Israel Zangwill

Anyhow there was no need to follow the glaring high road any longer. On the left he could see the clump of Steeples Wood, and he knew that once he had cut through that, he could find the swift field-path through Hoppits that would save miles of the high road and not bring him out on it till the Silverlane Pump. He strolled with a sense of relief towards the wood, but hardly had its green groves closed refreshingly upon him when, reminding himself he was a trespasser, he quickened his pace again, and hurried through the oak plantations and over the wonderful carpet of bluebells with but a slight eye to the sylvan beauty.

Even when he reached the field-path bounded by the ditch and the dog-rose hedge, he did not relax his speed, having bethought himself that the poor horse would surely be given drink at the trough of the Silverlane Pump, and that there would probably be a delay at “The Silverlane Arms,” even if he should not have succeeded in heading the Carrier off altogether. And from that point she would surely need his protection, so lonely was the road till you sighted Long Bradmarsh with the drainage windmills and the bridge. And the no less necessary sermon could be combined with the protection.

He found the wheel of the village pump chained up. Evidently the water was running scarce. It looked not unlike a gibbet, this tall pump, and he could imagine a criminal dangling from the spout. There was little water in the trough, and the water-butt of the inn was almost equally dry; a wayside mudhole haunted by geese represented a pool. He remembered these arid villages in such strange juxtaposition with his own oozy birthplace—was it here or at Kelcott that he had made a boyish fortune, bringing water at a halfpenny a pint? His mother, he recalled with a faint smile, had been against the business because Jesus had said to the woman of Samaria “Give me to drink,” though he had trumped her text with the injunction to the Israelites: “Ye shall also buy water of them for money.” It all made him super-conscious of thirst, and he went into the inn, and ordering a pint of ale, inquired if the Carrier had passed by.

“Which way be you a-gooin’?” said the tapster. It irritated him to be questioned, and he replied tartly that he was going home. He gulped down his liquor and put his question to a group of children playing around the pump. They scratched their heads and gaped at him, and the youngest put shy, chubby hands to its smeary face. “The white horse and the girl!” he explained, and the shy child started screaming, and a woman burst from a cottage door and dragged it within, glaring suspiciously at the “furriner.”

A labourer riding a plough-horse barebacked, and leading another, came from the Bradmarsh direction. “Has the Carrier passed you?” he asked.

“D’ye want a lift?” was the reply.

He lost his temper. “Haven’t you got enough business o’ your own?”

“Not much,” said the labourer naÏvely. “Ground be as ’ard as the road. Curous, baint it, arter all that soakin’.”

He replied more civilly, glad his rudeness was misunderstood. “Yes, it’s always either too little or too much.”

“And ye can’t sow unless ’tis none-or-both,” added the philosophic ploughman, plodding on. “Gimme a followin’ toime!”

The rustic meant a season in which rain and sunshine came in rapid alternation, but Will ruefully reflected that the “followin’ toime,” in the sense he was having it, was far from satisfactory.

But at that moment there was a cheerful bark, and that inconsistent dog was curveting around him, its tall thumping wildly against his trousers in an ecstasy of recognition. So he was too late, he thought with a strange heart-sinking; knowing its rearguard habit. He pushed it away with his foot. If the beast thought he was going to carry it again, it was jolly well mistaken. No more cart-chasing for him. His “following time” was over. And as the creature persisted in gambolling round his legs, he made a swish in the air with his stick to drive it on its way, and it uttered a fearsome yell; it being part of Nip’s slyness to cry before he was hurt. But for once Nip was not a laggard, but an advance courier, and Fate brought Methusalem round the corner at the exact instant of his yell.

“How dare you strike my dog?” It was an inauspicious reunion. Jinny had checked Methusalem, and her grey eyes were blazing down from their dark lashes; her face framed in its bonnet glowed like a dark flower, and he was confusedly aware that that lonely hamlet’s high-street was suddenly pullulating with people—the tapster and gapers at the inn door, the ploughman looking backwards, excited at last, the little children mysteriously out again with their mother, and other mothers and infants (in arms or at skirt) surging agitatedly from nowhere, whether at Nip’s cry or Jinny’s. Even the pump seemed to have spouted an old man, while an old lady arose, like an ancient Venus, from the pond. And every eye, he felt, was stabbing at the maltreator of Jinny’s animal; the cackle seemed a sinister clamour as of vengeance mounting from that swarm of sympathizers.

“I didn’t strike him,” he answered sulkily. Clearly she had not recognized him—a position not without its advantages. Doubtless the raw youth of her childish memories was effectually buried beneath this manly form, set off by the elegant London suit, this well-barbered head, and the face that had exchanged freckles for the stamp of experience. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “I fed the brute at the inn.”

