  Produced by Al Haines. THE POST-GIRL BY EDWARD C. BOOTH New York Copyright, 1908, by Published, June, 1908 THE POST-GIRL CHAPTER I When summer comes Mrs. Gatheredge talks of repapering her parlor, and Ginger gets him ready to sleep in the scullery at a night's notice, but the letting of lodgings is not a staple industry in this quarter of Yorkshire, and folks would fare ill on it who knew nothing of the art of keeping a pig or growing their own potatoes in the bit of garden at the back. Visitors pass through, indeed, in large enough numbers between seed- and harvest-time (mostly by bicycle), staring their way round the village from house to house. But all that ever develops is an occasional request for a cup of water—in the hope, no doubt, that we may give them milk—or an interrogation as to the road to somewhere else. Steg's reply to the latter, through a long succession of summers, has waxed into a set formula, which he prepares with all the exactness of a prescription: "There 's two rawds [roads] tiv it," he says, measuring out his words carefully against the light of inward understanding, like tincture in a chemist's vial. "A right un an' a wrong un. 'Appen ye 'd as lief gan right un. Wrong un 's a long way round." These are mere migratory birds of visit, however—here this morning and gone by noon—leaving little trace of their passage beyond a footmark on somebody's doorstep or a mustard-stained sandwich-paper blowing drearily against the tombstones in the churchyard. Residential visitors are almost unknown to Ullbrig. One or two petty tradesmen bring their wives and families from Hunmouth for cheap sojourn during the summer months, but they are more residential than visitors, recurring each year with the regularity of harvest, and blending as imperceptibly with Ullbrig life as the water with Jevons' milk. They have become to all intents and purposes a part of us, and are never spoken of as "visitors"—they are merely said to be "wi' us again" or just "coom back." The class of visitor which is lacking to Ullbrig is the pleasure-seeking variety which comes for a month, is charged unprotesting for lights and fire, never lends a hand to the washing of its own pots, and pays town price for country butter. Our local designation for such guests—when we get them—is "spawers." The word is apt to strike chill on urban understandings when heard for the first time. I remember when Ginger sprang it upon me on the initial occasion of my hearing it, I was filled for a moment with an indefinable sense of calamity. "Well," were Ginger's words, greeting me and leaving me almost in a breath. "Ah wish ah mud stay longer wi' ye noo, but ah mun't. We 've gotten spawers i' 'oose [house]." I shook his earth-worn hand with that degree of comprehensive warmth which should suggest sorrowing sympathy to a mind quickened through trouble, but nought beyond fervor to the ruder tissues of health. "There 's always something ... for some of us..." I said oracularly. "We mud as well 'ev 'em as onnybody," Ginger remarked, with what I took to be rare resignation at the time, and we parted. It was in the green, early days of July, when the corn waved slumberously back and forth over the hedge-tops, beating time to soundless adagios like a sleepy-headed metronome, and as yet there were few scorched patches in summer's rippling gown of emerald silk, that the Spawer arrived. Steg was one of the first to give tidings of his advent to Ullbrig, and after him Mrs. Grazer, who met him on his way home, bearing the intelligence laboriously with his mouth open, like a brimming pail of milk. "'Ev ye 'eard 'ow Mester Jenkison' mother' sister-in-law 's gettin' on, Steg?" she asked him, before he was ready to speak first. "Ay," says Steg, with a watchful eye upon his own intelligence, set momentarily down, and waiting his turn. "'Ow is she, then?" "She 's deead." "Nay! Is she an' all! Poor owd woman!" "She is that!" says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work, as though he had the credit of her demise. It is good to be the bearer of tidings, and feel oneself a factor in the world's rotation. "She deed ti morn [this morning] at aif-past six." "An' when 's t' buryin'? Did y' 'ear?" "Ay, they telt me," says Steg. "It 'll be o' Thosday, ah 's think." "Nay, bud it weean't," Steg replied, mounting up another step by contradiction toward the top rung of his ladder. "Wensday. There 's ower much thunder about for keepin'." Then he struck up still higher without loss of time. "They 've gotten a spawer up at Clift," he said. The intelligence was a guest at every tea-table in Ullbrig the same day, Steg and Mrs. Grazer having done wonders in its dissemination under wholesome fear of forestalment. Mrs. Grazer beat Steg by a short head at Shep Stevens', but Steg cut the triumph away from under her feet at Gatheredge's. To all intents and purposes they ran a dead heat at the brewery, only Mrs. Gatheredge's superior riding put Steg's nose out on the post. "Steg 'll 'a telt ye they 've gotten a spawer up at Clift Yend," she said, with diabolical cunning, just as Steg's mouth was opening for the purpose, snatching the prize from his very lips. "Nay, Steg 's telt us nowt," repudiated the brewer. "Steg 's nobbut just this minute walked i' yard. Ev' they an' all? Up at Clift Yend?" "'E come o' Monday," Steg chimed in morosely, picking up what odd crumbs of attention were left him from the purloin. "O' Monday, did 'e? There 's nobbut one on 'em, then?" said the brewer interrogatively. "That's