Chapter IV (5)

Two days later Huxley Rustem repeated his visit, but not all the intrigue of the girl nor his own manœuvring could effect the happy arrangement again, although he sat for a long time feeling sure that there was no other establishment of its kind in which the elements of celerity were so unreservedly abandoned, and the flunkeyism so peculiarly viscous. The many mirrors, of course, multiplied the objects of his factitious contempt; those male barbers were small vain beings of disagreeable outline to whom the doom of shaving tens of thousands of chins for ever and ever afforded a white-faced languid happiness. Huxley was exasperated—his personality always ran so easily to exasperation—by the care with which the wrinkled face of a sportive old gent of sixty was being massaged with steaming cloths. He wore pretty brown button boots and large check trousers; there was still a vain wisp or two of white hair left upon his tight round skull and his indescribably silly old face. In the outcome our hero had perforce to be shaved by a youth of the last revolting assiduity, who caressed his chin with strong, excoriating palms.

In the ensuing weeks Huxley Rustem became a regular visitor to the saloon, but he suffered repeated disappointments. He was disconsolate; it was most baffling; not once did he secure the bliss of her attentions. He felt himself a fool; some men could do these things as easily as they grew whiskers, but Rustem was not one of them, for the traditions of virtue and sweet conduct were very firmly rooted in him; he was like a mouse living in a large white empty bath which, if it was unscaleable, was clean, and if it was rather blank was never terrifying. It is easy, so very easy, to be virtuous when you can’t be anything else. But still he very much desired to take the fair barber out to dinner, say, just for an hour or two in a quiet place where one eats and chats and listens to the pleasant shrilling of restaurant violins. He would be able to amuse her with tales and recitals of his experiences and she would constantly exclaim “Really!” as if entranced—as she probably would be. In his imagined hour her conversational exchanges never developed beyond that, yet it was enough to thrill him with a mild happiness. An egoist is a mystic without a god, but seldom ever without a goddess. It was bliss to adore her, but very heaven for her to be adoring him. To be just to Huxley Rustem that was all he meant, but try as he would he could never make up the happy occasion. It was a most discomfiting experience. It is true that he saw her in the street on three or four occasions, but each time he was accompanied by his wife, and each time he was guilty of a vain pretence, his behaviour to his companion being extremely casual—as if she were just an acquaintance instead of being an important alliance. But no one could possibly have mistaken the lady for anything but Huxley’s very own wife, and the little barber was provocatively demure at these encounters. Once, however, he was alone, and she passed, ogling him in a very frank way. But she did not understand egoists like Rustem. He was impervious to any such direct challenge; he thought it a little silly, coarse even. Had she been shy and diffident, allowing him to be masterful instead of confusing him, he would have fluttered easily into her flame.

So the affair remained, and would have remained for ever but that, by the grace of fortune, he found himself one day at last actually sitting again in front of the charming girl, who was not less aware of the attraction than he himself. She was nervous and actually with her shears clipped a part of his ear. Huxley was rather glad of that, it eased the situation, but on his departure he committed the rash act for which he never afterwards forgave himself. Her fingers were touching his as she gave him the pay check, when he took suddenly from his pocket a silver coin and pressed it into her hand, smiling. It was as if he had struck her a blow. He was shocked at the surprised resentment in the fierce glance she flung him. She tossed the coin into a tray for catching tobacco ash and cigarette ends. He realized at once the enormity of the affront; his vulgar act had smashed the delicate little coil between them. Vague and almost frivolous as it was, she had prized it. Poor as it was, it could yet deeply humiliate him. But it was a blunder that could never be retrieved, and he turned quickly and sadly out of the saloon, feeling the awful sting of his own contempt. Crass fool that he was, didn’t he realize that even barbers had their altitudes? Did he think he could buy a jewel like that, as he bought a packet of tobacco, with a miserable shilling? Perhaps Huxley Rustem was unduly sensitive about it, but he could never again bring himself to enter the saloon and meet that wounded gaze. He only recovered his balance when, a fortnight later, he encountered her in the street wearing the weeds of a widow! Then he felt almost as indignant as if she had indeed deceived him!