“Which brute?” retorted Jinny sharply. But at this moment Nip, who had been calmly lapping the dregs of the pool, intervened by leaping up to lick Will’s hand.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured, coming to a standstill.

“Granted,” he said, not to be outdone in graciousness, and beginning to enjoy the advantage her ignorance of his identity gave him. “But that’s no proof I haven’t beaten him. You remember the saying:

A woman, a dog, and a walnut-tree,

The more you beat them, the better they be.”

“That’s all nonsense,” said Jinny, bridling up again.

He changed the subject quickly. “Have you got a drumstick?”

“Gracious! Do you want to try?”

He laughed. “It’s for the drum at the show. Miss Flippance thinks you didn’t deliver it.”

“Why, it was tied on the drum. The fool of a man must have dropped it—if he hasn’t poked it inside the drum. Did you look under the benches?”

“No. That’s it! I remember now seeing the man take the drum inside by mistake. He must have dropped it on the way back.”

“Don’t you think it would have been more sensible to look before you leaped—especially such a long leap! And what a pace you must have come in this heat!”

He flushed faintly. “I’m a good walker. I know the cuts.”

“Well, if you get back as quick as you came, there won’t be much time lost.” She clucked up Methusalem. “Good afternoon—hope you’ll find your stick, and that you’ll drum-in a good house.”

What! She too thought him capable of being a drum-banger, a minion of marionettes. Had women then no eye—no perception of clothes—as well as no humour? The mob was melting away under their amiable parley, but he now rallied it afresh: “Stop!” he called desperately after Jinny. “Stop!”

But Nip’s joyous bark at the resumption of the journey drowned all lesser remarks, and again the cart receded on the horizon—an horizon he knew houseless and arid, no region for a lonely, good-looking girl. Let poor pockmarked Polly Flippance brave the wild, if female carriers there must be: not his Jinny. No, he must reveal himself at the next stop, he must remonstrate, protest.

But the trouble was that the thing would not stop, and that there would be no stop now—he knew—for several miles. Perspiring, panting, hallooing and waving his stick and utterly oblivious of the scandalized street, he pursued at his swiftest, and Methusalem being no serious competitor in the long run, Jinny heard him at last, and looking back through the tilt over the dwindled packages, saw the pitiful, gesturing figure, and to his infinite relief the cart drew up.

“What have you lost now?” she called. “Your sandwich-boards?”

“I’m not going back to Miss Flippance,” he panted, “I’m going Bradmarsh way.”

“Then why ever didn’t you say so?” she replied calmly. “Jump up!”

Jump up? She asked a strange young man to jump up? Then what else could she have done if he had said who he was—a fact of which he had indeed been just about to make royal proclamation.

“You take passengers?” he gasped. He remembered now that Joey had told him the cart would take him, but then he had had no idea that “her” was not the vehicle.

She was equally surprised: “Why else did you run after me?”

Run after her? He did not like the phrase. Girls ran after men—girls of a sort—to some extent girls of every sort: that was the doctrine in his set. And yet he had run after her—it called for explanation. “I wasn’t running after you,” he said slowly, “it was only that—that I couldn’t believe my eyes to see you like that.”

“Like what?” She was frankly puzzled.

“Driving about alone in this God-forsaken part. It’s—” scandalous, he was about to say, but before the glimmering fire in her eyes he altered the word—“it’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Her little laugh rippled out. “I thought you said you knew these parts.”

“So I do—I’m an Essex man, even though I mayn’t look it, having been half round the world.”

“Have you now? Well, it’s the big cities that are dangerous, Gran’fer says.”

“Maybe he’s right,” he admitted, wincing a little before the candid grey eyes. “But don’t you understand that a woman carrier is—” again he toned down his word—“outlandish.”

Her amusement danced in her eyes. “Inlandish, I suppose you mean.”

“Don’t laugh,” he said, forgetting that the unrevealed Will had no right to that tone. “You know it’s an unwomanly occupation.”

“Laughing?”

“You know what I mean. For one thing a woman can’t know much about horses—and she oughtn’t to have to do with ’em anyhow—it’s not natural.”

“May she have to do with donkeys?” Jinny inquired sweetly.

He frowned. “Chaff’s no good.”

“But I never give my horse any—do I, Methusalem dear?”

Such word-mockery was bewildering to his simpler brain. He opened his mouth, but nothing came, and his vexation only increased for finding no vent.

“May she have to do with pigs?” queried Jinny again.

“Pigs are at home,” he conceded.

“Not always,” she said demurely. “I meet lots on this very road.”

“And you might meet worse than pigs on a lonely road like this—you might meet men——”

“Like I’ve met one now.”

