Читать книгу The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard - A. E. Coppard - Страница 6

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On the Sunday morn he dressed himself gallantly. It was again a sweet unclouded day. The church bell at Dinnop had begun to ring. From his window, as he fastened his most ornate tie, Harvey could observe his neighbour’s two small children in the next garden, a boy and girl clad for church-going and each carrying a clerical book. The tiny boy placed his sister in front of a hen-roost and, opening his book, began to pace to and fro before her, shrilly intoning: “Jesus is the shepherd, ring the bell. Oh lord, ring the bell, am I a good boy? Amen. Oh lord, ring the bell.” The little girl bowed her head piously over her book. The lad then picked up from the ground a dish that had contained the dog’s food, and presented it momentarily before the lilac bush, the rabbit in a hutch, the axe fixed in a chopping block, and then before his sister. Without lifting her peering gaze from her book she meekly dropped two pebbles in the plate, and the boy passed on, lightly moaning, to the clothes-line post and a cock scooping in some dust.

“Ah, the little impets!” cried Harvey Witlow. “Here, Toby! Here, Margaret!” He took two pennies from his pocket and lobbed them from the window to the astonished children. As they stooped to pick up the coins Harvey heard the hoarse voice of neighbour Nathan, their father, bawl from his kitchen: “Come on in, and shut that bloody door, d’y’ear!”

Harnessing his moody horse to the gig Harvey was soon bowling away to Shag Moor, and as he drove along he sung loudly. He had a pink rose in his buttonhole. Mrs. Sadgrove received him almost affably, and though Mary was more shy than ever before, Harvey had determined to make an impression. During the dinner he fired off his bucolic jokes, and pleasant tattle of a more respectful and sober nature; but after dinner Mary sat like Patience, not upon a monument but as if upon a rocking-horse, shy and fearful, and her mother made no effort to inspire her as the higgler did, unsuccessful though he was. They went to the pens to look at the pigs, and as they leaned against the low walls and poked the maudlin inhabitants, Harvey began: “Reminds me, when I was in the war ...”

“Were you in the war!” interrupted Mrs. Sadgrove.

“Oh yes, I was in that war, ah, and there was a pig ... Danger? Oh lord bless me it was a bit dangerous, but you never knew where it was or wat it ’ud be at next; it was like the sword of Damockels. There was a bullet once come ’ithin a foot of my head, and it went through a board an inch thick, slap through that board.” Both women gazed at him apprehendingly. “Why, I might ’a’ been killed, you know,” said Harvey, cocking his eye musingly at the weather-vane on the barn. “We was in billets at St. Gratien, and one day a chasseur came up—a French yoossar, you know—and he began talking to our sergeant. That was Hubert Luxter, the butcher: died a month or two ago of measles. But this yoossar couldn’t speak English at all, and none of us chaps could make sense of him. I never could understand that lingo somehow, never; and though there was half a dozen of us chaps there, none of us were man enough for it neither. ‘Nil compree,’ we says, ‘non compos.’ I told him straight: ‘You ought to learn English,’ I said, ‘it’s much easier than your kind of bally chatter.’ So he kept shaping up as if he was holding a rifle, and then he’d say ‘Fusee—bang!’ and then he’d say ‘cushion’ kept on saying ‘cushion.’ Then he gets a bit of chalk and draws on the wall something that looks like a horrible dog, and says ‘cushion’ again.”

“Pig,” interjected Mary Sadgrove, softly.

“Yes, yes!” ejaculated Harvey, “so ’twas! Do you know any French lingo?”

“Oh yes,” declared her mother, “Mary knows it very well.”

“Ah,” sighed the higgler, “I don’t, although I been to France. And I couldn’t do it now, not for luck nor love. You learnt it, I suppose. Well, this yoossar wants to borrow my rifle, but of course I can’t lend him. So he taps on this horrible pig he’d drawn, and then he taps on his own head, and rolls his eyes about dreadful! ‘Mad?’ I says. And that was it, that was it. He’d got a pig on his little farm there what had gone mad, and he wanted us to come and shoot it; he was on leave and he hadn’t got any ammunition. So Hubert Luxter he says: ‘Come on, some of you,’ and we all goes with the yoossar and shot the pig for him. Ah, that was a pig! And when it died it jumped a somersault just like a rabbit. It had got the mange, and was mad as anything I ever see in my life; it was full of madness. Couldn’t hit him at all at first, and it kicked up bobs-a-dying. ‘Ready, present, fire!’ Hubert Luxter says, and bang goes the six of us, and every time we missed him he spotted us and we had to run for our lives.”