_Big Game_

Old Squance was the undertaker, but in the balmy, healthy, equable air of Tamborough undertaking was not a thriving trade; its opportunities were but an ornamental adjunct to his more vital occupation of builder. Even so those old splendid stone-built cottages never needed repairs, or if they did Squance didn’t do them. Storms wouldn’t visit Tamborough, fires didn’t occur, the hand of decay was, if anything, more deliberate than the hand of time itself, and no newcomer, loving the old houses so much, ever wanted to build a new one: so Mrs. Squance had to sell hard-looking bullseyes and stiff-looking fruit in a hard, stiff-looking shop. Also knitting needles and, in their time of the year, garden seeds. Squance was a meek person whom you would never have credited with heroic tendencies; nevertheless, with no more romantic background than a coffin or two, a score of scaffold poles, and sundry hods and shovels, he had acquired in a queer, but still not unusual, way the repute of a lion-slayer. Mrs. Squance was not so meek, she was not meek at all, she was ambitious—but vainly so. Her ambitions secured their fulfilment only in her nocturnal dreams, but in that sphere they were indeed triumphant and she was satisfied. The most frequent setting of her unconscious imagination happened to be a tiny modern flat in which she and old Ben seemed to be living in harmony and luxury. It was a delightful flat, very high up—that was the proper situation for a flat, mind you, just under the roof—with stairs curling down, and down, and down till it made you giddy to think of them. The kitchen, well, really Mrs. Squance could expatiate endlessly on that and the tiny corner place with two wash-basins in it and room enough to install a bath if you went in for that kind of thing. Best of all was the sitting-room in front, looking into a street so very far below that Mrs. Squance declared she felt as if she had been sitting in a balloon. Here Mrs. Squance, so she dreamed, would sit and browse. She didn’t have to look at ordinary things like trees and mud and other people’s windows. That was what made it so nice, Mrs. Squance declared. She had instead a vista of roofs and chimneys, beautiful telephone standards, and clouds. The people, too, who walked far down beneath were always unrecognizable; a multitude of hat crowns seemed to collect her gaze, linked with queer movements, right, left, right, left, of knees and boots, though sometimes she would be lucky enough to observe a very fat man, just a glimpse perhaps of his watch-guard lying like a chain of oceanic islands across a scholastic globe. In the way of dreams she knew the street by the name of Lather Lane. It was cobbled with granite setts. There was a barber’s shop at one corner and a depot for foreign potatoes and bananas at another. That flat was so constantly the subject of her dream visitations that she came to invest it with a romantic reality, to regard it as an ultimate real possession lying fortuitously somewhere, at no very great remove, in some quarter she might actually, any day now, luckily stumble across.

And it was in that very flat she beheld Mr. Squance’s heroism. It seemed to be morning in her dream, early; it must have been early. She and Squance were at breakfast when what should walk deliberately and astoundingly into the room but a lion. Mrs. Squance, never having seen a lion before, took it to be a sheepdog, and she shouted, “Go out, you dirty thing!” waving a threatening hand towards it. But the animal did not go out; it pranced up to Mrs. Squance in a genial way, seized her admonishing hand and playfully tried to bite it off. Really! Mr. Squance had risen to his startled feet shouting “Lion! lion!” and then Mrs. Squance realized that she had to contend with a monster that kept swelling bigger and bigger before her very eyes, until it seemed that it would never be able to go out of that door again. It had a tremendous head and mane, with whiskers on its snout as stiff as knitting needles, and claws like tenpenny nails; but its tail was the awfullest thing, long and very flexible, with a bush of hair at the end just like a mop, which it wagged about, smashing all sorts of things.

“Ben,” said Mrs. Squance, “'ave you a pistol?”

“No, I ’ave not,” said Ben.

“Then we’re done,” she had declared. “Oh, no, we ain’t, though! You ’old ’im, Ben, and I’ll go and get a pistol; ’old ’im!”

Ben valiantly seized the lion by its mane and tail, but it did not care for such treatment; it began to snarl and swish about the room, dragging poor Ben as if he had been just a piece of rabbit pie.

“'Old ’im! ’old ’im!” exhorted Mrs. Squance, as she popped on her bonnet and shawl. “You ’old 'im!”

“All right,” breathed Ben, as she ran off and began the descent of the long narrow staircase. Almost at the bottom she met a piano coming upwards. It was not a very large piano, but it was large enough to prevent her from descending any further. It was resting upon the backs of two men, one in front, whose entirely bald, perspiring, projecting head reminded her of the head of a tortoise, and one who followed him unseen. They crawled on all fours, while the piano was balanced by a man who pulled it in front and another who pushed it from behind.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Squance. “I ’ope you won’t be long.”

They made no reply; the piano continued to advance, the bald man swaying his head still more like a tortoise. She began to retire before them, and continued retiring step by step until she became irritated and demanded to know the owner of that piano. The men seemed to be dumb, so she skipped up to the second floor to make enquiries, knocking at the first door with her left hand—the right one still hurting her very much. It was exasperating. Someone had just painted and varnished the doors, and she was compelled to tap very lightly instead of giving the big bang the occasion required. Consequently no one heard her, while her hand became covered with a glutinous evil liquid. She ran up to the third floor. Here the doors were all right, but although she set up a vigorous cannonade again no one heard her, at least, no one replied except some gruff voice that kept repeating “Gone, no address! Gone, no address!” She opened the doors, but there seemed to be no one about, although each room had every appearance of recent occupation: fires alight, breakfast things recently used, and in the bedrooms the disordered beds. She was now extremely annoyed. She opened all the doors quickly until she came to the last room, which was occupied by the old clergyman who kept ducks there and fed them on macaroni cheese. It was just as she feared; the ducks were waiting, they flocked quacking upon the passage and stairs before she could prevent them.

“I’m sure,” screamed Mrs. Squance, in her dreadful rage, “it’s that lion responsible for all this!”

She wasted no more time upon the matter. She rapidly descended the stairs again, treading upon innumerable indignant ducks, until she came to the piano. Here she said not a word, but, brushing the leading man aside, placed her foot roughly upon the slippery head of the first crawling man and scrambled over the top of the instrument, jumping thence upon the back part of the hindmost man, who turned his feet comically inwards, and wore round his loins a belt as large as the belly-band of a waggon horse.

