Israel Zangwill

If Jinny had much to tell her grandfather over the rabbit stew, he in his turn had no lack of material for excited conversation. Both were exhilarated, rejuvenated by the metamorphosis of their landscape; it seemed, more pungently even than snow, to re-create the wonder of the world. It was a gay young grandfather that rattled off the farces and tragedies of the day’s drama: a sodden haystack hurled into the Brad, a cart of mangolds overturned in a watery field, a bullock swimming for dear life and landing safely on a mound where stampeded horses cowered; dead ewes floating—and just in the lambing season too!—men in boats rescuing pigs and poultry from the grounds of water-logged cottages, and hauling clothes and bedding through the windows.

“There’s hundreds o’ Farmer Gale’s acres drowned what was cropped with seed,” he said with gloomy relish, “and regiments o’ rats ha’ saved theirselves atop of his stacks. When they’ve goffled their fill they wentures down for a drink, the warmints, and then up again. Same as ’twixt the devil and the deep sea for they onfortunit stacks.”

That night a white mist rising from the waters blotted out everything, but the next morning, when Jinny went up to induce her grandfather to descend to breakfast, she found to her surprise and relief that though the Brad was still hurling itself through the breach, the bulk of Long Bradmarsh was still unflooded, still alive with salvage parties. The low arms of the marsh-mills were still working with frantic efficiency. What miracle had saved this village? Her grandfather explained that there must still be some righteous men there. But Jinny, looking through his glass for herself, discovered—after a preliminary peep at the Frog Farm chimney, whose smokelessness was a fresh relief—that the breach-water instead of flowing evenly over Long Bradmarsh had half found, half scooped out for itself, a sort of river-bed. Turning aside before a slight rise, it had veered round sharply eastward, and then curving back westward, when it met another obstacle three hundred yards later, it had finally poured itself over the dyke back into the Brad.

“That’s a mercy,” she said, expounding it.

“But now there’s a chance of both they rivers flowin’ over,” he pointed out hopefully.

But as she gazed, she grew aware of a new phenomenon.

“Why, the Brad’s going backwards!” she said.

He snatched the glass from her hand. “So it be!” he agreed. “But that’s onny where the little river busts in agen the wrong way and pours along the top o’ the real river.”

Jinny was thrilling all down her spine. Again the sibylline prophecy of Miss Gentry rang in her ears:

When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,

Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,

And Jinny shall then learn Passion’s force.

Overwhelmed by the uncanny divination of the dressmaker—a “wise woman” in good sooth it now appeared—she sank into a chair, her whole being aquiver with a premonition that she had reached the crucial point of her destiny. Who was it coming on a horse? Who but Will, that incarnation of equestrian grace? He was coming to rescue her, the dear silly, imagining her menaced by the flood. As if she had not got Methusalem! As if Blackwater Hall was not an Ararat! But his foolishness was part of the Fate—might he not even ride his horse through the doorway, lying along its back to avoid the lintel, and thus be practically “on his hands and knees”? In her grandfather’s present happy mood, the old man might very well accept that solution. And Will himself would be “carried in,” and might equally accept the compromise. Absorbed in her sophistic day-dream, she sat there till even the old man at his tube remembered breakfast. Nor did she again volunteer to help in the fields. All day she stayed at home over her Monday housework and wash-tub, awaiting the horseman, afraid to stir out.

And with equal patience her grandfather sat at his all-day show. Engineers and gesticulating figures appeared on the broken bank for his delectation, and a mile or so lower down labourers began to shovel gault (culch, he called it to Jinny), and lighters laden with it tried to sink themselves in the breach, but some were swirled away like bandboxes and others turned turtle—a comical sight that made him roar with laughter. At last exciting operations with ropes, stretched across the river, succeeded in keeping some in place. After that a big-sailed barge came to the rescue—he could even recognize the two punters with long poles who eked out the sail. Ravens’ grandson, that ne’er-do-well, and Ephraim Bidlake, whose grandfather’s barge used to “competition wuss than coaches,” he told Jinny. They had brought a cargo of the blue-grey stuff—hundreds of sacks—and “dinged” it into the breach, wellnigh clogging it up. And then—oh side-splitting drollery!—the dyke had gone and “busted” in another weak place—near the bridge. And they were left “like dickies” with empty sacks, while the folk in the new-swamped fields went scurrying like rats.