“Yes, but it happens to be me!” he said, again all but forgetting her ignorance of his identity. “Usually it would be dangerous.”

“Well, but wouldn’t it be just as dangerous for a male carrier?”

“Not at all. He can fight.”

“And if he met a woman?” she said slyly.

“There’s no danger in a woman.”

“Then why are you running away from Miss Flippance?”

“Miss Flippance!” he cried in angry astonishment. “Who says I’m running away from Miss Flippance?”

“Well, you’ve run from her to me. And if you say you weren’t running after me, you must have been running away from her.”

“Don’t you try to bamboozle me. I tell you I’ve been half round the world, and nowhere have I seen a woman carrier.”

“If you’d ha’ stayed at home you would have,” said Jinny.

“So it seems. And in America there are those Bloomerites—come over here, too, I hear, nowadays, the hussies. Want to wear the breeches.”

“Do they?” inquired Jinny with genuine interest. “I’ve often thought it would be more convenient for me jumping up and down, and there would be yards of stuff less. Some of those Chipstone ladies quite scavenge the streets with their long skirts, padded out by all those petticoats, don’t you think?”

He grew almost as auburn as his hair: such secrets of the toilette, babbled by a young girl he still thought good at heart, outraged his sense of decorum.

“No, I don’t think!” he answered angrily.

“Well, try,” she suggested sweetly. “Put yourself into our place.”

“It’s you putting yourselves into our place that’s the trouble,” he retorted. “What will women be up to next, I wonder.”

Here it was Jinny’s turn to flare up. She had never—it has been already remarked—thought of herself as up to anything, rarely even thought of herself as a woman, least of all as a representative of her sex. But challenged now to her face for the first time, she felt she must hold the pass for all womanhood.

“We women will be up to whatever we please.”

“Not if you want to please the men.”

Jinny’s young face flashed fire and roses. “And who wants to please the men?”

He laughed complacently. “I never met a woman who didn’t.”

The girl’s fire died into cold contempt. “I don’t think you know much about women.”

“Me? Why, I’ve knocked about since you were in pinafores—and pelisses!”

“I shouldn’t be surprised, Mr. Drummer,” said Jinny with judicial frigidity, “if you knew less about women than I know about horses.”

“I’ve seen half the world, I tell you.”

She flicked up Methusalem. “But not the better half.”

He winced again. “Fiddlesticks!” was all he could find to answer.

“Drumsticks!” rejoined Jinny gaily, and with a mocking flourish of her horn, she receded afresh.

Something stronger than his will now shot him forward crying: “I say, Jinny!” He meant by crying that old familiar name to disclose himself, and then to have it out with her, side by side on the driving-board.

She turned her head. “Do you want to jump on or don’t you?” she called.

It was the last straw. Jinny—he had forgotten—-was not a name privileged for the friend of her pelisse and pinafore days: any male might use it, just as any wayside rough might abuse its owner. “I don’t,” he shouted savagely. “I’ll never patronize a woman carrier.”

“A dashing young lad from Buckingham!” She had started singing, whether to herself or at him, he could not tell, and he strode behind the cart almost as rapidly as Methusalem before it, to find out whether she was still answering back.

But apparently she had forgotten him—that was the most pungent repartee of all—and the gaiety of the chorus only added salt to the smart:

The thin silver treble reminded him incongruously of her Sunday-school singing, and the revival of that long-faded picture of himself driving her home only emphasized the jarring present. He turned furiously down Plashy Walk, where the rollick of the chorus soon ceased to penetrate and the white fragrance of the wonderful hawthorn avenue made a soothing passage-way. His tongue felt acrid with anger, ale, and running, and Frog Farm, with the faces of his parents, now began to loom more emotionally before him, because of the tea as well as the tenderness awaiting him. For neither of these luxuries was likely to be absent, even if his letter—or his father—had gone astray. Let her protect herself, this minx of a carrier, Time’s odd changeling for his sober little Jinny. Serve her right if some horrid instrument of fate should take down her pride!

By the time he had come through the mile of hawthorn, and defied the Plashy Hall dog with his stick, she had passed out of his thoughts, and his indignation against her had changed to indignation against the impudent attempt—obvious from the notice-boards—to deny him and the public this old-established right-of-way. Things would not have got even thus far had he remained in Little Bradmarsh, he was thinking, and he was already brooding over a plan of campaign as he was climbing over the stile back into the high road. And then his vaulting leg remained suspended an instant in air in sheer astonishment. Jinny was facing him from her perch of vantage, smiling sweetly from her witching bonnet, her cart athwart the road, in fact he could hardly step off the stile without treading on Methusalem’s toes. Relaxing his motion, he sat down on the stile, staring at her.