She proceeded breathlessly until she came to the last flight, where, behold! the stairs had all been smashed in by those awkward pianists, and she stood on the dreadful verge of a drop into a cellar full of darkness and disgusting smells. But she was able to leap upon the banister-rail which was intact, and slide splendidly to the ground floor. An unusual sight awaited her. Mrs. Squance did not remember ever to have seen such a thing before, but there in the hall a marvellous eustacia tree was growing out of the floor. She was not surprised at the presence of a tree in that unwonted situation. She had not noticed it before, but it did not seem out of place. Why shouldn’t trees grow where they liked? They always did. Mrs. Squance invariably took life as she found it, even in dreams. While she was surveying the beautiful proportions of the eustacia tree, the richness of its leaves, and its fine aroma a small bird, without warning or apology, alighted upon her right hand—which she carried against her chest as if it were in a sling, though it wasn’t—and laid an egg on it. It _was_ so annoying, she did not know what to do with it; she was afraid of smashing it. She rushed from the building, and entered the butcher’s shop a few doors away. The shop was crowded with customers, and the butcher perspired and joked with geniality, as is the immemorial custom with butchers. His boy, a mere tot of five or six years of age, observed to Mrs. Squance that it was “a lovely day, ma’am,” and she replied that it was splendid. So it was. People were buying the most extraordinarily fleshly fare, the smelt of an ox, a rib of suet, a fillet of liver, and one little girl purchased nineteen lambs’ tongues, which she took away secretly in a portmanteau.

“Now Mrs. Squance, what can I do for you?” enquired the butcher. Without comment she handed him the egg of the bird. He cast it into the till as if it were a crown piece. “And the next thing, ma’am?”

“'Ave you got such a thing as a pistol, Mr. Verryspice?”

Mr. Verryspice had, he had got two, and drawing them from the belt wherefrom dangled his sharpener, he laid two remarkable pieces of ordnance before her. In her renewed agitation she would have snatched up one of the pistols, but Mr. Verryspice prevented her.

“No, no, ma’am, I shall have to get permission for you to use it first.”

“But I really must ’ave it immediate....”

“Yes?” said the butcher.

“ ... for my husband.”

“I see,” he replied sympathetically. “Well, come along then and I’ll get an interim permission at once.” Seizing a tall silk hat from its hook and placing it firmly upon his head he led her from his establishment.

“Singular that the trams are all so full this morning,” commented Mrs. Squance as they awaited a conveyance.

“Most unusual, ma’am,” replied Mr. Verryspice. But at last they persuaded a bathchair man to give them a lift to their destination, where they arrived a little indecorously perhaps, for the top-hatted butcher was sitting as unconcernedly and as upright as a wax figure upon Mrs. Squance’s knees. The office they sought lay somewhere in a vast cavernous building full of stairs and corridors, long, exhausting, hollow corridors like the Underground railway, and on every floor and turning were signposts of the turnpike variety with directions:

“To the Bedel of St. Thomas’s Basket, 3 miles.”

“Registrar of Numismatics and Obligations, 2¼.”

Along one of these passages they plunged, and after some aggravating hindrances, including a demand from a humpty-backed clerk for a packet of No. 19 egg-eyed sharps, and five pennyworth of cachous which she found in her bosom, the permission was secured, and the butcher thereupon handed the weapon to Mrs. Squance.

“What did you say you wanted it for?” he asked.

Mrs. Squance’s gratitude was great, but her indignation was deep and disdained reply. She seized the pistol and began to run home. Rather a stout lady, too, and the exercise embarrassed her. Her hair fetched loose, her stockings slipped down, and her strange, hurrying figure, brandishing a pistol, soon attracted the notice of policemen and a certain young greengrocer with a tray of onions, who trotted in her wake until she threatened them all with the firearm.

Breathlessly at last she mounted the tremendous staircase. Happily in the interval the damage had been repaired, the tree chopped down, piano delivered, and ducks recaptured. She reached her rooms only in time to hear a great crash of glass from within. Old Ben was strutting about with a triumphant air.

“I done ’im—I done ’im,” he called. “You can come in now; I’ve just chucked ’im through the window!” And sure enough he had. The sash looked as if it had been blown out by a cannon-ball. Mrs. Squance peered out, and there, far down at the front door, curled up as if asleep, lay the lion. At that moment the milkman arrived, with that dissonant clatter peculiar to milkmen. He dashed down his cans close by the nose of the lion, which apparently he had not seen. The scared animal leaped up in its terror, and darting down an alley was seen no more.

So far this narrative, devoid as it is of moral grandeur and literary grace, has subjected the reader’s comprehension to no scientific rigours; but he who reads on will discern its cunning import—a psychological outcome with the profoundest implications. Listen. Mrs. Squance awoke that morning in her own hard-looking little house of one floor, with the hard-looking shop, startled to find the window of their room actually smashed, and inexplicable pains in her right hand. She related these circumstances in after years with so many symptoms of truth and propriety that she herself at last vividly believed in the figure of old Ben as a lion-slayer. “Saved my life when I was ’tacked by a lion!” she would say to her awed grandchildren, and she would proceed to regale them with a narration which, I regret to say, had only the remotest likeness to the foregoing story.