So continuous were her grandfather’s shouts of glee that Jinny ceased to attend to them, and would not come up to see even the new gap. She was the more amazed when at supper he talked of having seen “’Lijah Skindle” fishing from the window of Frog Farm. “Oi called ye to come and see,” he said reproachfully when she expressed incredulity. “He got his line danglin’ from a broomstick!”

The sight of Miss Gentry astride a broomstick seemed far likelier to Jinny. In the first place, no window of the farmhouse was visible from theirs; in the second, how could Elijah Skindle be living there?

“What would Mr. Skindle be doing at Frog Farm?” she said.

“So long as he ain’t taken Annie there!” he answered. “Oi shouldn’t wonder ef the whole place comes tumblin’ down like they fir-trees. For the more Oi set thinkin’ on it, the more Oi see as it’s to punish that competitioning pirate that the flood’s been sent.”

“Don’t talk like that, Gran’fer. I expect you’ve been dozing.”

“Oi tell you Oi seen him and his broomstick,” he cried angrily. “And when he couldn’t catch nawthen, he tied his han’kercher on it and signalled with it, too.”

She did remember now that Elijah and Will had become thicker than their respective relations to Blanche seemed to warrant, and she had shrewdly divined that Will wanted to flaunt his indifference to his rejection, and Elijah to pose as the magnanimous conqueror. It was not impossible, therefore, that the horse-doctor, summoned to Snowdrop or Cherry-blossom on the Saturday afternoon, had been caught by the torrential rain and the gale and persuaded to stay the night in that spare bedroom once occupied by Mr. Flippance. But more probably it was only another of the old man’s illusions. “Why, there wasn’t even any smoke from the chimney,” she reminded him.

“Mebbe there was too much water in it,” he chuckled.

Jinny’s blood ran cold, but not on account of the Flynts. She was still too obsessed with the vision of Will arriving on a horse to imagine him or his parents immured by the waters. No, the feeling that stole over her was that Elijah Skindle was not living at the farm, but that while the occupants had evacuated it, he had been drowned outside it—swept away with his trap—and that her grandfather had seen yet another ghost.

“If anybody was signalling,” she pointed out, “the engineers and the wherrymen would have seen him.”

“They can’t see through a brick wall,” he retorted crushingly. “Frog Farm ain’t got no eyes on the Brad. Depend on’t, ’tis the Lord’s finger.”

She was still incredulous. But the moment supper was over, she ran up to examine the farmhouse afresh. The wind had “sobbed down”; the sky was sprinkled with stars, seen through frequent rifts in the clouds; and the moon, though only a crescent, emerging through a cloud-rack, shed a silver radiance over the watery waste, and cast over it black rippling bands of shadow from the bare elms and poplars rising from it in such unearthly beauty. And there in the region of Frog Farm, perceptible even to the naked eye, a mysterious reddish-yellow light, like some new star, threw its far-reaching beams upon the softened flood. A closer examination revealed that some of the trees of the fir-copse had been sapped and now lay heaving gently—the old man, she remembered, had alluded to fallen firs—and that the ruddy rays came from a farm bedroom, no longer shut out by the foliage. The smoke, too, was rising again. It was clear that the house was not uninhabited, and that her grandfather might very well have seen Elijah Skindle, while the absence of smoke all day might be traceable to the inability of the occupants to get a light earlier from sodden matches.

“But if they are starving and signalling,” she cried agitatedly, “we must tell people. We must send a boat.”

“We can’t get no boat,” he said philosophically.

“But you’ve seen plenty of boats,” she urged. “I saw two myself rowing over the five-acre field. And there’s that fowling-punt on the bank.”

“That! Oi seen that fleetin’ bottom up! Ye can’t goo out to-night. Ye’d be drownded. Why, look there! That’s a dead cow from the Farm meadow!”

“Where? I can’t see anything.”

“There! Bobbin’ near the copse.” He pointed and snatched the glass from her. “Why, that’s a hoss,” he shouted exultantly, “a black hoss! That should be Snowdrop, ef it ain’t Cherry-blossom!” He was on his feet now, quivering with excitement, his blanket falling from his shoulders.

“Why, how can you be sure in this light?” she said, trembling no less. “It may be a brown horse, or even a plough-horse.”

“That’s a black coach-hoss sure enough, black as his heart, the pirate thief. What did Oi tell ye? ‘Wengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Oi will repay.’” He looked so solemn in the moonlight, with his white beard, and his white-sleeved arm pointing starward, that she almost felt his standpoint had a prophetic justification. But she shook off the spell.

