Half-Past Bedtime

by Sir H. H. Bashford

BEARDY NED

Near Uncle Joe's house there was a small pool which was really the beginning of a river; and this river ran into a bigger one that flowed through the town in which Marian and Cuthbert lived. The big river was rather muddy, but the little one was nearly always clear, and it was quite easy to paddle across it, though there were some pools in it six feet deep.

Up in the downs, where it began, it was hardly more than a bubbly trickle, but lower down it grew wider and wider, and ran between the reeds at the edges of the meadows. Close to Captain Jeremy's farmhouse, where it joined the big river that flowed through the town, it ran for almost a quarter of a mile through the middle of a sort of wood. It was under the roots of some of these trees, as they pushed through the water into the soil beneath, that the biggest of the trout had their nests, where fishermen with flies couldn't reach them. But there were some big trout, too, that lived under the meadow banks, and used to put up their noses in the summer evenings, and suck down the flies that fell on the water when they were tired of dancing in the air.

Cuthbert and Marian and Doris and Gwendolen were all very fond of this river, and when they had finished paddling or bathing in the pools (for they had all learnt to swim) they used to lie on the bank and keep very still and watch the trout having their evening meal. They would see an orange-coloured fly or a blue fly or a fly with pale wings like a distant rain-cloud floating down on the top of the water and probably wondering where it had got to; and then they would hear a little noise like grown-up people make with the tips of their tongues against the roofs of their mouths; and then the fly would be gone, and there would be a tiny wave on the water, shaped like a ring, and growing bigger and bigger. That meant that a trout had been lying in wait, with his eye cocked on the surface of the stream, and had seen the fly, and liked the look of him, and suddenly decided to swallow him up.

Sometimes a fisherman would come quietly along and kneel down on one knee, and, after he had seen a trout rise, would open a little box and take out a fly like the one that the trout had eaten. But this would be a sham fly, made of feathers and silk, cunningly tied round a sharp hook, and he would thread it on to a piece of gut so thin that they could hardly see it. Then he would tie the gut to a sort of string that was hanging down from the point of his fishing-rod; and then he would swish his rod until the fly flew out straight and fell upon the stream, just as the real one had done.

Sometimes they could see a trout come up and look at this fly and shake his head, and go down again; but once or twice they had seen a big trout rise and swallow it just as if it had been a real one. Then the trout had found himself caught, and they had seen the fisherman's rod bent almost double as the trout dashed to and fro; and at last they had seen the fisherman slip a net into the water, and lift the trout on to the bank, all curved and shining. But very often there would be no fishermen at all, and they would see nobody for hours and hours, and hear nothing but the cries of the river-birds and the suck, suck, of the feeding trout.

The man that they saw most often was a man called Beardy Ned, because, though he was only a youngish man, he had a sandy-coloured beard; and they were always very sorry for him, because he had lost his wife in a terrible railway accident soon after he had married her. She had left him with a little girl only ten months old, and that was why Ned had let his beard grow. He hadn't time, he said, to look after the little girl and shave his face every day as well. When he had married, Ned had been a postman, but after his wife had been killed he had given that up; and he had wandered about ever since, doing all sorts of odd jobs.

Sometimes he helped the farmers get their hay in, or the gamekeepers trap stoats, and sometimes he would chop wood, and sometimes he would go far away and not come back for weeks and weeks. But wherever he went he would take his little girl, whom he had called Liz after her mother; and sooner or later he would always come back to this river, because that was where he had first met his dead wife. He had lived so much in the open air that his skin was as dark as a Red Indian's, and when he laughed his teeth were like snow, and his eyes like the sea on a sunny day. People like clergymen and large employers often used to tell him that he ought to settle down. But why should he settle down, he asked, so long as there was only Liz, and she could sleep in his arms as snug as snug?

Liz was four years old now, and as brown as her father, and her hair was short and curly like a boy's; and Cuthbert and Marian and Doris and Gwendolen loved her almost as much as they loved Beardy Ned. For Beardy Ned, in spite of his great trouble, was always full of a secret happiness, and he had made this little song out of his own head that he used to sing every two or three hours:

The wickedest girl there was,
The wickedest girl there is,
The wickedest girl there ever will be
Is my young daughter Liz.