III
“They sin who tell as love can die.”
Southey.
Retrieved by Judy from a life of shame, her master had become a respectable character, and the year afterwards found work as a carpenter in an adjoining town, which compelled him to migrate from our village.
How to dispose of his dog was the question. His lodgings were situated in a crowded street, through which a continuous stream of the vehicles most dreaded by Judy, bicycles included, was passing literally by night and day. Garden he had none—only a small paved court-yard, tenanted in the main by children and cats, Judy’s natural enemies, while the nearest field was two miles off. It was clearly impossible to transfer her to such surroundings. Her future was settled thus. She was left in his old rooms under special charge of the landlady, and every evening when his day’s work was done, wet or fine, winter or summer, her master walked out to console her for the long hours of his absence.
Such affection might have satisfied a reasonable dog. But Judy was distinctly unreasonable. She remembered—none better—how in former times she was with him all the day, and sometimes, when she willed to have it so, all the night as well. Now she was left to her own devices, and only caught a hurried glimpse of him in the evening when she was too sleepy to enjoy it. Besides, when he left her at the garden gate, she was strictly enjoined not to follow him—a prohibition which, while it whetted her curiosity, was also regarded as a direct insult, viewed in the light of former days, and the unrestricted licence that had been accorded to her then.
So Judy put on her considering cap. “He can’t go far,” she said, “else he could never leave me so late and get home in time for bed. And I’m sure he doesn’t drive or travel by train, else his boots would never be so muddy when he comes here at seven. So it’s clear that he walks. And, in that case, a dog of the feeblest intelligence can follow in his track.”
Accordingly, on a wet and windy evening, when bicyclists were not likely to be abroad, a little wistful-eyed face peered out into the road, growing bolder and bolder as her master receded from view, but ever and again hurriedly withdrawn whenever he turned upon her with a threatening hand. Then he vanished behind a hill, and Judy felt that her opportunity was come. But a mob of children ran by with sticks in their hands, and Judy slunk back in alarm. As soon as these had passed, she made another attempt. But horror of horrors! a bicyclist scorched by, and back she shrank again into the friendly shade. At last the road was empty and silent. The most careful inspection to the right hand and to the left could find no sign of life, and the keenest ears with which ever dog was gifted failed to detect a sound.
“Now or never,” said Judy, and with tail erect, and her tiny snub nose well to ground on the scent, she rushed out into the night.
* * * * *
An hour later a man was sitting down to his supper in the adjoining town, cursing the noise of the street in which he lived, with its wrangling women and screaming children, and cabs and drays coming home for the night, when a little dog whined and scraped at his door, and Judy rushed in, mud-stained and panting and panic-stricken with fear.
It was probably the fright that killed her; it may have been some injury. Her master never knew.
Only a brief friendship, measured by the standard of time. But perhaps what Southey says is true, and “love is indestructible”—even the love that bound these two.
Our Professor
No: he was no Professor in the recognised sense of the term; not a bit of it. Neither can I tell you how he acquired the title, unless it were in recognition of his original wit. He was simply my factotum or Man Friday, ready for shooting, fishing, game-keeping, or gardening, as the emergency of the moment required. He could neither read nor write. But what are trifling details like these in comparison with ’cuteness. Institute a Tripos for originality and native wit, and Matthew would even now, at the age of seventy, pass with high honours. But the examination must be strictly viva voce, and not allowed to wander into the region of conventional knowledge.
“Matthew,” I said, “this isn’t work,” as I bestowed a kick upon an object that lay prone upon the lawn, when it ought to have been digging at our garden border.
“No, sir; but it’s preparin’ for it,” was the prompt reply. For myself, I was knocked out of time, though I felt I was clearly within my rights. Fancy a man, roused from a peaceful siesta, being ready with a retort of such preternatural smartness!
Unhappily Matthew had two failings, by which his career was handicapped. He was always lazy, and sometimes inebriate. Of the former he never repented so long as I knew him; the latter he was always repenting of and always repeating. And the stage of repentance was the more acute and the more grievous, at any rate to his neighbours. After a bout of drinking he would wander through the house with his hands on the pit of his stomach—as if the seat of his iniquity lay there—moaning in a dreary, exasperating way, “The Lord forgie I; I’ll never be drunk agin.” “How can you expect him to?” said his wife, in a tone of the bitterest sarcasm.