all," answered Steg, left in undisputed possession of the field by the departure of Mrs. Grazer into the internals of the brewer's house by the back. "Ay.... So there 's nobbut one on 'em, then? It 'll be newspaper man fro' Oommuth [Hunmouth], ah 's think—'im 'at was 'ere last back-end." "Nay, bud no," Steg answered, with decision, plucking up brightly at the sight of unspoliated pickings. "It 's a right new un this time." "'E 'll be fro' Oommuth, though," said the brewer, going down squarely on the bilge of a beer barrel after a cautious look backward. "Nay, an' 'e 's not fro' Oommuth naythur," said Steg, with zest. "Why! Where is 'e fro', then?" asked the brewer, in genuine surprise. Visitors to Ullbrig who don't come from Hunmouth can hardly be conceived to come from anywhere. We divide the world into two constituents, town and country, Hunmouth being the town. "Ah nivver thought to ask," said Steg, after a thinking pause; "bud 'e 's not fro' Oommuth.... Ah 'm none so sure," he added, straining the chords of his actual intelligence for the sake of a little extra effect, "'t 'e 's not fro' Lunnon!" "Ah think not, Steg," said the brewer quickly, rejecting the probability without consideration, like the blind man's box of matches pushed under his nose in Hunmouth. "Ah think not," the brewer repeated. "Lunnon 's a long way off 'n Clift Yend." "Ay, but ah 'm none so sure, ah tell ye," Steg urged, real conviction growing in him out of contradiction, as is the way of all flesh. "'E 's lived a deal i' furrin parts, onny'ow," he said craftily, making a counter demonstration to relieve pressure on the main issue, and retiring under its cover from the assailed position. "Which on 'em?" inquired the brewer, with disconcerting directness. "T' most part on 'em, ah think," Steg replied, boldly. "France, 'as 'e?" asked the brewer, testing this broad statement of fact by the application of specifics. "Ay," said Steg, with a big bold affirmative like the head of a tadpole, thinning out all suddenly into a faint wriggling tail of protective caution—"ah think so." "Jarmany?" asked the brewer. "Ay," said Steg again, "... ah think so." "Roo-shah?" the brewer went on judicially, suddenly of a mind to turn this interrogation into a geographical display, but with a keen eye for the limits of his territory. "Ay," repeated Steg, gathering such momentum of assent that he had buried his reply in the brewer's second syllable before he could stop himself, with his tail sticking out by the interrogation mark—"ah think so." "Hitaly?" queried the brewer, pausing through a futile endeavor to pronounce whether America was a foreign part or not. "Choina? Hindia?" "Nay," Steg demurred, with wily scruple, "ah 'm none so sure about t' last." "'E 's traviled a deal, 'owseumdivver," said the brewer. "What 's brought 'im to Clift Yend, ah wonder ... of all places i' world. 'E 's not for company, it seems, bi t' looks o' things. Did y' 'ear owt why 'e 's come?" "Naw," said Steg. "They say 'e writes a deal of 'is time." "'Appen 'e writes for t' paper," the brewer suggested. "Nay, ah div n't think that 's it," Steg said, taking the brewer's conclusion into his own hands like an ill-sharpened pencil and repointing it. "'E 's nowt to do wi' papers, by what ah can mek oot. 'E 's ta'en rooms for a month at start, wi' chance o' stoppin' on if 'e likes 'em, an' 'e 's brought a hextry deal o' things wi' 'im. 'E 's brought a bath...." "A bath!" said the brewer blankly, interrogation and interjection in visible conflict over the word. Complete house furnishing in Ullbrig stops at the wash-tub. Beyond this all is vanity. "What diz 'e want wi' a bath?" "Nay..." Steg said, declining any conflict on the unaccountabilities of strange men from far places. "Ah 'm nobbut tellin' ye same as they 've telt me," he added half-apologetically, in fear lest he might be accused of sympathies with false worship. "It 's a rare great bath an' all, by what they say—like one o' them big drums wi' a cover tiv it. Ye 've nobbut to gie it a ding wi' yer 'and an' it sets up a growl same as thunder. Onny road, that 's what Jeff Dixon says, an' 'e ought to know. 'E wor dingin' it all last neet." "Some folks 'as fancies," said the brewer, with impersonal scorn. "Ay ... an' ah was nigh forgettin'..." Steg struck in. "'E 's gotten a 'armonium comin' an' all. It 'll ought to be 'ere before so very long, noo." "A 'armonium!" exclaimed the brewer, trying the word incredulously upon his understanding. "Nay," he said, after testing it with his own lips, "nay, ah think ye 're wrong this time, Steg." "A pianner, then," Steg hazarded, after staring fixedly for a space with a wrestle going on laboriously behind his eyes. "It's all same thing i' yend." "Nay, nor a pianner naythur," ruled the brewer, refusing the substitute with equal disregard. "Folks dizz n't tek 'armoniums nor pianners about wi' 'em fro' place to place i' that road. It 'll be a concerteeny ye 're thinkin' on, 'appen." "Nay, it weean't," Steg said slowly. "What'll it be, then?" "It 'll be a pianner," he said, carrying the contention relentlessly in his mouth as a dog does a bone, and, seeing that, the brewer did not risk wresting it from him by force. "'Oo says it will?" he inquired, temporising warily after this convincing display of faith. "I do," said Steg, toll-gathering masterfully for himself. "Ay, bud 'oo telt you?" demanded the brewer. "Gyles' lad," said Steg. "An' 'oo telt 'im?" the brewer continued, pursuing the inflexible interrogative path to fundamentals. "Arny." "Arny