“Sit down, Gran’fer,” she pleaded, readjusting his blanket. “Mr. Flynt was in his right.”

“Ef he was in his right, why has the Lord drownded his hoss?” he demanded fiercely. “Do ye set down, yerself.” And he clutched her wrist with his bony hand.

“Let me go!” she cried. “There’s Mr. Skindle to be saved too.”

“There ain’t no danger for them—’tis your boat what ’ud come into colloosion with trees and cattle and fences and—why, just look at that!”

He dropped her hand to scrutinize the strange object awash. “Hallelujah!” he cried hysterically. “That’s the top o’ the coach! Dedn’t Oi say ’twas a funeral coach?”

She shivered, and a cloud, coming just then over the moon, seemed to eclipse her resolution to rouse the neighbours. The sudden pall of darkness made the old man clutch her again—his own evocation of the funeral coach had frightened him. “Oi won’t be left alone by night,” he quavered and wiped a watery eye. Jinny refused to take it as pathos. “You’ll blind yourself with that telescope,” she said sternly. But inwardly she felt he was not so wrong. In that dim fitful light there was more danger to the would-be rescuers than to the party so snugly gathered round some bedroom hearth in Frog Farm. That ruddy lamplight, still brighter by the extinction of the moon, beamed reassuringly over the waters. Skindle’s broomstick-rod might have represented merely an effort to break the monotony of imprisonment—it was no proof that they had been cut off from their larder. And with the waters now calmer, the house that had stood the gale was not likely to subside in the night. No, they were probably safer where they were than if “rescued.” She must wait till the morning.

A loud thumping at the kitchen-door shattered her speculations. Jinny’s heart beat almost as loudly. So the horseman had come at last, unheard in their excitement, choosing the back door as less of a surrender. Will had escaped then. He was not water-logged. She flew down the stairs three at a time. Poor Will! Poor Snowdrop—or was it Snowdrop that was saved and was now bearing his master to the heart that would give him compensation for all his shattered fortunes? Alas, no proud cavalier waited to bear her off clasped to his breast, no smoking steed—only a tatterdemalion before whose malodorous corduroys and battered beaver she recoiled in as much disgust as disappointment, though Uncle Lilliwhyte bore in his grimy claws a plump partridge, for which he demanded only twopence.

“But the season’s over,” she murmured.

“That’s onny the tother day and ’twarnt me as killed it,” he said. “The Lord don’t seem to care about they game laws; He killed even on Sunday.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Jinny rebuked him. “We can’t understand His ways.”

“They do seem wunnerful odd,” admitted the nondescript. “Ever since Oi was a brat Oi’ve tried to puzzle ’em out, but it git over me. Same as a man now perished in this here flood, and went straight to hell. Wouldn’t that be a cur’ous change for the chap—like the Lord larkin’ with him!”

“Perhaps there’ll be a flood that will put out hell one day,” said Jinny evasively.

“Martha Flynt should be sayin’ there ain’t no hell to put out. That looks as if ye’ve got to goo to Heaven, do what ye will.”

“Oh, I don’t think she means that,” said Jinny, smiling despite her heavy heart.

“That’s what the humes sounded like as her and the looker used to sing of a Sunday afore Master Will come home and stopped ’em. Oi used to listen to ’em chance times—put me in mind of my young days like—but Oi don’t howd with their doctrines.”

“With whose then?” asked Jinny, interested.

“With nobody’s. Dedn’t Oi say, git over me? Ef the Lord was to offer me Heaven or Hell, which d’ye think Oi’d choose?”

“Is there a catch in it?” she asked cautiously.

“We’ve got to be catched in one or the tother,” he said, misunderstanding. “But Oi mislikes ’em both. Will you be buyin’ the bird?”