Every time he repented he took the pledge anew. The consequence was, his bosom was garnished with blue ribbons—his “decorations” he called them—for he never cast off one when he assumed another, but regarded them as an old soldier does his medals, traces of many a scar and many a conflict, in which, unhappily, he always fell.
“Decorations!” said his wife, “fine decorations! Call ’em rather sign-posts along the road to perdition. If you stick to ’em all when you’re buried, they’ll have no trouble in fixing your whereabouts.”
Sometimes, when he was particularly exasperating, she would take the law in her own hands. “My head’s swimmin’ like a tee-total,” Matthew would say pathetically. “The very last thing it ought to swim like,” retorted his wife, a woman with a ready wit, “but I’ll soon make it do so.” And with that she would take him in her strong arms and give him a twist, as boys do when they give its first impetus to a top, after which she would wait patiently for the result. The result was, of course, collapse as soon as the primary impulse had run down; whereupon she would catch him up when he was on the point of falling, and bear him off to repentance and bed.
Matthew’s dialect was unique. I question whether a specialist could have reproduced it in its integrity, if only because it never reached finality, but was always in process of development. For myself, I had studied it for years, and could never get any nearer towards the discovery of its principles. Every day he was startling you with some new combination, as a rule strictly ungrammatical, but often a reversion to some lost or more accurate phraseology. For example: “Let I go,” “Would you like I to do it”?—the latter a reproduction, as near as may be, of the Latin formula visne ego faciam? A still more perplexing characteristic in his speech was that he used many of his words in a variety of senses.
“Cuss they nigglin’ weeds,” he’d say, and “Cuss my nigglin’ toothache”—phrases in which the adjective (or participle) carried an appreciable meaning, even when he didn’t add the word “darn’d” as an explanatory gloss. But when he transferred the phrase a minute afterwards to a splendid crop of potatoes, in which my inexperienced eye could detect no possible fault, I was all at sea again, and had to ask him to explain himself.
“I means they’m small,” he answered, with a contemptuous sniff at my ignorance.
“But, Matthew, you told me just now that ‘nigglin’’ meant ‘darn’d.’”
“And so it do—darn’d small;” looking at me as if he thought the epithet suited me as much as the potatoes.
When Matthew had pneumonia and lay in extremis, his friends came round to console him with the assurance that he would die at the turn of the tide.
“What time, Matthew, do ’en begin to turn?” they said.
“At seven o’clock, ezzactly,” whispered the inveterate old humorist. And it was not till the next morning they discovered that he had defrauded them of one whole hour of pleasant anticipation.
In his sober moments Matthew was a brilliant story-teller (in both senses, I fear); though his brilliancy now is limited to occasional flashes of wit. The following is one of his best reminiscences. I have selected it out of many because I have since discovered that it was founded on fact. Not only was it authenticated by a clergyman in whose neighbourhood it was enacted, but it was told and re-told by one of the actors in the tragedy, though he had passed to a land from which no testimony is available long before I heard the story at second-hand from Matthew.
“’Twas in December, 1824, that it happened. So Joseph told I.” (This, at any rate, was Matthew’s recognised formula.) “’Tis true he were a great liar, and I didn’t take no count o’ the main o’ his tales; for he’d tell you most anything, he would; ’specially if he see’d the price of a glass of fourpenny for tellin’ it. But, in proof ’tis true, they’d tell it to the childer at night time, when they was obstrepulous and wouldn’t go to bed—just for a joke like, to fright ’em to sleep.
“’Twas in December, 1824; and not likely he were to forget it. For ’twas the year of the great gale (the ‘Outrage’ they calls it hereabouts), when the sea broke clean over Rudge and washed away th’ old church, all but the chancel. Joseph never took kindly-like to the new church they built for ’en higher up i’ the valley, out o’ reach o’ the sea. ’Twas too spick and span, he said, to suit he—all white and glitterin’ like chalk—though ’twere built of the best Portland stone, and a sight prettier to my thinkin’ than the tumble down old barn that’s all that’s left o’ th’ old un. But the visitors and gentry, they takes after Joseph, and for one what goes to see the new church there’s hundreds ’ll bring their vittles and sit and peant th’ old ’un—studyin’ all the tombstones, and what’s writ on ’em—mostly shipwrecks it be, for I doubt if there’s half-a-dozen stones in th’ old grave-yard but what tells of someone or t’other who was drownded at sea. In that one gale of ’24 ’twas thousands that perished, and all that was found on ’em Joseph buried there, when the sea gived back her dead, and he could get at his grave-yard. Though, to be sure, nought was left but the chancel, so you could scarce say as how, poor souls, they got a decent buryin’.
