!” cried the aromatic apparition. “Up already!”

“_I’ve_ got to work for my living,” Mr. Flippance retorted. “The dormouse season is over. You coming in, Charley, to see the show to-night?”

“Me! I’ve got better things to do, old boy.” The young landlord turned to the Deacon. “Can you let me have five or six live ’uns?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Oi don’t want to disoblige brother. Oi do my duty according to Peter—‘nat’ral brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed’—but they bain’t meant by the Almoighty to be taken for sport, and Oi don’t howd with fox-hunting neither.”

“So I see.” Mr. Charles Mott glanced glumly at the backs of the pictures.

“Ef you want to be riddy o’ warmints, shoot ’em, says Oi, or nip their brushes in traps.”

“Oh, oh!” came involuntarily from Will at this blasphemy. The Deacon transfixed him with his glittering eye, but went on without pausing: “And ef you want to be riddy o’ rats, come to me. Don’t set a-worshippin’ your prize-terriers, like Ephraim jined to his idols.”

“I did come to you to be rid o’ the warmints, and now I want half-a-dozen spunky ’uns. Make your own price, but if you won’t supply ’em I’ll get ’em from Bill Nutbone.”

“That’s doubly sinful—to goo to the heathen.” He turned to Will. “Ef you’re so fond o’ ferrets, young man, Oi could spare you this pair—cheaper than you’ll get ’em from Nutbone.” He let their pink eyes protrude from his pockets.

Will eagerly closed with the offer. If Frog Farm proved as dull as he was now beginning to fear—after this contrast of Anthony Flippance and Joshua Mawhood—ratting or rabbiting might be a providential diversion.

“But I can’t carry them in _my_ pockets,” he said impressively. “Just made by Moses & Son, London. And I’ve got a long walk. Besides, I’d like them in cages.”

“Oi’ll send ’em by the carrier on Friday,” promised the ratcatcher. “Frog Farm, you said. Good day to you, Brother Mott.”

“Good day, Deacon. Sorry we can’t do business. Queer old cuss,” he said, winking at Will as the door closed. “Belongs to the Peculiars.”

“I—I’ve heard of them.” Will coloured a bit.

Tony, who had listened to the dialogue with enlightenment, here stalked out in half-genuine horror: “Holy Moses & Son! The publican and sinner prefers rats to Shakespeare!”

“Stow it, Tony!” called the landlord after him. “One preacher’s enough.” And, smiling, he changed the blanks into hunting pictures almost as deftly as his waiter would have done it.

He had scarcely effected the transformation, however, before the Deacon popped his head in again. Mr. Mott looked like a caught schoolboy, but though the beady eyes looked straight at the flamboyant hunters, Mr. Mawhood only said: “Oi forgot to lend a law-book.”

“What sort of a law-book d’ye want?”

“Miss Gentry’s got a counter-claim. Ef Oi won’t pay for my wife’s silk dress as Oi never ordered, she says my ferrets killed her chickens.”

“That’s not a counter-claim, Mr. Mawhood,” advised Will.

“It’s a lyin’ claim, anyways. What killed her chickens was her own black devil, Squibs. Her and her angels!”

“You go down to the bar and see if the missus can find you a book—but wouldn’t a lawyer be better?”

“The good Lord forbid! Oi’d sooner goo to a doctor. Well, thank you kindly, brother—one good turn desarves another. Foive, Oi think you said.”

“Or six. First thing in the morning. Spunky ’uns, remember.”

The Deacon sighed and disappeared again.

“Poor old chap!” Sure of his rats, Mr. Mott was now touched to sympathy. “His missus is a Tartar, no mistake. Still with them rounds of his, he dodges her a good deal.” And he sighed like the Deacon and followed him—bear’s-grease after aniseed—and Will, alone at last, followed too, though without a sigh, being still—as the waiter said—“one of the lucky ones.”

In the corridor he turned the wrong way, finding bedroom doors instead of the staircase. He paused a moment to gaze at a stuffed specimen of the sacred animal that stood with brush rampant against a scenic background under a glass case, and a stuffed trout that swam movelessly through a mimic stream. Then he became aware to his surprise that Tony Flip, still in his dressing-gown and still hugging the balance of his posters, was pacing the corridor restlessly, like a caged lion, though it turned out to be really like a tame creature denied his cage.

“They won’t let me in,” he said miserably. And he indicated an open bedroom door opposite the fox, with a view of housemaids at work, angry at the hour. One was making his bed, thumping it viciously; another raised swirls of dust with a broom. Slops stood blatantly around.

“They won’t even take free seats,” he groaned.

VII

“What did I tell you?” said Will.

“Oh, it ain’t because they think it wicked, the hussies. They turn up their noses at it, just because it’s _under_ their noses. If they had to go to Greenwich Fair to see it, they’d fight to get in. Candidly, cocky, have you ever seen a better bill?”

“It seems only too much,” ventured Will.

“It don’t say all at the same performance. In practice it all comes down to _The Mistletoe Bough_, the silliest of the lot, a bride who shuts herself in a chest for fun, you know, and moulders into a spirit. But think of Richardson’s—what they cram into twenty-five minutes! You saw that at Greenwich, I suppose, Easter time.”

“No, I only got to London in time for the Great Exhibition.”

“You’ve been to that?” The Showman’s eyes sparkled.

“What I came back for.”

“That’s a Show!!” And a note of immeasurable envy mixed with the rapture of the rival impresario. “But what a chance missed!”

“How so?”

“No drinks.”

“I got lemonade.”

“That’s not a drink—that’s a gas. Lord, I thought, looking at that bumper house, with a proper Christian bar, they could pay off the National Debt.”

“You’ve seen it then?”