_The Poor Man_

One of the commonest sights in the vale was a certain man on a bicycle carrying a bag full of newspapers. He was as much a sound as a sight, for what distinguished him from all other men to be encountered there on bicycles was not his appearance, though that was noticeable; it was his sweet tenor voice, heard as he rode along singing each morning from Cobbs Mill, through Kezzal Predy Peter, Thasper, and Buzzlebury, and so on to Trinkel and Nuncton. All sorts of things he sang, ballads, chanties, bits of glees, airs from operas, hymns, and sacred anthems—he was leader of Thasper church choir—but he seemed to observe some sort of rotation in their rendering. In the forepart of the week it was hymns and anthems; on Wednesday he usually turned to modestly secular tunes; he was rolling on Thursday and Friday through a gamut of love songs and ballads undoubtedly secular and not necessarily modest, while on Saturday—particularly at eve, spent in the tap of “The White Hart”—his programme was entirely ribald and often a little improper. But always on Sunday he was the most decorous of men, no questionable liquor passed his lips, and his comportment was a credit to the church, a model even for soberer men.

Dan Pavey was about thirty-five years old, of medium height and of medium appearance except as to his hat (a hard black bowler which seemed never to belong to him, though he had worn it for years) and as to his nose. It was an ugly nose, big as a baby’s elbow; he had been born thus, it had not been broken or maltreated, though it might have engaged in some pre-natal conflict when it was malleable, since when nature had healed, but had not restored it. But there was ever a soft smile that covered his ugliness, which made it genial and said, or seemed to say: Don’t make a fool of me, I am a friendly man, this is really my hat, and as for my nose—God made it so.

The six hamlets which he supplied with newspapers lie along the Icknield Vale close under the ridge of woody hills, and the inhabitants adjacent to the woods fell the beech timber and, in their own homes, turn it into rungs or stretchers for chair manufacturers who, somewhere out of sight beyond the hills, endlessly make chair, and nothing but chair. Sometimes in a wood itself there may be seen a shanty built of faggots in which sits a man turning pieces of chair on a treadle lathe. Tall, hollow, and greenly dim are the woods, very solemn places, and they survey the six little towns as a man might look at six tiny pebbles lying on a green rug at his feet.

One August morning the newspaper man was riding back to Thasper. The day was sparkling like a diamond, but he was not singing, he was thinking of Scroope, the new rector of Thasper parish, and the thought of Scroope annoyed him. It was not only the tone of the sermon he had preached on Sunday, “The poor we have always with us,” though that was in bad taste from a man reputed rich and with a heart—people said—as hard as a door-knocker; it was something more vital, a congenital difference between them as profound as it was disagreeable. The Rev. Faudel Scroope was wealthy, he seemed to have complete confidence in his ability to remain so, and he was the kind of man with whom Dan Pavey would never be able to agree. As for Mrs. Scroope, gloom pattered upon him in a strong sighing shower at the least thought of her.

At Larkspur Lane he came suddenly upon the rector talking to an oldish man, Eli Bond, who was hacking away at a hedge. Scroope never wore a hat, he had a curly bush of dull hair. Though his face was shaven clean it remained a regular plantation of ridges and wrinkles; there was a stoop in his shoulders, a lurch in his gait, and he had a voice that howled.

“Just a moment, Pavey,” he bellowed, and Dan dismounted.

“All those years,” the parson went on talking to the hedger; “all those years, dear me!”

“I were born in Thasper sixty-six year ago, come the twenty-third of October, sir, the same day—but two years before—as Lady Hesseltine eloped with Rudolf Moxley. I was reared here and I worked here sin’ I were six year old. Twalve children I have had (though five on ’em come to naught and two be in the army) and I never knowed what was to be out of work for one single day in all that sixty year. Never. I can’t thank my blessed master enough for it.”

“Isn’t that splendidly feudal,” murmured the priest, “who is your good master?”

The old man solemnly touched his hat and said: “God.”

“O, I see, yes, yes,” cried the Rev. Scroope. “Well, good health and constant, and good work and plenty of it, are glorious things. The man who has never done a day’s work is a dog, and the man who deceives his master is a dog too.”

“I never donn that, sir.”

“And you’ve had happy days in Thasper, I’m sure?”

“Right-a-many, sir.”

“Splendid. Well ... um ... what a heavy rain we had in the night.”

“Ah, that _was_ heavy! At five o’clock this morning I daren’t let my ducks out—they’d a bin drownded, sir.”

“Ha, now, now, now!” warbled the rector as he turned away with Dan.

“Capital old fellow, happy and contented. I wish there were more of the same breed. I wish....” The parson sighed pleasantly as he and Dan walked on together until they came to the village street where swallows were darting and flashing very low. A small boy stood about, trying to catch them in his hands as they swooped close to him. Dan’s own dog pranced up to his master for a greeting. It was black, somewhat like a greyhound, but stouter. Its tail curled right over its back and it was cocky as a bird, for it was young; it could fight like a tiger and run like the wind—many a hare had had proof of that.

Said Mr. Scroope, eyeing the dog: “Is there much poaching goes on here?”

“Poaching, sir?”

“I am told there is. I hope it isn’t true for I have rented most of the shooting myself.”

“I never heard tell of it, sir. Years ago, maybe. The Buzzlebury chaps one time were rare hands at taking a few birds, so I’ve heard, but I shouldn’t think there’s an onlicensed gun for miles around.”