Dixon?" "Ay, 'e did." "Arny Dixon 'issen?" "Ay, Arny Dixon 'issen. There 's not two of 'em." "Arny Dixon telt Gyles' lad and Gyles' lad telt you, ye say?" "Ay, ah do," said Steg, with a voice that cried for no abatement of its responsibility. The brewer gave one thigh a moment's respite off the hard cask, and after that the other. "Well!" he said, sententiously. "There 'll be time enough an' all, Steg. Them 'at lives longest sees most, they say." "Ay!" Steg assented, with equanimity. A shadow fell across the brewer's yard; an irresolute, halting shadow—the shadow of one with half a mission and two minds. "'Neet, James," greeted the brewer to the yard-end, and the shadow deepened, falling finally over an adjacent beer barrel with a couple of nods and an expectoration. "We 've gotten company up at Gift Yend, then," it said. CHAPTER II Where the roadway splits on the trim, green prow of Hesketh's high garden-hedge, dipping down like the trough of a wave and sliding along the cool, moss-grown wall beneath a tangle of leafy rigging towards the sunlit opens of Cliff Wrangham, Father Mostyn, deep in his own thoughts, came suddenly upon the Spawer, going homeward. He was a tall, lithe figure of young manhood, in snowy holland, with the idle bearing of one whose activity is all in the upper story; eyes brown, steadfast, and kindly, less for the faculty of seeing things than of thinking them; brows lying at ease apart, but with the tiny, tell-tale couple-crease between them for linked tussle—brows that might hitch on to thought with the tenacity of a steel hawser; a jaw fine, firm, and resolute, closing strongly over determination, though void of the vicious set of obstinacy, with a little indulgent, smiling, V-shaped cleft in the chin for a mendicant to take advantage of; lips seemingly consecrate to the sober things of this life, yet showing too a sunny corner for its mirthmakings and laughters beneath the slight slant of moustache—scarcely more tawny than its owner's sun-tanned cheeks where it touched them. Father Mostyn awoke suddenly from his musing to the awareness of a strange presence, encompassing it with the meshes of an inquiring eye. Before the Spawer could extricate his glance from the toils of its inadvertent trespass, the dread "Ha!" had completed his enslavement and brought him up on his heel sideways at the moment of passing. "... A stranger within our gates!" Father Mostyn observed, with courteous surprise, rocking ruminatively to and fro on his legs in the roadway, and dangling the ebony staff in both palms. He drew a comprehensive circle with its ferrule in the blue sky. "You bring glorious weather," he said, contemplating the demarcated area through rapt, narrowed lashes, and sensing its beneficence with the uplifted nostrils of zest. The Spawer unlocked his lips to a frank, boyish smile that lighted up his face in quick response like the throwing open of shutters to the sunlight. Also, just a little emanative twinkle that seemed to suggest previous acquaintance with the Vicar over some Cliff Wrangham rail. "To be truthful," he laughed, "it 's the weather that brings me. One feels it almost a sin, somehow, to let such a sun and sky go unenjoyed. The rain always comes soon enough." "Not till we 've prayed for it," Father Mostyn decided with prompt reassurance, making critical diagnosis of the sky above. "... Prayed for it properly," he hastened to explain. "Indiscriminate Ullbrig exhortation won't do any good—with a sky like that. You can't mistake it. The meteorological conditions point to prolonged set fair." He dismissed the weather with a sudden expulsion of glance, and put on his atmospheric courtesy of manner for personal approaches. "... A pilgrim to the old heathen centre of Ullbrig?" he inquired, diffusing the direct interrogation over the Spawer's holland trousers. "Brig, the Bridge, and Ull, or Uddle, the Idol—the Village of Idols on the Bridge. The bridge and the idols have departed ... the church is partly built of stones from infidel altars ... but the heathen remain. Large numbers of them. Do you come to study our aboriginal habits and superstitions? ... A student of Nature at all?" The Spawer exchanged a happy negative. "Hardly a student," he said, rejecting the title with pleasant demur. "I 'm afraid I can't lay claim to that. A lover, perhaps," he substituted. "That leaves ignorance free scope. Love is not among the learned professions." "Ha!" Father Mostyn commented, considering the reflection, like the scent of a cigar, through critical nostrils. "A lover of Nature; with a leaning towards philosophy. You come far to do your love-making?" "Fairly far—yes. I am fond of the country," the Spawer explained, with simple confession of fact, "and the sea." "We have not much country to offer you hereabouts, I fear," Father Mostyn said, looking deprecatingly round it. "We have land." He leaned interrogatively on the proffered alternative. "If that 's any good to you. A fine, heavy, obstinate clay like the rest of us. We are sweaters of the brow in these parts. We find it an excellent substitute for soap. All our life is given over to the land. We are born on it, brought up on it, buried in it. We worship it. It is the only god we bow to. Notice the back of an Ullbrig man; it is bent with devotion to the soil. We don't bend like that in church. To bend like that in church is idolatry. So we go to chapel and unbend instead, and hold mighty tea-meetings in honor of Jehovah. Notice our eyes too; take stock of them