The Torch and Other Tales

by Eden Phillpotts

Mary explained it very simply.

"You'm just so clever as me," she said, "but you'm not so generous. You ain't got my powers of looking forward, and you hate to part with money in your pocket for the sake of money that's to be there. In a word, you're narrow-minded, and don't spend enough on manure, Rupert; and till you put it on thicker and ban't feared of paying for lime, you'll never get a root fit to put before a decent sheep."

There was truth in it I do believe, for I was always a bit prone, like my father before me, to starve the land, against my reason. You'd think that was absurd, and yet you'll hardly find a man, even among the upper educated people, who haven't got his little weak spots like that, and don't do some things that he knows be silly, even while he's doing 'em. They cast him down at the moment; and he'll even make resolves to be more open-handed, or more close-fisted, as the case may be, but the weakness lies in your nature, and you could no more cure me from being small-minded with my manure than you could have cured Mary from shivering to her spine every time she saw a single magpie, or spilled the salt.

A very impulsive woman, and yet, as you may say, a very keen and clever one in many respects. I don't think she ever wanted to marry and certainly I can call home no adventures in the way of courting that fell to her lot. And yet a pleasant woman, though not comely. In fact, without unkindness, she might have been called a terribly ugly woman. Yellow as a guinea, with gingery hair, yellow eyes, and no figure to save her. You would have thought her property might have drawn an adventurer or two, for Little Sherberton was a tenement farm and Mary's very own; but nobody came along, or if they did, they only looked and passed by; and though Mary had no objection to men in general, she didn't encourage them. But in her case, without a doubt, they'd have needed all the encouragement she could give 'em, besides the property, to have a dash at her.

So she bided a spinster woman, and took very kindly to my childer, who would run up over to her when they could, for they loved her. And by the same token, my second daughter, by the name of Daisy, was drowned in Dart, poor little maid, trying to go up to her aunt. My wife had whipped her for naughtiness, and the child—only ten she was—went off to get comfort from Mary and fell in the river with none to save her. So I've paid my toll to Dart, you see, like many another man in these parts.

Well, my sister, same as a good many other terrible ugly women, got better to look at as she grew older; and after she was sixty, her hair turned white and she filled out a bit. Her voice was always a pleasant thing about her. It reflected her nature, which was kindly, though excitable. But her people never left her. She'd got a hind and his wife—Noah and Jane Sweet by name; and he was head man; and his son, Shem Sweet, came next—thirty year old he was; and besides them was Nelly Pearn, dairymaid, and two other men and a boy.

Then came along the Old Soldier to Little Sherberton; and he never left it again till five year ago, when he went out feet first.

To this day I couldn't tell you much about him. His character defied me. I don't know whether he was good, or bad, or just neither, like most of us. But on the whole I should be inclined to say he was good. He was cast in a lofty mould, and had a wide experience of the seamy side of life. I proved him a liar here and there, and he proved me a fool, but neither of us shamed the other in that matter, for I said (and still say) that I'd sooner be a fool then a rascal; while he, though he denied being a rascal, said that he'd sooner be the biggest knave on earth than a fool. He argued that any self-respecting creature ought to feel the same, and he had an opinion to which he always held very stoutly, that the fools made far more trouble in the world than the knaves. He went further than that, and said if there were no fools, there wouldn't be no knaves. But there I didn't hold with him; for a man be born a fool by the will of God, and I never can see 'tis anything to be shamed about; whereas no man need be a knave, if he goes to the Lord and Father of us all in a proper spirit, and prays for grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the Dowl.

Bob Battle he called himself, and he knocked at the door of Little Sherberton on a winter night, and asked to see Mary, and would not be put off by any less person. So she saw him, and heard how he had been tramping through Holne and stopped for a drink and sang a song to the people in the bar. It happened that Mr. Churchward, the innkeeper, wanted a message took to my sister about some geese, and none would go for fear of snow, so the tramp, for Bob was no better, said that he would go, if they'd put him in the way and give him a shilling. And Churchward trusted him, because he said that he reminded him of his dead brother. Though that wasn't nothing in his favour, seeing what Henry Churchward had been in life.

However, Bob earned his money and came along, and Mary saw him and took him in, and let him shake the snow off himself and eat and drink. Then began the famous blizzard, and I've often thought old Bob must have known it was coming. At any rate there was no choice but to let him stop, for it would have been death to turn him out again. So he stopped, and when the bad weather was over, he wouldn't go. There's no doubt my sister always liked the man in a way; but women like a man in such a lot of different ways that none could have told exactly how, or why, she set store on him. For that matter she couldn't herself. Indeed I axed her straight out and she tried to explain and failed. It wasn't his outer man, for he had a face like a rat, with a great, ragged, grey moustache, thicker on one side than t'other, and eyebrows like anybody else's whiskers. And one eyelid was down, though he could see all right with the eye under it. Round in the back he was and growing bald on the top; but what hair he had was long, and he never would cut it, because he said it kept his neck warm.