“Anyhow ’twas in that very month, just arter the ‘Outrage,’ that one Price—a farmer he called hisself—was livin’ high up yonder among they hills that you can see faint-like in the distance, nigh agin they ricks. A bleak and dreary place it were at the best o’ times, and a job to get at it at all when a strong so’wester were blowin’. And most every November it do blow cruel strong along they high downs, wi’ no cover to speak on’t ’cept scraps of fuz and heather, and a small thorn tree, may be, now and agin, wi’ ’is branches all leanin’ to the nor’-east, as though ’twas an old man a holdin’ out his arms for shelter. And the road to Price’s farm were no better nor a sheep run. A godless man Price were, as you’d expect wi’ a man who lived so far from all we decent folks. And he never com’d nigh no church. Passon, he said, didn’t suit he, and he weren’t a goin’ to trapeze over hill and dale—not he—when chance ’twas he’d find no passon and no service at t’other end. And if passon went to he—as he did now and agin—he’d find the door shut in his face. And for vittles—not a bite nor a sup of anything did he offer ’en, though passon was a rare ’un at that kind of work. Sunday after Sunday he’d look in reg’lar nigh about dinner time, and savour by his nose, he would, where there was a chance for ’en of summat enticin’. Not but what ’twere bad for the childer where he did settle hisself, for ’twas little of the pudden was left for they when he’d a’ had his turn on’t.
“Howsomever, ’twas there Price lived, wi’ hisself for his company. So no wonder strange tales got abroad about ’m. ’Twas said, though Joseph never gived no heed to ’t, that three wives had entered his doors, and never one of ’em had come out agin—no, not for buryin’. And Joseph must have known on’t if so be they had, seein’ he were clerk and sexton and grave-digger, let alone the head o’ the choir. ’Twas thought that he’d buried ’em in another parish, more nigher to the house he lived in, and wi’ a better road ’long which to carry ’em. But, Lord save us! tweren’t nothin’ of the kind.
“One morning, early in December, ’twas nine o’ the clock, may be, or thereabouts—for Joseph had just been out to pen the sheep in the church-yard—a tall fine old genelman called at the door, and he knowed by his dress ’twere the Bishop. Not that he’d cast eyes on ’en before, for our youngsters are confirmed a way off; there baint enough of them to claim a Bishop for theirselves. But he knowed ’twere the Bishop, what wi’ his gaiters, fittin’ as though they’d grow’d to his legs, and his broad hat as shiny as if you’d smoothed it wi’ a flat iron.
“‘Good morning to you,’ says he, as pleasant as anyone could say it. ‘You be clerk of the parish, baint you?’ ‘True, your wusshup,’ he replied. ‘And sexton too’ says he. ‘Right you be; and grave-digger and choir leader as well,’ for he thought it no sin to make the most to ’m of his preferments. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I want you for a buryin’—this night at eight o’clock.’ ‘A buryin’, your wusshup,’ says he, ‘and at night?’ ‘Yes, and three on ’em,’ says he, ‘all in one grave.’ ‘Well, it do sound mortial strange, your wusshup, but ’tis you that says it, and not I.’ ‘You’d better go at once,’ he says, ‘and begin the grave, for you won’t have none too much time to spare on’t, ’specially as I want it done on the quiet, so to speak, and you mustn’t take no hand to help you, and meet me punctually as ever is at eight o’clock at Farmer Price’s, up along the hill, and bring a lantern and the parish hand-bier ’long wi’ ’e.’
“He hadn’t much time to ponder on it, as you may suppose, with that grave to dig, and no one to gi’ ’m a helpin’ hand. And mortial hard work he found it, too, for the frost set in early that year, and the ground that hard that, young and lusty as he were, he found it a job to get the pick-axe into ’en.