when we give you 'Good day' in the road. There is a peculiar, foxy, narrow-grooved slant in them through incessant following of the furrow. You can't mistake it. You don't need any pretensions to metoposcopy to read our faces. We are of the earth, earthy. When we turn our eyes towards Heaven, we are merely looking for rain. If we turn them up again, we are merely looking for the rain to stop. Our lives are elemental and our pleasures few. To speak ill of one's neighbor, to slander the vicar, to deride the church, to perpetuate heresy, to pasture untruths—spargere voces in vulgum ambiguas—to fly off at a tangent on strong beer—these are among our catalogue of homely recreations. "If you were staying here to study us for any length of time—but I suppose you are the mere sojourner of a day, gone from us again in the cool of the evening with the night-moths and other flitting things?" The Spawer laughed lightly. "Not quite so soon as that," he said. "And you make me glad of it. No; I am pitching my tent in this pleasant wilderness awhile." Father Mostyn opened his roomy eye to the reception of surprise. "Ha! Is it possible? Within measurable distance of us?" "At Cliff Wrangham." "Cliff Wrangham!" The ecclesiastical eyebrows elevated themselves up out of sight under Father Mostyn's cap-rim. "So near and yet so far! Friends?" he added, as the eyebrows came down, casting over the word a delicate interrogative haze. The Spawer cleaved its meaning. "I am making them," he said. "At present I am merely a lodger." "Merely a lodger," Father Mostyn repeated, using the words to nod over, as was his wont. "And Mrs. Dixon, I suppose, is our landlady? Ha! I thought so. She has the monopoly hereabouts. A tower of nonconformity in a district pillared with dissent—but a skilled cook. A cook for an abbot's board. Only describe what a dish smells like and she will come within reasonable approach of its taste on the table. You won't have much fault to find with the meals—I 've tried 'em. Her chicken-pies are a specialty. There 's not a single crumb of vice in the whole crust, and the gravy glues your lips together with goodness. The pity is they are not even Protestant pies, and are impiously partaken of on Fridays and other holy fast days. You need never fear for a dinner. All you have to do is to go out into the yard and point your finger at it. We possess an agreeable knack of spiriting poultry under the crust hereabouts without unnecessary formula. It is inherited. Beef will give you trouble, and mutton; both in the buying and the masticating. We kill once a week. Killing day falls the day after you want steak in a hurry—or has fallen some days before. That is because we sell first and slaughter second. Our Ullbrig butchers leave nothing to chance. They keep a beast ready in the stall, and as soon as the last steak 's sold by allotment, they sign the execution warrant. Not before, unless the beast falls ill. In the matter of fish we are better off. We don't go down to the sea in ships for it—we should come back without it if we did. We get it at Fussitter's. Ready tinned." "Ready tinned!" said the Spawer. "It sounds rather deadly, does n't it? It puts me in mind of inquests, somehow." "Ha!" Father Mostyn made haste to explain. "You must n't buy it out of the window. That 's where the deadliness comes in. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings. Insist on having it from under the counter. Ask for tinned lobster—as supplied to his reverence the vicar...." He wrote out the instructions with his right forefinger upon the left-hand palm. "To be kept in a Cool, Dark Place under the Counter. The crayfish brand. Nothing but the crayfish brand. Ask for the vicar's lobster—they 'll know what you mean—and see that you get it." "Would n't one of Mrs. Dixon's pies come in rather handy there, even on Friday?" the Spawer suggested. "Ha!" said Father Mostyn, with a luminous eye. "I see you realize the danger of them. The sin that comes in handy. That 's it! That we may have strength of grace to turn away from the sin that comes in handy! ... Your tent has been pitched in the wilderness before?" "Many times." Father Mostyn made expressive comment with his eyebrows. "Ha! I thought so. A misanthrope?" he asked, in genial unbelief. "Shunning company for solitude!" "On the contrary, I find solitude excellent company at times." "A literary man?" "No." The Spawer parted pleasantly with the word, unattached to any further token of enlightenment. "A visitor at large, I suppose!" Father Mostyn substituted, holding the conclusion under his nose with the delicate non-insistence of a collecting plate in church. "Here for rest and quiet." The Spawer shook his head. "Again no," he answered. "Rest and quiet are for the wealthy." Then he laughed himself free of further dissimulation. "I will be frank with you," he said. "I am none of these things. I am a poor beggar in the musical line." Father Mostyn's eyebrows arched. "The musical line!" he exclaimed. "The musical line drawn through Ullbrig! Geography upheaved! Mercator confounded! One might just as well expect the equator. And yet ... I felt convinced ... a disciple of art. You can't mistake it. But in Ullbrig. Is it possible?" He wagged the staff in his hands to appreciative wonder, waltzing back and forth over three paces as though he were performing the first steps of a minuet. "A singer?" he said, with a beaming eye of discovery. "Surely.... You have the singer's eyes." "Alas!" said the Spawer. "I have not the singer's