The Black Dog, and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

They gave each other good wishes and said good-bye in the little dark porch. The shadowy bird on the blind stood up and shrugged itself. Pettigrove’s stay had scarcely lasted an hour, but in that time the moon had gone, the sky had cleared, and in its ravishing darkness the stars almost crackled, so fierce was their mysterious perturbation. The village man felt Caroline’s arms about him and her lips against his mouth as she whispered a “God bless you.” He turned away home, dazed, entranced, he did not heed the stars. In the darkness a knacker’s cart trotted past him with a dim lantern swinging at its tail and the driver bawling a song. In the keen air the odour from the dead horse sickened him.

Pettigrove passed Christmas gaily enough with his kindred, and even his wife indulged in brief gaieties. Her cousin was one of those men full of affable disagreements; an attitude rather than an activity of mind. He had a curious face resembling an owl’s except in its colour (which was pink) and in its tiny black moustache curling downwards like a dark ring under his nose. If Pettigrove remarked upon a fine sunset the cousin scoffed, scoffed benignantly; there was a sunset every day, wasn’t there?—common as grass, weren’t they? As for the farming hereabouts, nothing particular in it was there? The scenery was, well, it was just scenery, a few hills, a few woods, plenty of grass fields. No special suitability of soil for any crop; corn would be just average, wasn’t that so? And the roots, well, on his farm at home he could show mangolds as big as young porkers, forty to the cartload, or thereabouts. There weren’t no farmers round here making a fortune, he’d be bound, and as for their birds, he should think they lived on rook pie.

Pettigrove submitted that none of the Tull farmers looked much the worse for farming.

“Well, come,” said the other, “I hear your workhouses be middling full. Now an old neighbour of mine, old Frank Stinsgrove, was a man as could farm, any mortal thing. He wouldn’t have looked at this land, not at a crown an acre, and he was a man as could farm, any mortal thing, oranges and lemons if he’d a mind to it. What a head that man had, God bless, his brain was stuffed! Full!! He’d declare black was white, and what’s more he could prove it. I like a man like that.”

The cousin’s wife was a vast woman, shaped like a cottage loaf. For some reason she clung to her stays: it could not be to disguise or curb her bulk, for they merely put a gloss upon it. You could only view her as a dimension, think of her as a circumference, and wonder grimly what she looked like when she prepared for the bath. She devoured turkey and pig griskin with such audible voracity that her husband declared that he would soon be compelled to wear corks in his earholes at meal times, yes, the same as they did in the artillery. She was quite unperturbed by this even when little Jane giggled, and she avowed that good food was a great enjoyment to her.

“O ’tis a good thing and a grand thing, but take that child now,” said her father. Resting his elbow on the table he indicated with his fork the diminutive Jane; upon the fork hung a portion of meat large enough to half-sole a lady’s shoe. “She’s just the reverse, she eats as soft as a fly, a spillikin a day, and not a mite more; no, very dainty is our Jane.” Here he swallowed the meat and treated four promising potatoes with very great savagery. “Do you know our Jane is going to marry a house-painter, yah, a house-painter, or is it a coach-painter? ’Tis smooth and gentle work, she says, not like rough farmers or chaps that knock things pretty hard, smiths and carpenters, you know. O Lord! eight years old, would you believe it? The spillikin! John, this griskin’s a lovely bit of meat.”

“Beautiful meat,” chanted his wife, “like a pig we killed a month ago. That was a nice pig, fat and contented as you’d find any pig, ’twould have been a shame to keep him alive any longer. It dressed so well, a picture it was, the kidneys shun like gold.”

“That reminds me of poor old Frank Stinsgrove,” said her husband. “He’d a mint of money, a very wealthy man, but he didn’t like parting with it. He’d got oldish and afraid of his death, must have a doctor calling to examine him every so often. Didn’t mind spending a fortune on doctors, but every other way he’d skin a flint. And there was nought wrong with him, ’cept age. So his daughter ups and says to him one day—You are wasting your money on all these doctors, father, they do you no good, what you must have is nice, dainty, nourishing food. Now what about some of these new laid eggs? How much are they fetching now? old Frank says. A penny farthing, says she. A penny farthing! I cannot afford it. And there was that man with a mint of money, a mint, could have bought Buckingham Palace—you understand me—and yet he must go on with his porridge and his mustard plasters and his syrup of squills, until at last a smartish doctor really did find something the matter with him, in his kidneys. They operated, mark you, and they say—but I never quite had the rights of it—they say they gave him a new kidney made of wax; a new wax kidney, ah, and I believe it was successful, only he had not to get himself into any kind of a heat, of course, nor sit too close to the fire. ’Stonishing what they doctors can do with your innards. But of course he was too old, soon died. Left a fortune, a mint of money, could have bought the crown of England. Staunch old chap, you know.”

Throughout the holidays John sang his customary ballads, “The Bicester Ram,” “The Unquiet Grave,” and dozens of others. After songs there would be things to eat. Then a game of cards, and after that things to eat. Then a walk to the inn, to the church, to a farm, or to a friend’s where, in all jollity, there would be things to eat and drink. They went to a meet of the hounds, a most successful outing for it gave them ravening appetites. In short, as the cousin’s wife said when bidding farewell, it was a time of great enjoyment.

And Pettigrove said so too. He believed it, and yet was glad to be quit of his friends in order to contemplate the serene dawn that was to come at any hour now. By New Year’s Day Mrs. Cronshaw had not returned, but the big countryman was patient, his mind, though not at rest, was confident. The days passed as invisibly as warriors in a hostile country, and almost before he had begun to despair February came, a haggard month to follow a frosty January. Mist clung to the earth as tightly as the dense grey fur on the back of a cat, ice began to uncongeal, adjacent lands became indistinct, and distant fields could not be seen at all. The banks of the roads and the squat hedges were heavily dewed. The cries of invisible rooks, the bleat of unseen sheep, made yet more gloomy the contours of motionless trees wherefrom the slightest movement of a bird fetched a splatter of drops to the road, cold and uncheering.