Back o' the Moon, and other stories

by Oliver Onions

The weavers of Wadsworth and beyond have a sort of thwarted sense of the droll, and first they smiled sourly, and then guffawed, as the full humour of the parson’s coming broke on them. They chuckled at the looms that had been the cause of the knock-knocking, caught their fellows’ eyes in the steep street and roared again. For Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeons knew their way home through the broken louver-boards of the squat belfry by this. If sometimes a ferret refused to come out of the air-hole by the buttress into which he had been put (and the church “lifted,” as they said, with rats), well, it was cheaper to take up a floorboard or two than to pull the church down. As for the unhinged church-door, it was a wit from Booth, over the moors far beyond the mountainous Scout, who observed that doorways were made to let folk into church and not to keep them out; and for the rest—the broken windows, the hen-coops in the aisle, the parchments taken by the lads to make kites, and the single elm of the churchyard that had been cut down to furnish galley-baulks for the looms of they knew whom—the responsibility for these things rested somewhere between Pim o’ Cuddy and the bishop of the diocese.

On the first Sunday morning of his incumbency, save for a preliminary scrubbing and cleaning and moving out of the hen-coops and so forth, the parson preached in the church as it was; and then, at his own cost, he set half a dozen men to work. He paid them at the end of the week in good coin from a canvas bag. Thereupon a ripple of excitement passed through the village. The winks and amused stares ceased. The parson was favoured with nods in the square and street, and awkward greetings were passed. A man came down from a loom-loft one morning and asked him whether he had half a guinea in exchange for silver; and the parson, in his own room, made a little sound of contempt that a few round pieces of gold should thus buy civility.

Then began the parson’s observations of his new parish.

And first of all, he found that he might regard this hamlet of Wadsworth either as barbarous or civilised, and be, in a sense, right either way. It was rougher by several degrees than Horwick Town, where the Thursday cloth-market was held—the town where he had left the grey galloway; on the other hand, its manners passed as gentle and gracious by comparison with certain places away over the well-nigh impassable Scout—Holdsworth, Booth, Brotherton, Fluett, and other nooks lost in the wilds that stretched a dozen miles and more to Trawden Forest in Lancashire. This westerly district went by the name of Back o’ the Moon, or, as they had it, “Back o’ th’ Mooin” (for they put the “i” into that and similar words—the “Goose,” the Wadsworth inn, was invariably the “Gooise,” and there was scarce a long open vowel but they made a diphthong of it). This mountainous and inaccessible country was cut up into innumerable short deep valleys and Slacks, thinly-wooded Deans, stony Shelves, leagues of sweeping heather, and rocks, and Scouts and Ridges past counting. The best part of a winter might pass and a Holdsworth man would not be seen in Brotherton nor a Brotherton man in Booth; while Fluett, save for the Pack Causeway that, creeping by a roundabout route out of Horwick, gained the high land and crossed the whole district, would have been utterly isolated. One geographical fact especially impressed the parson: that was, that the nature of the country had determined the passing of special Acts of Parliament for the protection of the weavers of Back o’ th’ Mooin. A man could not, up and down such a country, carry on his back more than three or four stone of cloth. He was thus under certain disabilities as compared with those in the valleys; and it had been necessary to limit by enactment the buying-powers of the Horwick merchants, in order that the occupation of the three-and four-stone men should not be entirely gone.

Now the parson was a man of his eyes and ears, and of his tongue withal; and of one of the earliest of his observations of Back o’ th’ Mooin he had, by a witty stroke, made a sort of parable. It was a common saying that in Wadsworth they were “All Raikeses—th’ Eastwoods an’ all,” just as in Holdsworth they were all Bentleys, including the Murgatroyds, and in Brotherton Benns, not excepting the Deans. Now it happened that a Murgatroyd of Holdsworth was famous for a certain run of fighting-dogs of extraordinary tenacity, and this man (his nickname, by the way, was “Mish”) hung about Wadsworth a good deal during the summer months—after a hoyden of a girl, it was said, one of the innumerable Raikeses. He had turned up one afternoon with one of his dogs in a leash, that it might not brawl with the tag-rag of Wadsworth, and a little group of men in the square were now jesting with him about the girl and now discussing the dog.

The parson chanced to pass as they were badgering this Mish for the secret of his breeding, and to hear Mish’s reply—something about “in and in and in.” He stopped abruptly before Murgatroyd.

“Yes,” he interposed; “and in again on top of that, Murgatroyd, till they’re wrong in their heads and afraid of nothing. Look——”

He pointed to a sackless lad who lolled his tongue over by the horse-trough. “Yes,” he muttered, half to himself, “there’s little doubt it’s your Slacks and Scouts and Ridges do it; you’ll not go courting far from your firesides in the winter ... maybe your metallic water is the cause of all this goître, too ... in and in and in....”

He shook his head and passed on his way.

And though the winter that was drawing near proved afterwards to be a green and mild one, the parson seemed able to guess without knowing what these same Scouts and hills would be like when the snow lay thick on them, and the packmen went before the horses with spades, seeking for the black-topped guide-posts, and of each hamlet it became true that there was “one way in and none out.”