voice." The gaze of the Vicar went suddenly thin. "But the eyes!" he said; and then, with a quick readjustment of vision: "At least ... there can be no doubt.... An executant? You play?" The Spawer sighed. "Yes," he admitted, with smiling resignation. "I suppose I play." "The piano, of course?" Father Mostyn conjectured, taking assent for granted. "Ha! ..." His face melted in smiles, like golden butter, to rapt appreciation at the vista of glorious possibilities that the instrument conjured up before him. He lingered over the contemplation down a long-drawn, eloquent "M-m-m-m," gazing out upon the infinite plains of melody with a brightened eye. "You are not relying on our aboriginal stone age pianos, of course," he said, recalling his eye to the actual, with a sudden recollective jerk. The Spawer showed a sunny glint of teeth. "Hardly," he replied. "As soon as the railway people remember where they saw it last, I hope to have one of my own." "One of your own. Ha!" Father Mostyn's eye glistened to enthusiasm again. "I judged so. Beautiful! Beautiful!" The ebony staff shook to internal humor at a thought. "Fancy Mozart on an Ullbrig piano! ... or Bach! ... or Beethoven! ..." He wagged the unspeakable with his head. "I 'm afraid you won't find any music hereabouts." "Thank Heaven!" the Spawer breathed devoutly. "I was afraid perhaps I might!" "Ha!" Father Mostyn caught quickly at the inference and translated it. "I see; I see. A musical monastic! Coming into retreat at Cliff Wrangham to subject his soul to a course of artistic purification and strengthening!" The Spawer accepted the illustration with a modest laugh. "Well, yes," he said. "I suppose that 's it—only it 's rather more beautiful in idea than in actuality. I should have said myself, perhaps, that I 'd come into the country to be able to work in shirt-sleeves and loosened braces, and go about unshaved, in baggy-kneed trousers, without fear of friends. I 'm half a monastic and half refugee. In towns so many of us are making music that one never gets a chance to hear or think one's own; one's ears are full of other people's. So I 've run away with my own little musical bone to a quiet place, where I can tackle it all to myself and growl over the business to my heart's content without any temptation to drop it for unsubstantial shadows. Instead of having to work in a stuffy room, with all the doors and windows closed and somebody knocking at you on the next house wall, I have the sea, the cliff, the sands ... and the whole sky above me for my workshop. It will take me all my time to fill it. If a melody comes my way, I can hum it into shape without causing unpleasant remarks. Nobody ever hears me, for one thing; and for another, they would n't bother to listen if they did." Father Mostyn's glance flickered imperceptibly for a moment, and then burned with an exceeding steady light. "I can orchestrate aloud in the open air, singing flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, ophicleide ... tympani ... just whatever I please, without any risk of an official tap on the shoulder. In a word, I can be myself ... and it 's a treat to be oneself for a while. One gets tired of being somebody else so long, and having to go about in fear of the great Unwritten." "We have our great Unwritten here too," Father Mostyn told him. "I doubt if any of us could write it if we tried. Ullbrig is weak in its caligraphy. We do most of our writing in chalk. It suits our style better. The pen has an awkward habit of impaling the paper, we find, and carrying it back to the ink-pot." "Don't teach me anything of Ullbrig's great Unwritten," the Spawer put in quickly. "Let me violate it with an easy conscience." "By all means," Father Mostyn invited him genially. "It will be a chastening mortification to our pride. We are swollen with local pride—distended with the flatulence of dissent. A little pricking will do us no harm. I should have thought, though," Father Mostyn went on, "that you would have sought to feed your muse on richer fare than turnip-fields. I imagined that mountains and valleys, with castles looking over lakes and waterfalls by moonlight, were more the sort of stuff for stimulating a musician's fancy. Is it possible there can be music lying latent in our Ullbrig soil?" The Spawer smiled a sympathetic appreciation of his perplexity. "I think there may be," he told him. "Anyhow, I have come to make the experiment, and I 'm very well satisfied with it so far." "Heaven be with you," Father Mostyn prayed with fervor. "It passes the mind of man to imagine the conversion of friend Joseph Tankard into a symphony, or friend Sheppardman Stevens as a figure in a sonata. You have your labor." "I am not dismayed," the Spawer laughed, with light-hearted confidence. "And you are staying here for any length of time—a month, at least, to start with? ... I would suggest three, if you wish to study the district." "It might very well be three before I leave; certainly not less than a month." "Excellent! Your soul is my cure while you stay. It will be my duty as parish priest to pay you parochial visits. I hope, too, that it will be my privilege to receive your full musical confession. And as soon as ever you grow tired of the company of solitude up at the Cliff End, just drop down to Ullbrig and try me for an antidote, any time you happen to be passing. If you 're tired, or want something to drink, don't hesitate to make use of the parish priest. That 's what he 's for. Just call in at the Vicarage as you would