“I’m not thinking so much of guns. Farmer Prescott had his warren netted by someone last week and lost fifty or sixty rabbits. There’s scarcely a hare to be seen, and I find wires wherever I go. It’s a crime like anything else, you know,” Scroope’s voice was loud and strident, “and I shall deal very severely with poaching of any kind. O yes, you have to, you know, Pavey. O yes. There was a man in my last parish was a poacher, cunning scoundrel of the worst type, never did a stroke of work, and _he_ had a dog, it wasn’t unlike your dog—this _is_ your dog, isn’t it? You haven’t got your name on its collar, you should have your name on a dog’s collar—well, he had a perfect brute of a dog, carried off my pheasants by the dozen; as for hares, he exterminated them. Man never did anything else, but we laid him by the heels and in the end I shot the dog myself.”

“Shot it?” said Dan. “No, I couldn’t tell a poacher if I was to see one. I know no more about 'em than a bone in the earth.”

“We shall be,” continued Scroope, “very severe with them. Let me see—are you singing the Purcell on Sunday evening?“

”_He Shall Feed His Flock_—sir—_like a Shepherd_.”

“Splendid! _Good_-day, Pavey.”

Dan, followed by his bounding, barking dog, pedalled home to a little cottage that seemed to sag under the burden of its own thatch; it had eaves a yard wide, and birds’ nests in the roof at least ten years old. Here Dan lived with his mother, Meg Pavey, for he had never married. She kept an absurd little shop for the sale of sweets, vinegar, boot buttons and such things, and was a very excellent old dame, but as naïve as she was vague. If you went in to her counter for a newspaper and banged down a halfcrown she would as likely as not give you change for sixpence—until you mentioned the discrepancy, when she would smilingly give you back your halfcrown again.

Dan passed into the back room where Meg was preparing dinner, threw off his bag, and sat down without speaking. His mother was making a heavy succession of journeys between the table and a larder.

“Mrs. Scroope’s been here,” said Meg, bringing a loaf to the table.

“What did _she_ want?”

“She wanted to reprimand me.”

“And what have _you_ been doing?”

Meg was in the larder again. “’Tis not me, ’tis you.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“She’s been a-hinting,” here Meg pushed a dish of potatoes to the right of the bread, and a salt-cellar to the left of the yawning remains of a rabbit pie, “about your not being a teetotal. She says the boozing do give the choir a bad name and I was to persuade you to give it up.”

“I should like to persuade her it was time she is dead. I don’t go for to take any pattern from that rich trash. Are we the grass under their feet? And can you tell me why parsons’ wives are always so much more awful than the parsons themselves? I never shall understand that if I lives a thousand years. Name o’ God, what next?”

“Well, ’tis as she says. Drink is no good to any man, and she can’t say as I ain’t reprimanded you.”

“Name o’ God,” he replied, “do you think I booze just for the sake o’ the booze, because I like booze? No man does that. He drinks so that he shan’t be thought a fool, or rank himself better than his mates—though he knows in his heart he might be if he weren’t so poor or so timid. Not that one would mind to be poor if it warn’t preached to him that he must be contented. How can the poor be contented as long as there’s the rich to serve? The rich we have always with _us_, that’s _our_ responsibility, we are the grass under their feet. Why should we be proud of that? When a man’s poor the only thing left him is hope—for something better: and that’s called envy. If you don’t like your riches you can always give it up, but poverty you can’t desert, nor it won’t desert you.”

“It’s no good flying in the face of everything like that, Dan, it’s folly.”

“If I had my way I’d be an independent man and live by myself a hundred miles from anywheres or anybody. But that’s madness, that’s madness, the world don’t expect you to go on like that, so I do as other folks do, not because I want to, but because I a’nt the pluck to be different. You taught me a good deal, mother, but you never taught me courage and I wasn’t born with any, so I drinks with a lot of fools who drink with me for much the same reason, I expect. It’s the same with other things besides drink.”

His indignation lasted throughout the afternoon as he sat in the shed in his yard turning out his usual quantity of chair. He sang not one note, he but muttered and mumbled over all his anger. Towards evening he recovered his amiability and began to sing with a gusto that astonished even his mother. He went out into the dusk humming like a bee, taking his dog with him. In the morning the Rev. Scroope found a dead hare tied by the neck to his own door-knocker, and at night (it being Saturday) Dan Pavey was merrier than ever in “The White Hart.” If he was not drunk he was what Thasper calls “tightish,” and had never before sung so many of those ribald songs (mostly of his own composition) for which he was noted.

A few evenings later Dan attended a meeting of the Church Men’s Guild. A group of very mute countrymen sat in the village hall and were goaded into speech by the rector.

“Thasper,” declared Mr. Scroope, “has a great name for its singing. All over the six hamlets there is surprising musical genius. There’s the Buzzlebury band—it is a capital band.”

“It is that,” interrupted a maroon-faced butcher from Buzzlebury, “it can play as well at nine o’clock in the morning as it can at nine o’clock at night, and that’s a good band as can do it.”