“Howsomever he did get ’en done, and at eight o’clock he was at Farmer Price’s door, and ’twas opened to ’en by the Bishop hisself. And so, hand in hand as you may say, he and the Bishop, they went into the kitchen. And there right facin’ ’em—packed up agin the wall like so many old grandfeyther clocks—stood three coffins, with a piece of glass let in ’em to show the face, and a dead woman in each!
“Close handy they were to ’m when he took his meals, or smoked his pipe; and when he felt a bit lonesome (so he told Joseph) he’d go up to ’em and ask ’em how they did, and if they felt comferable. And fresh as peant they were, too: only a bit shrivelled, like as ’twere an apple in April. Perhaps ’twas the heat of the kitchen, or may be some stuff he’d put in along wi’ ’em; anyhow you could see their faces right enough and tell they was women.
“‘Take ’em down,’ says the Bishop; ‘Farmer Price’ll lend ’e a helpin’ hand: and we’ve none too much time to get ’em back to the churchyard and bury ’em.’ Joseph hisself could scarce do nought but stare at ’em. To think that that godless man had kep’ ’em there—one on ’em for nigh on ten years—never thinkin’, not he, that he was keepin’ ’em tied hand and foot to this world, with never no chance of a resurrection till he took it into his wicked head to let ’em go. And there they’d a’ been for ten years longer—for just so long he lived—if Bishop hisself hadn’t got wind on’t and come down right away to bury ’em.
“Anyhow they did get decent burial—the three on ’em—at last. For they had Bishop, and Joseph and Farmer Price; though I don’t take no count o’ he, ’cept that he helped to lower ’em and fill in the grave.
“But Joseph were right glad, he were—and so he told I—to see the rare tug he had in draggin’ they three dead women up hill and down hill ’cross to the church-yard. For Joseph never gived ’en no helpin’ hand—you may take your oath on’t—though he did make a show of pushin’ at the bier whensomever the Bishop looked his way.
“Didn’t no one never hear on’t? Yes, they did. But they didn’t take no count on’t. Our people baint over wise about religion, and things were done in those days that’d make a rare potheration now. Besides, you see, Bishop were there, and he made a sight o’ difference. ’Twas a rare fine buryin’, people thought, wi’ a Bishop to put you unnerground; though ’tis true he hadn’t his fine gran’ toggery on, and his girt white sleeves.”
The actors in our humble drama are dead and gone. The Bishop and Price and Joseph have, each in his turn, been followed to the grave, only with less eccentric rites. But the story of the farmer’s “Happy Family” still lingers in the village, and is told and re-told round many a cottage hearth under the quaint but significant title of “Price’s Menagerie.”
P.S. The “Professor” himself came round to-day—“for a pipe of baccy, Sir, if you have such a thing about you”—so I have utilised him to correct his own proof sheets. “There baint nothin’ wrong in ’em, Master Fred (this to a man of sixty!), so fur as I sees. Only you says ‘gived’ where I says ‘gi’ed.’ But taint no odds. Like enough they’ll guess what you means whatsomever you writes down.” Thanks, Matthew, for your tribute to my clearness of expression.
The Cruel Crawling Foam
It was a touch of the old wilfulness in Ronald, which cost him dear, and saddened all his future life.
A windy storm-swept sky, though the wind was only playing with the sea as yet. Still, it met us, as we went down to the shore, with a drift of sand that stung the face like pin-pricks—trying, one might easily fancy, to warn us back from our foolhardy enterprise.
A painter would have needed only his blends of grey to paint the scene, till we came upon it, and added, I suppose, a patch of colour. Wiser people than ourselves kept quietly indoors; and the sand, the sea, the gulls, and the hurrying scud could all have been rendered in varying shades of grey. It is, to me, the most fascinating hue that the changeful sea can wear. One great artist, whose sketches are the glory of Girton College, knew it well. With an unerring eye for this sad unity of tone, she admits no faintest touch of colour into her cold grey wastes of sea and sky.
It was a risky and foolhardy attempt on the part of Ronald, and one that he has bitterly repented of, to launch a boat that afternoon. I can never quite forgive him for the sorrow it was to bring on us. But his wife would have it so. It was her greatest enjoyment to put out to sea on such a day. A calm aimless drift, in life or on the sea, was out of harmony with her bright and nerve-wrought soul.