As Harvey looked up he caught a glance of the girl fixed on him. She dropped her gaze at once and, turning away, walked off to the house.

“Come and take a look at the meadow,” said Mrs. Sadgrove to him, and they went into the soft smooth meadow where the black pony was grazing. Very bright and green it was, and very blue the sky. He sniffed at the pink rose in his buttonhole, and determined that come what may he would give it to Mary if he could get a nice quiet chance to offer it. And just then, while he and Mrs. Sadgrove were strolling alone in the soft smooth meadow, quite alone, she suddenly, startlingly, asked him: “Are you courting anybody?”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?” he exclaimed.

“You haven’t got a sweetheart, have you?” she asked, most deliberately.

Harvey grinned sheepishly: “Ha ha ha,” and then he said: “No.”

“I want to see my daughter married,” the widow went on significantly.

“Miss Mary!” he cried.

“Yes,” said she; and something in the higgler’s veins began to pound rapidly. His breast might have been a revolving cage and his heart a demon squirrel. “I can’t live for ever,” said Mrs. Sadgrove, almost with levity, “in fact, not for long, and so I’d like to see her settled soon with some decent understanding young man, one that could carry on here, and not make a mess of things.”

“But, but,” stuttered the understanding young man, “I’m no scholar, and she’s a lady. I’m a poor chap, rough, and no scholar, ma’am. But mind you ...”

“That doesn’t matter at all,” the widow interrupted, “not as things are. You want a scholar for learning, but for the land ...”

“Ah, that’s right, Mrs. Sadgrove, but ...”

“I want to see her settled. This farm, you know, with the stock and things are worth nigh upon three thousand pounds.”

“You want a farmer for farming, that’s true, Mrs. Sadgrove, but when you come to marriage, well, with her learning and French and all that ...”

“A sensible woman will take a man rather than a box of tricks any day of the week,” the widow retorted. “Education may be a fine thing, but it often costs a lot of foolish money.”

“It do, it do. You want to see her settled?”

“I want to see her settled and secure. When she is twenty-five she comes into five hundred pounds of her own right.”

The distracted higgler hummed and haaed in his bewilderment as if he had just been offered the purchase of a dubious duck. “How old is she, ma’am?” he at last huskily inquired.

“Two and twenty nearly. She’s a good healthy girl for I’ve never spent a pound on a doctor for her, and very quiet she is, and very sensible; but she’s got a strong will of her own, though you might not think it or believe it.”

“She’s a fine creature, Mrs. Sadgrove, and I’m very fond of her, I don’t mind owning up to that, very fond of her I am.”

“Well, think it over, take your time, and see what you think. There’s no hurry I hope, please God.”

“I shan’t want much time,” he declared with a laugh, “but I doubt I’m the fair right sort for her.”

“Oh, fair days, fair doings!” said she inscrutably, “I’m not a long liver, I’m afraid.”

“God forbid, ma’am!” His ejaculation was intoned with deep gravity.

“No, I’m not a long-living woman.” She surveyed him with her calm eyes, and he returned her gaze. Hers was a long sallow face, with heavy lips. Sometimes she would stretch her features (as if to keep them from petrifying) in an elastic grin, and display her dazzling teeth; the lips would curl thickly, no longer crimson but blue. He wondered if there was any sign of a doom registered upon her gaunt face. She might die, and die soon.

“You couldn’t do better than think it over, then, eh?” She had a queer frown as she regarded him.

“I couldn’t do worse than not, Mrs. Sadgrove,” he said gaily.

They left it at that. He had no reason for hurrying away, and he couldn’t have explained his desire to do so, but he hurried away. Driving along past the end of the moor, and peering back at the lonely farm where they dwelled amid the thick furze snoozing in the heat, he remembered that he had not asked if Mary was willing to marry him! Perhaps the widow took her agreement for granted. That would be good fortune, for otherwise how the devil was he to get round a girl who had never spoken half a dozen words to him! And never would! She was a lady, a girl of fortune, knew her French; but there it was, the girl’s own mother was asking him to wed her. Strange, very strange! He dimly feared something, but he did not know what it was he feared. He had still got the pink rose in his buttonhole.