“Now I want our choir to compete at the county musical festival next year. Thasper is going to show those highly trained choristers what a native choir is capable of. Yes, and I’m sure our friend Pavey can win the tenor solo competition. Let us all put our backs into it and work agreeably and consistently. Those are the two main springs of good human conduct—consistency and agreeability. The consistent man will always attain his legitimate ends, always. I remember a man in my last parish, Tom Turkem, known and loved throughout the county; he was not only the best cricketer in our village, he was the best for miles around. He revelled in cricket, and cricket only; he played cricket and lived for cricket. The years went on and he got old, but he never dreamed of giving up cricket. His bowling average got larger every year and his batting average got smaller, but he still went on, consistent as ever. His order of going in dropped down to No. 6 and he seldom bowled; then he got down to No. 8 and never bowled. For a season or two the once famous Tom Turkem was really the last man in! After that he became umpire, then scorer, and then he died. He had got a little money, very little, just enough to live comfortably on. No, he never married. He was a very happy, hearty, hale old man. So you see? Now there is a cricket club at Buzzlebury, and one at Trinkel. Why not a cricket club at Thasper? Shall we do that?... Good!”

The parson went on outlining his projects, and although it was plain to Dan that the Rev. Scroope had very little, if any, compassion for the weaknesses natural to mortal flesh, and attached an extravagant value to the virtues of decency, sobriety, consistency, and, above all, loyalty to all sorts of incomprehensible notions, yet his intentions were undeniably agreeable and the Guild was consistently grateful.

“One thing, Pavey,” said Scroope when the meeting had dispersed, “one thing I will not tolerate in this parish, and that is gambling.”

“Gambling? I have never gambled in my life, sir. I couldn’t tell you hardly the difference between spades and clubs.”

“I am speaking of horse-racing, Pavey.”

“Now that’s a thing I never see in my life, Mr. Scroope.”

“Ah, you need not go to the races to bet on horses; the slips of paper and money can be collected by men who are agents for racing bookmakers. And that is going on all round the six hamlets, and the man who does the collecting, even if he does not bet himself, is a social and moral danger, he is a criminal, he is against the law. Whoever he is,” said the vicar, moderating his voice, but confidently beaming and patting Dan’s shoulder, “I shall stamp him out mercilessly. _Good_-night, Pavey.”

Dan went away with murder in his heart. Timid strangers here and there had fancied that a man with such a misshapen face would be capable of committing a crime, not a mere peccadillo—you wouldn’t take notice of that, of course—but a solid substantial misdemeanour like murder. And it was true, he _was_ capable of murder—just as everybody else is, or ought to be. But he was also capable of curbing that distressing tendency in the usual way, and in point of fact he never did commit a murder.

These rectorial denunciations troubled the air but momentarily, and he still sang gaily and beautifully on his daily ride from Cobbs Mill along the little roads to Trinkel and Nuncton. The hanging richness of the long woods yellowing on the fringe of autumn, the long solemn hills themselves, cold sunlight, coloured berries in briary loops, the brown small leaves of hawthorn that had begun to drop from the hedge and flutter in the road like dying moths, teams of horses sturdily ploughing, sheepfolds already thatched into little nooks where the ewes could lie—Dan said—as warm as a pudding: these things filled him with tiny ecstasies too incoherent for him to transcribe—he could only sing.

On Bonfire Night the lads of the village lit a great fire on the space opposite “The White Hart.” Snow was falling; it was not freezing weather, but the snow lay in a soft thin mat upon the road. Dan was returning on his bicycle from a long journey and the light from the bonfire was cheering. It lit up the courtyard of the inn genially and curiously, for the recumbent hart upon the balcony had a pad of snow upon its wooden nose, which somehow made it look like a camel, in spite of the huddled snow on its back which gave it the resemblance of a sheep. A few boys stood with bemused wrinkled faces before the roaring warmth. Dan dismounted very carefully opposite the blaze, for a tiny boy rode on the back of the bicycle, wrapped up and tied to the frame by a long scarf; very small, very silent, about five years old. A red wool wrap was bound round his head and ears and chin, and a green scarf encircled his neck and waist, almost hiding his jacket; gaiters of grey wool were drawn up over his knickerbockers. Dan lifted him down and stood him in the road, but he was so cumbered with clothing that he could scarcely walk. He was shy; he may have thought it ridiculous; he moved a few paces and turned to stare at his footmarks in the snow.

“Cold?” asked Dan.

The child shook its head solemnly at him and then put one hand in Dan’s and gazed at the fire that was bringing a brightness into the longlashed dark eyes and tenderly flushing the pale face.

“Hungry?”

The child did not reply. It only silently smiled when the boys brought him a lighted stick from the faggots. Dan caught him up into his arms and pushed the cycle across the way into his own home.

Plump Meg had just shredded up two or three red cabbages and rammed them into a crock with a shower of peppercorns and some terrible knots of ginger. There was a bright fire and a sharp odour of vinegar—always some strange pleasant smell in Meg Pavey’s home—she had covered the top of the crock with a shield of brown paper, pinioned that with string, licked a label: “Cabege Novenbr 5t,” and smoothed it on the crock, when the latch lifted and Dan carried in his little tiny boy.

“Here he is, mother.”

Where Dan stood him, there the child remained; he did not seem to see Mother Pavey, his glance had happened to fall on the big crock with the white label—and he kept it there.

“Whoever’s that?” asked the astonished Meg with her arms akimbo as Dan began to unwrap the child.