Where Ronald was still more at fault was in the choice of our third hand. True, we had a fair amount of experience between us. But, with a strong south-wester to fight against, weight and strength are the two things needed, and will often win through a gale when experience is powerless. Ronald, however, was in one of his obstinate moods. He would take Oswald or no one, and his wife said ditto. Now Oswald was a lad of eighteen: a good seaman, I grant, but quite unequal to the work we had in view. However, he was the son of Ronald’s favourite gardener, and had been his wife’s pet scholar at her Sunday school, since which time he had been her devoted slave, making himself useful about the house, and looking after her specialities in the garden and conservatory.
“Isn’t that boat too big for us, Oswald? Remember, there are only two of us to handle it, for Ronald’s ill, and can’t be reckoned on for much. Unless I’m mistaken, it intends to blow harder than this before it’s done.”
“Yes, sir. You’re right in a way. But we’ve got the winch to lower and haul her up with. And once at sea she’ll be a deal safer and stauncher than that one,” pointing to a lean, wall-sided thing that was our only alternative. “Besides, we’ll set very little canvas; indeed, to all appearance we shan’t want much.”
What a sail we had that afternoon! I think that I, who had countenanced it least, enjoyed it most. For Ronald was only just recovering from influenza, and certainly not up to a rough and tumble experience of this sort. And Oswald, too, for a lad of his spirits, was strangely depressed. “Never felt like it before,” he said, “and I shall be thankful when we’re safe on shore again. Our old people at home would say that I was walking over my grave, or some folly of the kind. But that can’t be out here,” he added, with a poor attempt to laugh it off.
First of all we took her along under the lee of the shore, where we were able to carry a fair amount of sail, and when we had worked her well round the bay we put her head straight for the south-east, and, with the wind on our beam, raced out into the open sea.
It was a longer and heavier business to work her back again, with the wind right in our teeth, and freshening steadily as the evening wore on. Fortunately for us it had only blown fitfully, and without much weight in it till now. It was still “making up its mind,” as sailors say, whether it would blow or not. But as we were beaching her in a deep sandy cove it had finished apparently with indecision, and began to blow in earnest.
Just as we had landed, and Oswald was preparing to follow us, a terrific squall burst full upon the boat, which lay beam on to it. Relieved of her last weight, as Oswald stepped on shore, she yielded to the pressure, and, heeling over on her side, pinned him to the ground. In a moment the horror of it broke upon us. What could we do, the two of us, even if Ronald hadn’t been shorn of half his strength? It would have taken ten men to pull her over in the face of the gale that was blowing. And the tide was rising rapidly. It was idle to look for help. We had beached her in a quiet sequestered cove, used only by ourselves. But it was closer to Thorpe Hill than the regular landing stage, and, after a hard day’s work, saved us a tedious beat along the coast when the wind was blowing from its present quarter. The high land above us was private property, with no right of way, and on a day like this, for it was beginning to rain, would be lonely as a desert.
Our first thought was of the winch. We had had one fitted up under the cliff in order to save labour in launching and beaching the boat. But, even if it were possible, we had no time nor knowledge how to alter the gear so as to utilise the leverage for righting her. No doubt the incoming tide would help us later on, but its help, when it did come, would come too late. Yet to do anything was better than to do nothing. So we took the balers out of the boat, and, kneeling down beside Oswald, attempted the hopeless task of freeing him by scooping out the sand on either side, till he begged us to desist, as the boat only fell over more heavily, and imprisoned him still deeper in the yielding sand.
And all the time that we were working, Kingsley’s “cruel, crawling foam” beat persistently upon my brain, maddening me with its ghastly congruity. And yet “cruel and crawling” it was not. Quicker it could scarcely have been, and its quickest was (I saw) its kindliest. Already it was playing with the lad’s hair, though his mistress, careless of the risk she ran, knelt down beside him and supported his head in her arms.
“Pray for me,” he said.
She whispered the words in his ear, though if she had shouted them with all her strength they would not have reached us on the other side of the boat, where, with a hope that was hopeless now, we were straining ourselves to no purpose in the attempt to right her.
But Oswald was satisfied. A look of repose and even comfort settled upon his face before the last words came.
“Thank you,” he said, “you have made death easy for me. And you have done so at the risk of your own life. Tell them at home I was not afraid.”
She bent down and kissed his forehead.
“And now—cover my face.”
Our Queen
“And the stars—they shall fall, and the Angels go weeping,
Ere I cease to love her, my Queen, my Queen.”