at the Ullbrig Arms; you 'll find the attention as good, and the welcome greater. After eight o'clock you can be almost sure of catching me ... without there be sick calls. A pain in the umbilical vicinity is an excellent worker for the Church. Unfortunately, it passes off too soon, and then we are apt to forget that we called the vicar out of bed in a hurry one morning...." The first stroke of three fell across his words from the church tower round the corner, and on the instant his genial eye was wreathed in priestly mysticism as with the spirals of incense. The mantle of a mighty mission descended upon him, and he gathered its folds in dignity about his being. "Ha!" he said, grasping his staff for departure, and verifying the time from a handsome gold chronometer, "... I must leave you. They 're waiting.... Priestly duties...." He did not specify who were waiting or what the priestly duties were, but exhaled the spirit of leave-taking in an ineffable smile without words, and vanished round Hesketh's corner—a vague, ecclesiastical vapor. A few moments later, by the time his Reverence could have comfortably reached the belfry, the creaking of a bell-rope overtook the Spawer on his way homeward, and the tongue of the stagnant hour-teller roused itself once more in public reproof of schism. A mile and a half of roadway lies between Ullbrig and Cliff Wrangham. As near as may be it stretches straight to the halfway house, like a yard of yellow ribbon measured against the rod. From there the rest of it rolls away to the Cliff End in sweeping fold of disengaged material and the gateways set in. There are four of these, with a music all their own as they clash behind you, wagging their loose, worn, wooden tongues, that sometimes catch and are still with one short note, and sometimes reiterate themselves slowingly to sleep upon the gate-post behind you as you go. The first lets you by Stamway's long one-story farm-house, before Stamway's three front windows, hermetically sealed, each darkened with a fuchsia and backed with white curtains drawn as tight as a drumhead, and Stamway's front door, an arm's length behind the wooden palisading, that Stamway has never gone in or come out by since he happened through with some of the parlor furniture thirty years ago—our front door, as Father Mostyn himself tells us, being no better than the church door for all the use we make of it. Beyond Stamway's third window is Stamway's big semi-circular duck-pond, where Barclay of Far Wrangham suffered shipwreck one night in November, being found water-logged up to his knees, and crying aloud (as it is attested): "Lord 'ev mercy on me an' gie me strength ti keep my legs while tide gans down." Adding when rescued: "Ah nivver knowed sea so 'igh i' all my days, nor rise so sudden. She mun 'a done a deal o' damage, Stamway. If ah 'ad n't been strongish o' my feet, like, ah sewd 'a been swep away, for sure." "Nay," Stamway told him bluntly, who does not hold with dissipations in any shape or form, being a strict Good Templar himself, and never known the worse for liquor more than six times in the year. "It 's Red Sea i'side of ye, ah think, 'at 's most to blame. It 's drowned a deal o' Phaarahs in its time. Gan yer ways 'ome wi' ye, an' div n't say nowt about matter ti onnybody. They 'll know very well wi'oot." The second gate gives you your first foot on Dixon's land. The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horseshoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze red tiles, two stories high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stackgarth till they touch its high nettles. If you are approaching it with heelless boots and an apologetic tread, beware of the dog. The door opens under the low scullery roof, with the sink to your right hand as you go in, where the whole family takes turns at the papier-machÉ basin before tea. To the left of the scullery lies the kitchen. You go in as you go in at Stamway's: scrape your boots over a spade, knock both heels alternately against the outer wall, skate inwards over two mats, and give a twist sideways, watching the kitchen floor anxiously the while to see whether the mats have done their work or will betray you. The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little unclassified garden; the second comes on the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, fading all the flowers on the figured print blind drawn down against his intrusion. It is one of six that look out upon the little green lawn of ragged grass, where invisible hens are desperately busy under its long blades all day long, and chase the moths with vehement beaks above the tangle at even. A rude rail fence bounds it in front, that gives way at times when you dangle both legs on it, and tints your trousers with a rich, powdery, green bloom where it darkens under the trees by the orchard corner. Beyond this, dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction to right and left, go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green confines, and Barclay's farm shimmering on the distant cliff hill against the sky-line; and the dim Garthston windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and buttercupped pasture, with the cry of cattle and the chorus of birds, and the hum of wings and the fiddling of hidden grasshoppers; and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, lipping the lonely shore, and the basin of blue sky above, with a burning round sun for trade mark; and the stirring of lazy