IV
"Those are bonny potatoes, missis!"
"Ay!" The stout woman, the upper part of whose shabby dress seemed to be subjected to considerable strains, looked at Jock carelessly, and then, attracted perhaps by his eager face, smiled with a certain facile amiability.
"But by th' time they're cooked your supper'll be late, I'm reckoning."
"Them potatoes have naught to do with our supper," said Mrs Clowes. "They're for to-morrow's dinner. There'll be no time for peeling potatoes to-morrow. Kezia!" She shrilled the name.
A slim little girl showed herself between the heavy curtains of the main tent of Mrs Clowes's caravanserai.
"Bring Sapphira, too!"
"Those yours?" asked Jock.
"They're mine," said Mrs Clowes. "And I've six more, not counting grandchildren and sons-in-law like."
"No wonder you want a pailful of potatoes!" said Jock.
Kezia and Sapphira appeared in the gloom. They might have counted sixteen years together. They were dirty, tousled, graceful and lovely.
"Twins," Jock suggested.
Mrs Clowes nodded. "Off with this pail, now! And mind you don't spill the water. Here, Kezia! Take the knife. And bring me the other pail."
The children bore away the heavy pail, staggering, eagerly obedient. Mrs Clowes lifted her mighty form from the stool, shook peelings from the secret places of her endless apron, and calmly sat down again.
"Ye rule 'em with a rod of iron, missis," said Jock.
She smiled good-humouredly and shrugged her vast shoulders—no mean physical feat.
"I keep 'em lively," she said. "There's twelve of 'em in my lot, without th' two babbies. Someone's got to be after 'em all the time."
"And you not thirty-five, I swear!"
"Nay! Ye're wrong."
Sapphira brought the other pail, swinging it. She put it down with a clatter of the falling handle and scurried off.
"Am I now?" Jock murmured, interested; and, as it were out of sheer absent-mindedness, he turned the pail wrong side up, and seated himself on it with a calm that equalled the calm of Mrs Clowes.
It was now nearly dark. The flares of the showmen were answering each other across the Fair-ground; and presently a young man came and hung one out above the railed platform of Mrs Clowes's booth; and Mrs Clowes blinked. From behind the booth floated the sounds of the confused chatter of men, girls and youngsters, together with the complaint of an infant. A few yards away from Mrs Clowes was a truss of hay; a pony sidled from somewhere with false innocence up to this truss, nosed it cautiously, and then began to bite wisps from it. Occasionally a loud but mysterious cry swept across the ground. The sky was full of mystery. Against the sky to the west stood black and clear the silhouette of the new Town Hall spire, a wondrous erection; and sticking out from it at one side was the form of a gigantic angel. It was the gold angel which, from the summit of the spire, has now watched over Bursley for half a century, but which on that particular Friday had been lifted only two-thirds of the way to its final home.
Jock-at-a-Venture felt deeply all the influences of the scene and of the woman. He was one of your romantic creatures; and for him the woman was magnificent. Her magnificence thrilled.
"And what are you going to say?" she quizzed him. "Sitting on my pail!"
Now to quiz Jock was to challenge him.
"Sitting on your pail, missis," he replied, "I'm going for to say that you're much too handsome a woman to go down to hell in eternal damnation."
She was taken aback, but her profession had taught her the art of quick recovery.
"You belong to that Methody lot," she mildly sneered. "I thought I seed you talking to them white-chokers."
"I do," said Jock.
"And I make no doubt you think yourself very clever."
"Well," he vouchsafed, "I can splice a rope, shave a head, cure a wart or a boil, and tell a fine woman with any man in this town. Not to mention boxing, as I've given up on account of my religion."
"I was handsome once," said Mrs Clowes, with apparent, but not real, inconsequence. "But I'm all run to fat, like. I've played Portia in my time. But now it's as much as I can do to get through with Maria Martin or Belladonna."
"Fat!" Jock protested. "Fat! I wouldn't have an ounce taken off ye for fifty guineas."
He was so enthusiastic that Mrs Clowes blushed.
"What's this about hell-fire?" she questioned. "I often think of it—I'm a lonely woman, and I often think of it."
"You lonely!" Jock protested again. "With all them childer?"
"Ay!"
There was a silence.
"See thee here, missis!" he exploded, jumping up from the pail. "Ye must come to th' Bethesda down yon, on Sunday morning, and hear the word o' God. It'll be the making on ye."
Mrs Clowes shook her head.
"Nay!"
"And bring yer children," he persisted.
"If it was you as was going to preach like!" she said, looking away.
"It is me as is going to preach," he answered loudly and proudly. "And I'll preach agen any man in this town for a dollar!"
Jock was forgetting himself: an accident which often happened to him.