“That’s mine,” said her son, brushing a few flakes of snow from the curls on its forehead.

“Yours! How long have it been yours?”

“Since ’twas born. No, let him alone, I’ll undo him, he’s full up wi’ pins and hooks. I’ll undo him.”

Meg stood apart while Dan unravelled his offspring.

“But it is not your child, surely, Dan?”

“Ay, I’ve brought him home for keeps, mother. He can sleep wi’ me.”

“Who’s its mother?”

“’Tis no matter about that. Dan Cupid did it.”

“You’re making a mock of me. Who is his mother? Where is she? You’re fooling, Dan, you’re fooling!”

“I’m making no mock of anyone. There, there’s a bonny grandson for you!”

Meg gathered the child into her arms, peering into its face, perhaps to find some answer to the riddle, perhaps to divine a familiar likeness. But there was nothing in its soft smooth features that at all resembled her rugged Dan’s.

“Who are you? What’s your little name?”

The child whispered: “Martin.”

“It’s a pretty, pretty thing, Dan.”

“Ah!” said her son, “that’s his mother. We were rare fond of each other—once. Now she’s wedd’n another chap and I’ve took the boy, for it’s best that way. He’s five year old. Don’t ask me about her, it’s _our_ secret and always has been. It was a good secret and a grand secret, and it was well kept. That’s her ring.”

The child’s thumb had a ring upon it, a golden ring with a small green stone. The thumb was crooked, and he clasped the ring safely.

For a while Meg asked no more questions about the child. She pressed it tenderly to her bosom.

But the long-kept secret, as Dan soon discovered, began to bristle with complications. The boy was his, of course it was his—he seemed to rejoice in his paternity of the quiet, pretty, illegitimate creature. As if that brazen turpitude was not enough to confound him he was taken a week later in the act of receiving betting commissions and heavily fined in the police court, although it was quite true that he himself did not bet, and was merely a collecting agent for a bookmaker who remained discreetly in the background and who promptly paid his fine.

There was naturally a great racket in the vestry about these things—there is no more rhadamanthine formation than that which can mount the ornamental forehead of a deacon—and Dan was bidden to an interview at the “Scroopery.” After some hesitation he visited it.

“Ah, Pavey,” said the rector, not at all minatory but very subdued and unhappy. “So the blow has fallen, in spite of my warning. I am more sorry than I can express, for it means an end to a very long connection. It is very difficult and very disagreeable for me to deal with the situation, but there is no help for it now, you must understand that. I offer no judgment upon these unfortunate events, no judgment at all, but I can find no way of avoiding my clear duty. Your course of life is incompatible with your position in the choir, and I sadly fear it reveals not only a social misdemeanour but a religious one—it is a mockery, a mockery of God.”

The rector sat at a table with his head pressed on his hands. Pavey sat opposite him, and in his hands he dangled his bowler hat.

“You may be right enough in your way, sir, but I’ve never mocked God. For the betting, I grant you. It may be a dirty job, but I never ate the dirt myself, I never betted in my life. It’s a way of life, a poor man has but little chance of earning more than a bare living, and there’s many a dirty job there’s no prosecution for, leastways not in this world.”

“Let me say, Pavey, that the betting counts less heavily with me than the question of this unfortunate little boy. I offer no judgment upon the matter, your acknowledgment of him is only right and proper. But the fact of his existence at all cannot be disregarded; that at least is flagrant, and as far as concerns your position in my church, it is a mockery of God.”

“You may be right, sir, as far as your judgment goes, or you may not be. I beg your pardon for that, but we can only measure other people by our own scales, and as we can never understand one another entirely, so we can’t ever judge them rightly, for they all differ from us and from each other in some special ways. But as for being a mocker of God, why it looks to me as if you was trying to teach the Almighty how to judge me.”

“Pavey,” said the rector with solemnity, “I pity you from the bottom of my heart. We won’t continue this painful discussion, we should both regret it. There was a man in the parish where I came from who was an atheist and mocked God. He subsequently became deaf. Was he convinced? No, he was not—because the punishment came a long time after his offence. He mocked God again, and became blind. Not at once: God has eternity to work in. Still he was not convinced. That,” said the rector ponderously, “is what the Church has to contend with; a failure to read the most obvious signs, and an indisposition even to remedy that failure. Klopstock was that poor man’s name. His sister—you know her well, Jane Klopstock—is now my cook.”

The rector then stood up and held out his hand. “God bless you, Pavey.”

“I thank you, sir,” said Dan. “I quite understand.”

He went home moodily reflecting. Nobody else in the village minded his misdeeds, they did not care a button, and none condemned him. On the contrary, indeed. But the blow had fallen, there was nothing that he could now do, the shock of it had been anticipated, but it was severe. And the pang would last, for he was deprived of his chief opportunity for singing, that art in which he excelled, in that perfect quiet setting he so loved. Rancour grew upon him, and on Saturday he had a roaring audacious evening at “The White Hart” where, to the tune of “The British Grenadiers,” he sung a doggerel:

Our parson loves his motor car
His garden and his mansion,
And he loves his beef for I’ve remarked
His belly’s brave expansion;
He loves all mortal mundane things
As he loved his beer at college,
And so he loves his housemaid (not
With Mrs. parson’s knowledge.)