leaves, the cluck of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs, outstretched on the pungent straw and intoxicated with content, the solaceful shutting of unseen gates, and all the thousand things and doings, and sounds and sights and scents that lie expressed in the words Cliff Wrangham and Dixon's by the sea. And here the Spawer came in the early days of July, big with musical enthusiasm and the themes for his second concerto. They made the two end windows over to him, adjoining the orchard; the best sitting-room—that is not even used by the family on Sundays—with the best bedroom above; and he was very happy indeed. The diminutive front door, all out of plumb under its three drunken panes of different colored glass, and buried a yard deep behind its porch of flowering tea, cut him off figuratively from the rest of the house; and the little staircase, starting straight upward for the square yard of bedroom landing from the sunk mat, cut him off in effect. Its tread is so steep and so unwonted that it put him in mind of augmented seconds whenever he went up or down, and the first step gives the door so little turning space that you have to mount your foot upon it and twist round, with the sneck in your stomach, to get into the Spawer's room. A little faded, old-world, out-of-the-world room, like a faint last century sigh, dear to the Spawer's heart on the first day; doubly dear on the second. The dearest little room in all the world, perhaps, before the third. Even the irresistible tide of modernity flowing into it through the Spawer's possessions settled down in clear, hushed pools, as though the turbulent current of Time had found rest here at last and was still. In its nostrils the sweetest breath of decay; the pleasant, musty incense of crumbling mortar and horse-hair, and curtains heavy in their folds with the record of departed harvests; of air kept piously secluded under lock and key, through a sacred life of Sundays, and never disturbed in its religious brooding by any thoughtless gusts of worldly wind. On its walls a choir of pink roses, seeking the ceiling in prim devotion—such a paper as you shall no longer find at any shop in these days of Lincrusta and Tynecastle and Anaglypta and Japanese leathers, though you pile gold on the counter in pyramids and exhort the covetous glint in the salesman's eye through tears. From the hook in the center of the ceiling hangs the big brass duplex lamp, beneath which the Spawer bends his head by the hour together, orchestrating his concerto over a busy Jacob's ladder of full score; or, in more material mood, where he draws up his chair to Mrs. Dixon's immortal productions in pastry, with the little brass bell to his right hand, that gives forth a faint, far, meadow-tinkle when he swings it. Whereupon the twins, who have been waiting for the sound of it all the time, under orders, barely a nose-width out of sight round the corner, take up its expiring message with a business-like scuffle of boots and run loudly to the kitchen in double harness, shouting as they go: "Mek 'aste wi' ye an' all. Bell 's gone." By the left wall, abacking the staircase, the two-headed horse-hair sofa, consecrate to Dixon, beneath the framed print of the Ponte dei Sospiri and the twin china shepherds staring hard at the mantelpiece off their Swiss brackets; where Dixon fills his pipe at night when the Spawer's work is over, and puts a cheery retainer on the conversation with his familiar: "Noo then ... ah 'll tell ye." And tells him in a confidential whisper, after a look at the door: "They say Lunnon 's a rum place!" Or, "Ah 've 'eard tell o' some queer goings on i' towns!" Or, "Ye 'll 'a seed a deal o' strange sights i' France, ah 's think!" And goes to bed slapping his knees and saying: "Well, ah don't know!" till Mrs. Dixon tells him, "Now, you 've been talking your nonsense again," knowing well the tokens. And for the rest, dispersed indiscriminately about the room, there are Daudet's "Jack"; Tolstoi's "Sonate À Kreutzer"; half a dozen old leather-bound volumes of MoliÈre, opening of themselves at "Le Bourgeois," "Le Malade," or "L'Avare"; Turgenieff twice over in French yellow; Swinburne's "Songs before Sunrise"; a litter of Brahms in his granite Simrock livery; of Grieg in pale pink Peters; of red brick Chopin; of BÜlow's Beethoven; of Tschaikowsky; of Rachmaninov; of Glazounow; of Balakirev—of Young Russia, in a word; of Hans Huber; of Smetana; of Dvorak; of loose MSS. and blank music paper—all strewing the chairs and sofa and table in ideal confusion, so that before the Spawer may sit down on one seat he must mortgage another. A letter-weight bust of Chopin on the round antimacassared table by the window; by its side a signed Paderewski; on the mantelpiece the genial Bohemian 'cellist, piercing the soul of the little room with his glowing eyes from under the well-known silvery nimbus, and apostrophising his "dear young friend," Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, in neatest English through copper-plate German characters; Sarasate on the sideboard by the big cupboard undermining the staircase, where the Spawer's table-bass goes off in heat apoplexy, a bottle a day. Elsewhere of literary features a few; of singers, of artists, of actors even. Lastly, after an octave of days, comes the piano too, and takes up the far angle by the window corner, its treble truss touching the steel fender, its bass abutting the sill. And the Spawer sets to work in earnest. Not the Spawer of hitherto. No