It was hot midday and the road bare of folk. She did not wish a travelling companion and would have liked to tell him so, but she was somehow cowed this noon, weary and listless where on the sunrise road she had been hopeful. She let him walk beside her, a freakish figure, vowed to mischief. Immediately he began to talk about the plague. Her father had died?—“Yes.”—He had been told so. Many people had died—many people in the town, and not so many, but enough in Hawthorn and roundabout. Once he saw the plague. He was lying in the heather on a hillside near a town that had it. Dark was coming. Then a great figure of a woman, black and purple, with a veil all over, rose straight up above the roofs and chimneys. She lifted her arms and took the veil from her head, and it was crowned with shiny gold and she was the Plague—and she floated in the sky and took her veil and drew it behind her, and every roof it touched they were going to die in that house.—Yes, tinkers saw strange things, wandering over the country. There were a many strange things, weren’t there? The plague left the country very fearful—and there was another strange thing, Fear! It took a man and knocked the heart out of him—but then to make up, it gave him more eyes and ears than he’d ever had before!
He looked at her aslant. “Did you ever see the Devil?”
“No.”
“Then you aren’t fearful,” said the tinker. “Fearful folk can see him plain.”
He kept silence for a little, his eyes upon a cloud of butterflies fluttering before them over a muddy place in the road, then again turned upon Joan his curious, half-squinting look. “Of course there’ve been men who weren’t afraid and yet have seen him. Men who were great enemies to him, and pushing him hard, and he so angry and despairing that he shows himself, tail, claws, and all! Tall Bible men and great men like Doctor Martin Luther who threw his ink-well at him. And a lot of other men—mass-priests, and bishops, and marprelates, all the same. It’s to their honour to have seen him, for so the people see how the Devil must hate them to come himself to beard them, and what a strong enemy they are to him, which means, of course, that the King of Heaven must hold them in high regard.—Even poor wights may sometimes give a good blow—just as a camp-follower might save an army or a scullion a palace! I’m not saying that I didn’t get a glint of his horns myself once on Little Heath, between two furze bushes!”
Joan was not talkative. She walked steadily on, but she was tired, and her mind now seemed to drowse, and now, rousing itself, strayed far from the other’s talk.
The tinker was piqued by her inattention. “And then witches and warlocks see him.—Women see him,” he said with spite. “And not because they’re his enemies neither! Ten women know him, hair and hoof, to one man.... For why? They knew him first, as the good Book tells us, and became his gossips in Eden Garden. So ’tis that still when things go wrong ’tis woman that gives them the shog. The Devil gives her the apple still, and she takes it and shakes out harm on mankind—which is why we’ve got a leave to keep her somewhat down! That’s woman in ordinary—and then you come to witches—”
Joan’s eyelids twitched.
He saw that she attended. “Witches! First they begin by having commerce with elves and fays, green men, and such. They get into fairy hills and eat and drink there, and they dance in the moonlight around trees in the wood. But the elves are the Devil’s cousins, and he’s always on hand, and some night he comes smirking up, dressed now this way and now that. So the woman drops a curtsy, and he puts out his hand and gives her something, just as he did in Eden Garden. She takes it, and that seals her both sides of the Judgement Day! Pay for pay! Blood gives him strength, and so he sucks from a little place he makes upon her body—that’s the witch mark that can’t be made to feel pain, and that’s why we strip and prick witches to find their mark, which is better proof even than their confessing! Now she’s the Devil’s servant and leman forever, and begins to work evil and practise the Black Art. He shows her how to fly through the air and change herself into all manner of shapes. Then she goes to his Sabbat and learns to know other witches and maybe a wizard or two, though there aren’t so many wizards. They’re mostly witches and demons. If you look overhead at night you can sometimes see a scud of them flying between you and the moon. Then begin the tempests of hail and thunder and lightning, and the ships that are sunk at sea, and the murrain in the cattle, and the corn blighted and ricks burned and beasts lamed and children possessed and gear taken and sickness come—”
He stopped to cough and also to observe if she were listening. She was listening. He was saying nothing that she had not heard before. They were commonplaces alike of pulpit and doorstep. But it had all been like figures seen afar off and upon another road. Now she had come to a place in life where, bewildered, she found them about her. Joan was conscious that life was becoming like an evil dream. Just as in a dream a hundred inconsequences might form the strongest net, entangling you, withholding you from some longed-for escape, so now, awake, a hundred things so little in themselves— She never said to herself that there was a net weaving about her; the mind, struck and bewildered, could not yet give things a name, perhaps would not if it could. She only saw the gold and warmth going for her steadily out of the sunshine—and knew not how it came that they were going nor how to stop that departure. Now she said dully, “I do not believe all that,” and then saw immediately that it was a mistake for any one to say that.