Our parson lies both hot and strong,
It does not suit his station,
But still his reverend soul delights
In much dissimulation;
Both in and out and roundabout
He practises distortion,
And he lies with a public sinner when
Grass widowhood’s his portion.

All of which was a savage libel on a very worthy man, composed in anger and regretted as soon as sung.

From that time forward Dan gave up his boozing and devoted himself to the boy, little Martin, who, a Thasper joker suggested, might have some kinship with the notorious Betty of that name. But Dan’s voice was now seldom heard singing upon the roads he travelled. They were icy wintry roads, but that was not the cause of his muteness. It was severance from the choir; not from its connoted spirit of religion—there was little enough of that in Dan Pavey—but from the solemn beauty of the chorale, which it was his unique gift to adorn, and in which he had shared with eagerness and pride since his boyhood. To be cast out from that was to be cast from something he held most dear, the opportunity of expression in an art which he had made triumphantly his own.

With the coming of spring he repaired one evening to a town some miles away and interviewed a choirmaster. Thereafter Dan Pavey journeyed to and fro twice every Sunday to sing in a church that lay seven or eight miles off, and he kept it all a profound secret from Thasper until his appearance at the county musical festival, where he won the treasured prize for tenor soloists. Then Dan was himself again. To his crude apprehension he had been vindicated, and he was heard once more carolling in the lanes of the Vale as he had been heard any time for these twenty years.

The child began its schooling, but though he was free to go about the village little Martin did not wander far. The tidy cluster of hair about his poll was of deep chestnut colour. His skin—Meg said—was like “ollobarster”: it was soft and unfreckled, always pale. His eyes were two wet damsons—so Meg declared: they were dark and ever questioning. As for his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his chin, Meg could do no other than call it the face of a blessed saint; and indeed, he had some of the bearing of a saint, so quiet, so gentle, so shy. The golden ring he no longer wore; it hung from a tintack on the bedroom wall.

Old John, who lived next door, became a friend of his. He was very aged—in the Vale you got to be a hundred before you knew where you were—and he was very bent; he resembled a sickle standing upon its handle. Very bald, too, and so very sharp.

Martin was staring up at the roof of John’s cottage.

“What you looking at, my boy?”

“Chimbley,” whispered the child.

“O ah! that’s crooked, a’nt it?”

“Yes, crooked.”

“I know ’tis, but I can’t help it; my chimney’s crooked, and I can’t putt it straight, neither, I can’t putt it right. My chimney’s crooked, a’nt it, ah, and I’m crooked, too.”

“Yes,” said Martin.

“I know, but I can’t help it. It _is_ crooked, a’nt it?” said the old man, also staring up at a red pot tilted at an angle suggestive of conviviality.

“Yes.”

“That chimney’s crooked. But you come along and look at my beautiful bird.”

A cock thrush inhabited a cage in the old gaffer’s kitchen. Martin stood before it.

“There’s a beautiful bird. Hoicks!” cried old John, tapping the bars of the cage with his terrible finger-nail. “But he won’t sing.”

“Won’t he sing?”

“He donn make hisself at home. He donn make hisself at home at all, do ’ee, my beautiful bird? No, he donn’t. So I’m a-going to chop his head off,” said the laughing old man, “and then I shall bile him.”

Afterwards Martin went every day to see if the thrush was still there. And it was.

Martin grew. Almost before Dan was aware of it the child had grown into a boy. At school he excelled nobody in anything except, perhaps, behaviour, but he had a strange little gift for unobtrusively not doing the things he did not care for, and these were rather many unless his father was concerned in them. Even so, the affection between them was seldom tangibly expressed, their alliance was something far deeper than its expression. Dan talked with him as if he were a grown man, and perhaps he often regarded him as one; he was the only being to whom he ever opened his mind. As they sat together in the evening while Dan put in a spell at turning chair—at which he was astoundingly adept—the father would talk to his son, or rather he would heap upon him all the unuttered thoughts that had accumulated in his mind during his adult years. The dog would loll with its head on Martin’s knees; the boy would sit nodding gravely, though seldom speaking: he was an untiring listener. “Like sire, like son,” thought Dan, “he will always coop his thoughts up within himself.” It was the one characteristic of the boy that caused him anxiety.

“Never take pattern by me,” he would adjure him, “not by me. I’m a fool, a failure, just grass, and I’m trying to instruct you, but you’ve no call to follow in my fashion; I’m a weak man. There’s been thoughts in my mind that I daren’t let out. I wanted to do things that other men don’t seem to do and don’t want to do. They were not evil things—and what they were I’ve nigh forgotten now. I never had much ambition, I wasn’t clever, I wanted to live a simple life, in a simple way, the way I had a mind to—I can’t remember that either. But I did not do any of those things because I had a fear of what other people might think of me. I walked in the ruck with the rest of my mates and did the things I didn’t ever want to do—and now I can only wonder why I did them. I sung them the silly songs they liked, and not the ones I cherished. I agreed with most everybody, and all agreed with me. I’m a friendly man, too friendly, and I went back on my life, I made nought of my life, you see, I just sat over the job like a snob codgering an old boot.”

The boy would sit regarding him as if he already understood. Perhaps that curious little mind did glean some flavour of his father’s tragedy.