longer the smooth-browed son of leisure, with laughter held lazily captive in the meshes of his moustache and an unencumbered eye for the clear draughts of gladness, but a purposeful demon with conspiring brows and deadly-looking hands clawing the keys with a sinuous throttle in each finger, that draw forth a pencil murderously from time to time, like a stiletto, to stab thought upon the paper with the unpleasant despatch of assassination. A pause for the day's dip and dinner, and on again; and a pause for a stroll and tea, and on again; and supper and a chat with Dixon, and on again. Till Dixon slaps his thigh when he comes back from anywhere and hears it all in full progression, and asks: "What! Is 'e still agate [on the go]?" Pushing his hat from his brow to reply: "Mah wod! It 's a caution, yon!" For a second octave of days. And then a strange happening, to check the buoyant current of the Spawer's activity. Very late one night the shadow of his head lingered upon the figured print blind, drawn loosely down over the wide-opened window, and the piano poured its unceasing treasury into night's immeasurable coffers. Already, in the long musical decade since Dixon's departure, he had risen to readjust the smouldering wicks, and gone back to a new lease of light at the keyboard. The light was failing for the second time as his fingers, slowing dreamily, sought the final shelter of Chopin. By many winding ways they came at length to the hushed haven of the seventeenth prelude, with the muffled A-flat bell booming its solemn death-message over the waters, and the little tear-laden boat of melody cradling its grief to silence on the ripples below. The bell tolled no more; the little boat lay tremulous upon the echoes, and in the lingering stillness that followed, before yet the player's fingers had dared to break that sacred communion with the keys, fell all abruptly a sudden human sob. A sudden human sob out of the darkness beyond the blind. So near and real and necessitous that the Spawer's elbows kicked backward from the keys, and the pedals went off like triggers under his feet as he spun round to the window. And yet, so far, so remote in probability, that even while he turned, he found far easier to account for it as some acute, psychical manifestation of his own emotions, rather than the expression of any agency from without. Through faith in this feeling, and no fear of it, he flung up the blind abruptly, and thrust forth his head with a peremptory "Who's there?" Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough. Came, as the Spawer listened, the slow, muffled thud-thud of some horse's hoofs on the turf, as it plodded in patient change of pasture, and the deep blowing of kine along the hedge-bottoms. But these, with the soft sound of the sea, spreading its countless fans of effervescing surf upon the sandy shore, were the only answer to his challenge. He threw it out again, with the mere indolent amusement of casting pebbles into a pool, and swung one leg over the sill. Night allured him with all her mystic altar lights. He was of a mind to sit there and fling open his soul like a lattice to her seductive minstrelsy; drain deep draughts of celestial gladness from the overflowing tankard of stars. In the dead black porch of flowering tea, with one pale planetary flame shining through its tabernacled branches, no stir. No stir in the square black rug of long grass, softened in its centre to grey silver-point. No stir in the massed shadow of trees, uprising rigid like dim marine growths in a dense ocean of azure. "Well?" he asked of the stillness, swinging his leg with a complacent tattoo of heel against the brickwork, and smiling indulgence at his own little extension in folly. "For the last time! One ... two ... three. Or must I fire?" The stars twinkled him in irresistible summons to the sea. Even the sea itself raised its supplicative song a little louder, he thought, as he listened, and called "Come!" The night was too full of blessings to be suffocated untimely beneath the blankets; all his senses were making outcry for its bounty, and the soul of him hearkened. Just one stroll to the edge of the water and back before bed. It was no new thing for him to do. He reached his hat from its insecure slant upon the pile of music topping the piano, and clasped the sill with both hands for descent. As he did so, in the still pause presaging the act, he heard the frenetic tugging of someone at the sticky orchard gate, that takes six pulls to open and three and a kick to close, ever since Jabe Stevens painted it drab, with black latch pickings. He heard the quick repeated pant of the pulls; felt in a flash the desperate occasion that was urging them; felt the very prayers surging about him on their way from a soul in turbulent tussle against destiny, and next moment was down on his feet before the window with a clear, arrestive "Hello!" The click of the liberated latch; garments in swift full stir; a prolonged rending, like the descent of some four-octave chromatic, and a sudden breath-held, death-like stillness fell upon his landing. For a moment he could elucidate nothing by the look. Sight was sealed up in yellow lamplight. Two steps forward and the bondage was burst. He made out the line of flat wood stakes bounding the orchard to its half width, whence rough green rails complete the demarcation; and the gate, thrown three quarters open; and by it, the dim, motionless figure of a girl. |
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