As Jinny produced two of her only three pennies, she began to realize for the first time the revolution in her fortunes implicit in the destruction of the coach. But her heart was aching too poignantly for any joy of victory. She could not savour, as her grandfather was savouring, the miraculous collapse of the competition. Victory or defeat—heaven or hell—she thought ruefully, she misliked them both. She was consumed with yearning, anxiety and compassion for the young rival who had failed to “come on a horse,” who had perhaps no longer even a single horse to come on. Nor did the fate of Snowdrop or Cherry-blossom—that superb vitality turned into a floating carcase—leave her jubilant. In the morning, indeed, she was to awake to a sense of her triumph. But what endless hours of insomnia and nightmare had first to be lived through! Again Queen Victoria, who was also quite intelligibly Miss Jinny Boldero, was saved by “The Father of the Fatherless” from the gins and stratagems of the red-haired villain who cut away London Bridge just as Her Majesty was going over it in her gold coronation coach with its six black ponies and its canvas tilt. Struggling in the cold waters, she was held up by Henry Brougham, Esq., who helped her to scramble athwart the naked carcase of a black pony on which she floated to shore, when it stood upon its feet, and with Queen Jinny astride the saddle and Miss Gentry (in bridal attire) not at all surprisingly on the pillion, galloped towards Blackwater Hall across the dry Common where anglers sat with broomsticks. And while she was lying along the pony’s mane to get through the door to the red-haired young man (now become the hero), just as she was beginning to feel Passion’s force, that stupid Miss Gentry came crack with her neck against the lintel, and off rolled her head on the floor, its moustache dabbled in blood. Picking herself up, and her scattered bedclothes, and rubbing her bruised crown, Jinny congratulated herself on sleeping in a chest of drawers in such proximity to the floor.

But the bang, slight as it was, had cleared away the vapours of sleep and she awoke to a consciousness of victory brimming her veins with vital joy. Song, so long strange to her lips, unless simulated to lull Gran’fer, came back to them as she dressed, and when she prayed “Give us this day our daily bread,” it was no longer an almost despairing cry to a deaf heaven.

Running upstairs to see if Frog Farm was safe, she was relieved to find it smoking imperturbably, though up to its bedrooms in water, and a glimpse of Caleb at the casement serenely lowering a bucket into the flood was still more reassuring. But she was thunderstruck when her grandfather gleefully pointed out that the bridge to Long Bradmarsh had broken down, almost as in her dream, and she half looked round for the coronation coach. Doubtless, she felt, surveying the broken bankside arch, which lay in uncouth masses impeding the current and sending it swirling through the still-standing central arch, the breach hard by in the dyke had helped to sap the bridge, and she was glad to see this breach being already repaired by her friends, Bidlake and Ravens, with a gang of labourers, for they were clearly heaven-sent minions for the expedition to Frog Farm.

But if she sang on as she cleared the breakfast things, her grandfather was in still higher feather. Not only had the morning brought to him as to Jinny a keener realization of the collapse of their mushroom rival, but he had discovered floating near the bridge a black horse which he persisted was the second horse, and though Jinny maintained it was the same horse, the old man had more faith in heaven. So occupied was he in gloating over this distant horse swirling against the ruined brickwork, with its stiffened leg pointing skywards, that he had not seen Methusalem harnessing under his nose, and it was not till Nip started his hysteric prelude to departure that Mr. Quarles was aroused to Jinny’s proceedings.

“Ye can’t goo out in the flood,” he called down in alarm.

“It’s Tuesday,” she called up. The blood was dancing gaily in her veins. The frosty morning air was fresh and invigorating. She was young and unconquered. The long anxiety was over. Methusalem had survived the coach, even as he had survived the murderous wiles of Elijah! She put her horn to her lips and blew a challenge to the world.

“But there bain’t no bridge,” cried her grandfather.

“Daniel Quarles hasn’t been downed by a coach,” she said, “and he isn’t going to be downed by a flood.”

“No, by God, he ain’t!” cried the old Carrier delightedly. “Oi’ll goo round miles by the next bridge sooner than miss my day. And they false customers’ll ha’ to come to me on their hands and knees ere Oi takes ’em back. Goo to the coach, ye warmints, Oi’m done wi’ ye! And Oi wish ye joy of your fine black hosses all a-jinglin’ and a-tinklin’. He, he, he! Make muddles, do Oi? Oi never made no muddle like that, stablin’ my hosses with the frogs. Do ye give a squint at that carcase, Jinny, as ye pass by and ye’ll see it ain’t the one but the tother.”

“And do ye don’t squint into that spy-glass no more,” she called up in merry earnest. “Do, ye’ll get a glass eye.”

He laughed. “No fear. Have they writ ye yet about Sidrach’s stone?”

Annoyed with herself at having called up that memory, she feigned deafness. “You’ll find partridge for your dinner,” she called out, and flicking playfully at Methusalem she burst forth joyously: “There is Hey——”

“There is Ree!” responded the sepulchral bass from above, and then as the old horse stepped out, both voices declared in duet that ’twas Methusalem bore the bells away. Jinny, waving her whip with a last backward glance at her grandfather, saw him wildly agitating his telescope, to which his coloured handkerchief was tied like a flag of victory.